Guns and Madness: The Person Inside the Patient
Read Time:3 Minute, 14 Second
Our country is talking about guns and madness again in the wake of the most recent round of seemingly 2d amendment protected mass murder. I don’t have much to say on the gun front. I think it is pretty simple. The 2d amendment has an eighteenth century context inconsistent with a twenty-first century world. White men toting high-powered weapons in the beer aisle is a facile form of self-determination and seems to illustrate delusion, not courage.
I want to talk about the other hot topic that comes with gun violence, madness.
There is a great long-form piece by Slate’s David Haglund, on former NBA guard Delonte West, that examines West’s too public bi-polar diagnosis, and how our society’s misunderstanding of mental health can reduce the response to illness to an indignant, superstitious and alienating judgment. Those that struggle with mental or mood disorders, or outright mental illness, are too often defined as their diagnosis rather than person who falls along a continuum of health. It is a response to personal suffering, akin to medieval surgical practices, that would bleed the illness out of gravely sick people, as a means of balancing “the humors.”
We respond to outbursts of destructive behavior by labeling a person “crazy” and make them a distinct “other” from what we define in ourselves as “normal.” This is a way of thinking that ignores any sophistication or evidence-based decision-making. It fails to recognize that all individual health operates on a spectrum. Just like there is no one perfect state of physical health that is experienced by any majority, there is no perfect mental or emotional state that can be declared “normal.”
This matters to me. I spent a long time working to help people with mental illness. My colleagues and I always talked about working very hard to ensure that the medical community and the larger society would see the person inside the patient. The fact is few do. Too often a person with a mental or mood disorder or illness is easily marginalized as “not me” and therefore not worth understanding. The danger in not understanding the health situation is to neglect the illnesses or disorders that might exist in oneself. Optimal mental health is not achieved when our society practices this collective form of denial.
This matters to me also because I have suffered from a mood disorder my whole life. It led me to miss 45 days of school in the fourth grade, a suicide attempt when I was 16 and trips to emergency rooms in my 20’s, 30’s and my 40’s. It contributed to my first marriage failing and multiple career difficulties. It is called Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD – DSM 300.2) and it can lead to major depressive episodes and suicidality. It is also imminently treatable with medication, therapy and life-style changes.
I was hospitalized for this condition 6 years ago and that is when I decided to leave behind my own denial towards mental health and got busy getting healthy. I stopped thinking of myself as a bad person who needed to be good and started considering my condition as a wellness issue. I’ve had some ups and down, mostly ups, and have found balance as I better understand that I am a person living with a medical condition, not a patient who needs to be ostracized from the “normal” world. There is no “normal.”
When destruction and self-destruction happen there is a response to identify the “crazy person” at the center of it. That seems to be a valid reaction to horror, but we too often stop with this type of reductive judgment, and never go deeper to understand the causes behind the destruction. Mental health is a health issue. Our society will suffer until we are able to embrace that truth.
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Howdo Chuck. This is a bloody brilliant first article old bean. You’ve set your bar high mate!
Tally Ho! On we go eh?
This is good stuff indeed. When’s your next article coming out Chuck?
” People make a rational choice to commit crime. ”
No they don’t. What is you basis for calling people with severe impulse control rational? Why would you lump all crimes into a single category? the guy with a brain tumor who climbs a tower in Texas, the teenage outcast tired of being picked on who steals a gun and makes a bomb is not rational.
Perhaps the answer is that you dislike the complexity of human behavior and want to reduce it to some simple and simple minded rationalization for punishment?
Read “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahnemann who won a Nobel prize for ripping hell out of your argument.
I have Kahnemann’s book on my shelf. I need to dig into that.
Actually you are right Glenn. I have been studying criminal and delinquent behavior for more than forty years now and I wish it were as simple as dealing with impulse control. I have dealt with more than 50 people, up close and personal, that have committed murder over the last 25 years and the reasons cover an enormous amount of ground from the sociological to the psychological. To a few it seemed like a pleasant past time to others it was the most frightening experience of their life.
I would like to point one thing out though, in my experience there are far fewer criminal minds than there are people who commit criminal acts. People with criminal minds, to define the term, are those who consider themselves criminals and are constantly looking for ways to make money from some type of criminal enterprise. These type people are usually less dangerous to the general public than the person who chooses to commit a crime out of desperation or for the thrill. Criminal minds include con artists as well as burglars and thieves. There are also among them those that commit robberies but for the most part they do some degree of planning and they are not interested in dying for a living.
