People With Mental Illness as "The Other"

     Over the last five years Andrew H has worked as Job Coach and a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor. He is one class away from earning a Master's Degree in Rehabilitation Counseling and will sit for the certified rehabilitation counseling examination later this year.  Mental and emotional illnesses and learning disabilities run in his family.  Though it occurred nearly 35 years ago, he still remembers going to "special class" for having what is now called dysgraphia.  A version of the following post was submitted for a grade in his "Working with People with Severe Mental Illnesses" class.    

On December 14^th, 2012, our nation was horrified and sickened by the news that a gunman named Adam Lanza had invaded Sandy Hook Elementary School in the small town of Newtown, Connecticut, killing 20 children and 6 faculty members before committing suicide.  It was later discovered that he had also shot and killed his mother.  Almost immediately it began to be reported in the news that the 20 year old Lanza had Asperger’s syndrome or autism.  Many began to speculate that perhaps this played a role in his committing the crime.  When reporting its version of the events, The National Enquirer, ever the scion of responsible news reporting, carried the headline, “Inside The Sick Twisted Life Of School Mass Killer – What drove crazed gunman to slay kids” (emphasis mine, “Inside the sick twisted life of Adam Lanza,” December 27, 2012 www.nationalenquirer.com/true-crime/world-exclusive-inside-sick-twisted-life-adam-lanza ).

            After the shooting, the National Rifle Association remained silent for a week.  Then on December 21, 2012, the NRA held a press conference which was really not so much a “press conference” as it was a “rant to the press.”  The main speaker at this “conference” was NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre.  In his speech LaPierre blamed everyone and everything except guns and gun owners for the Sandy Hook shooting.  Among other things he blamed the media, violent games, violent movies, and the government.  For the purpose of this blog post, I wish to discuss how LaPierre demonized and depicted persons with mental illness in his speech.  I will focus on the following two statements made by LaPierre that characterize or I should say stigmatize and mischaracterize people with mental illness:

Politicians pass laws for gun free school zones, they issue press releases bragging about them. They post signs advertising them. And, in doing so, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk….How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame from a national media machine that rewards them with wall-to-wall attention and a sense of identity that they crave, while provoking others to try to make their mark. A dozen more killers, a hundred more? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill? (emphasis mine,  LaPierre, W., Keene, D., Hutchinson, A, para. 14, 22 http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-21/politics/36018141_1_mayhem-with-minimum-risk-nra-wayne-lapierre)

            I believe that the implications of LaPierre’s statement, as well as his seemingly general attitude about people with mental illness, is very serious.  In an attempt to deflect blame from guns and gun users, the NRA through LaPierre has played the old, “‘Insane’ people are dangerous” card that has too often been the plot of our stories, myths, and urban legends.  It doesn’t take much searching to find movies, TV shows, books, and comics where the villains or dangerous characters have a mental illness.  Hannibal Lecter and “Buffalo Bill” in “The Silence Of The Lambs,” Annie Wilkes in “Misery,” Randle McMurphy and others in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” Norman Bates in “Psycho,” Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Jack Torrance in “The Shining,” Carnage in “Spiderman,” this list could go on and on.  The website “Villains Wiki” actually has a category called “Villains With Mental Illness” which lists 774 villains with mental illnesses from popular movies and stories categorized into 21 different subcategories from “abusers” to “villains with dual personalities” (Villains Wiki, 2013 http://villains.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Villains_With_Mental_Illness ).     

Many have written or commented on the idea of making society’s villain’s members of “the other.”  I particularly like the following quote from Carolyn Kaufman, who is clinical psychologist:

Mental illness and Monstrosity are often clumped together for two reasons. First, mental illness can be scary, and we want to believe we would never behave that way, no matter what. Second, we use psychological terms to try to understand cruelty and hatred, and it's much easier for the average person to equate "sociopath" with "monster" than to accept that circumstances contributed to that person's behavior...and could conceivably have done the same to us if we'd shared them. 

(“Creating wonderfully wicked villains”, para. 13. http://www.movieoutline.com/articles/creating-wonderfully-wicked-villains.html )

Even before the shooting and LaPierre’s outrageous and civil-rights defying suggestion, people in our society with mental illness faced serious issues and consequences of such labeling and stigmatizing statements.  Donna Falvo, author of “Medical and Psychosocial Aspects of Chronic Illness and Disability,” defines stigma as “individual feelings of shame due to disapproval of others and guilt resulting from being discredited or devalued” (p. 22) and a 2005 study by Rüsch, Angermeyer, and Corrigan explained that stigma exists when elements of labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination occur in power situations that allow these processes to happen.  Further, the study by Rüsch et al. discussed the damaging misconceptions and harmful results of stigma towards those with mental illness.  Some of these misconceptions were that people with mental illness, “are homicidal maniacs who should be feared;…are rebellious, free spirits; or (that) they have childlike perceptions of the world”.  Rüsch et al. also found that people without mental illness often believe that people with mental illness are to be feared and excluded and, “kept out of communities,” and that they are to be seen as “irresponsible” and therefore need to be cared for and have others without mental illness make their decisions for them.  As a result people with mental illness are less likely to be hired, have apartments and homes rented to them, and are more likely to be blamed for violent crime (Rüsch et al., 2005 “Mental Illness Stigma: Concepts, Consequences, and Initiatives to Reduce Stigma,” in European Psychiatry, 20, 529-539).  And of course, people with mental illnesses also get to be our bad guys and take the blame for most of what goes wrong in our society.

By now you can probably tell that I believe that LaPierre and the NRA, and any who believe as they do about people with mental illness, could not be any more wrong.  In an attempt to be reader friendly, I will not take the time in this blog post to provide lots of documentation, but many studies have been conducted that show that people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims of violent crime than they are to commit violent crimes.  Also, studies have been done that have shown that people with mental illnesses and no history of substance abuse are no more likely to be violent than people without mental illnesses (see Elbogen and Johnson, 2009 “The Intricate Link Between Violence and Mental Disorder”, in Archives of General Psychiatry, 66, 152-161).  We as a society need to stop demonizing people with mental illnesses and start including them in our society.  We need to stop making them our “go to” villains and we need to stop using them as pawns in our political battles. 

I would like to wrap up my thoughts with a quote from an op-ed that was written by Lollie Butler and published in the Arizona Daily Star on January 15, 2013.  Butler wrote:

There is a bloody war being waged in America; gun advocates versus those who would ban guns. This "civil" war may go on for a long time.  Meanwhile, those suffering from mental illnesses unfairly shoulder the blame for atrocities committed against the innocent.  This is an unreasonable situation. Armed persons firing into crowds, whether at schools or shopping malls, defies reason and causes all of us to feel vulnerable. It also takes its toll on those with mental illnesses. Words like "crazy" and "deranged" fly across the front pages, and the mentally ill in treatment, saddled with severe funding cuts and ongoing social stigma, take it on the chin. 

(“Let's Stop Blaming the Mentally Ill,” para. 1-3 http://azstarnet.com/staff/lollie-butler/guest-column-let-s-stop-blaming-the-mentally-ill/article_ec8019a1-0b0d-5e6a-97d7-a99a17e3cea3.html )          

People with mental illnesses have rights just like the rest of us.  They are everywhere.  They do not deserve the treatment that society, as demonstrated by LaPierre and the NRA, is giving them.  People with mental illnesses are not “the other,” they are our spouses, our lovers, our daughters, our sons, our parents, our siblings, our neighbors, our roommates, our co-workers, and our friends.  It is time to embrace them as such, to embrace and confront our own weaknesses and fears, and to put our old demons permanently to rest.