Can I just say something about mental health? [View all]

[auntpurl]

Last edited Sun Jun 12, 2016, 06:34 PM - Edit history (2)

Whenever these kinds of horrific events happen, there's always a lot of talk thrown around about the perpetrator being mentally ill. The media exploits this talk and uses terms like "psycho killer" to describe them.

It's really important to remember that the vast, vast majority of mentally ill people are NOT violent, and that most acts of violence are NOT committed by the mentally ill. You don't have to be mentally ill to murder someone. Not in the sense of a diagnosable mental illness.

Automatically assuming everyone who has committed an act of violence is mentally ill conflates the two in the public's mind. This leads to many bad outcomes, including:

- The mentally ill are discriminated against in myriad ways, including employment, benefits, and access to healthcare and education
- The mentally ill know that they face this discrimination, and are therefore less likely to seek help, and also less likely to adhere to medication schedules
- The mentally ill are more likely to receive harsher sentences in criminal trials
- The mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent crimes

The problem of media stigma of the mentally ill is so widespread that an international measuring instrument has been produced: the PICMIN - Picture of Mental Illness In Newspapers (Rukvina et al, 2012). This standardised measure was developed in order to allow for comparison of stigmatising mental health media stories across countries and across time.

We have no knowledge yet (as far as I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong) that the shooter was diagnosed with a mental illness. It would be good to be careful with language - using phrases like "insane person", etc to describe him.

Here I confess something. I am a psychologist, and today, as I watched this horror in Orlando unfold, I actually used the above phrase "insane person" to describe the shooter in a post here. I was horrified by the images I saw coming out of Florida, crying, and just didn't think before I typed. Another DUer called me on it (nicely) and I immediately edited. But I am someone who WORKS in mental health, and I did that. This is how pervasive this is. I apologise for the few minutes that post of mine was up.

Thank you for reading.