The occasional criminal rarely plans, is usually very nervous, and may panic at any given time. That is when people get hurt. That is usually the kind of people that I see charged with capital murder. Those and the ones who are drinking and drugging while trying to commit a crime. Why they decided to commit the crime in the first place is still the mystery. Studies have shown that, contrary to popular belief, juveniles often get into committing offenses before they get into using drugs. So, drugs are not necessarily a causation factor but a contributing factor along the way. One could take any number of theories and relate them to any offender and they would probably fit to some degree. We in the field of criminology and criminal justice used to think that good parenting would solve everything, but it does not, not really. Sometimes parents do everything that we think is right and somewhere the kid takes a hard right turn and ends up bad. Sometimes parents do everything wrong and the kid ends up doing well. There is no magic bullet where you have free will. This is particularly true in a country such as ours where people are extremely judgmental and cliquish, and, of course, simply infatuated with violence and greed.
Chuck, I want to thank for an excellent post. I have also suffered from chronic depression and anxiety for most of my life although it took almost fifty years to find someone who recognize what it was. Until then I simply self medicated the old fashioned way with alcohol. I agree that it is a path to freedom to actually identify what is going on and, in my case, understand why. It took a lot of hours with a very good shrink at the VA unraveling most of my problems that went all the way back almost to birth, but it was well worth it. Don’t get me wrong, knowing the starting point does not cure anything, it only helps with the understanding and coping, but the meds are still required to maintain stability and productivity. Again a great piece of writing and I hope to see more.
Thanks Bill. I’m moved to hear your experience. Thanks for sharing it. My point in “coming out” with my disorder is to try and “normalize” it. I think your understanding of anxiety and depression is spot on (and the most healthy way of addressing it). I too self-medicated in many ways. I’m glad I don’t need to do that any more.
Good article. I really don’t have anything constructive to add, although the article itself and the comments at all been right on. I just wanted to offer my support and congratulations to a new contributor. Welcome aboard 🙂 I think that you are potentially a great addition.
Thanks Marsha.
I think your most important point was “seeing the person inside the patient” or the mental illness. I think society also has to learn that for other severe disabilities such as paralysis. I would love to see this article expanded on that thought without the reference to guns and more on what can we each do to influence that change in culture. Thanks for the post.
I agree Carol. I think the bias to a Platonic “normal” human condition, limits our ability to understand what it means to be human (and then correspondingly put policies in place that help humanity). The reference to the recent gun violence was simply my subjective explanation why the issue was on my mind. It holds no insight into the question of gun violence.
Carol I couldn’t agree more. I would also like to see the article expanded. It wasn’t the author’s intent, I don’t believe, to emphasize guns, but as we know people will see what they choose to see and apply their own definitions.
There is a propensity in the US and elsewhere to blame mental illness whenever some idiot goes on a shooting spree. It’s rarely the case. People make a rational choice to commit crime. It’s aberrant behavior not always insane behavior under the description of law.
Paul you are absolutely correct in your assertion, however, it’s important to remember that in some cases mental illness is the foundation for such behavior, and it’s that condition that must not be overlooked.
I agree. The point of the piece was to make the case you make. Mental health is not as black and white as people would like to make it, especially as it is used as an explanation in relation to shooting deaths.
Thoughtful insight, Chuck. I appreciate the “mental health spectrum” most. Violence as a manifestation of unchecked mental anguish remains an all to often forgotten discussion topic.
Thanks Steve.
Thoughtful story here, and one I accept completely because I also struggle with mental illness. Thank you.
Thanks.
lotsa hugs old bean. Keep the faith eh? x
Very good article sir! Mental health is almost always overlooked in the US, although I do agree with Jess. It’s the gun owner that needs to be registered not the mentally ill.
Mental health is overlooked in Britain too. In my English ignorance I’d assumed all gun owners in America had to register their ownership?
Obviously apart from the criminals.
I was diagnosed as ‘borderline schizophrenic’ at 16 so I know first hand how mental illness is considered in Britain and nothing has changed.
Anyway they were wrong….quadrophenic perhaps 😉
I am about sick of hearing every time something like this happens that we need to look at mental health in our country but nothing is ever looked at from that point of view. There are many mentally ill people that don’t go around shooting up everything and everyone in sight so to always blame mental illness pisses me off. The NRA would have us register the mentally ill instead of registering what ought to be registered, the gun owner his or her self.
My intention with this piece was not be reductive in making mental health the cause for gun violence. My point was that our misunderstanding of mental health makes it easy for society to make it the cause of gun violence. I ask you to re-read the piece with that in mind.
I agree with you Chuck. I am talking about the clowns that jump right to, it’s the mental health issue that is a problem not the fact that x gun person got angry because someone was using a cell phone at dinner so he or she felt the need to shoot them. I have bouts of severe depression myself, once in a while, and I know there is nothing wrong with me that some therapy and meds for a time will help me out. It’s just my brain deciding I’ll have a different kind of normal temporarily but not once has my mental instability make me ever think of hurting another person.
Well said Jess. Thanks. And keep on keeping on.