The war on stigma

I originally wrote this and realized that the main issue of my rant was not clearly being stated and I was getting confusing with other issues I debated throughout my rant. So here is my second try and hopefully this time my words are much clearer.

Recently our country faced a devastating tragedy where a 22 year old male decided to walk into a supermarket and shot 19 people, killing 6 and injuring 13. A week has passed since the tragic event and I’ve watched the news cover the story faithfully, searching for answers. Here we are again, another shooting in America, and we are looking for something or someone to blame.

Terry Newell, in his article for The Huffington Post, states, “The question of responsibility can quickly lead to invective instead of insight. That has already begun in the typical attempt to fix blame. But blame is not the same as responsibility. Blame, derived from the Latin blashemare, means "to rebuke, reprimand, condemn, criticize." Responsible, derived from the Latin responsus, means "to be morally accountable for one's actions." Blame is a one way focus on what others have done. Responsibility is a two-way conversation on what we owe to each other. If we seek to fix blame instead of responsibility, we take the mentally easy way out. The former requires only anger. The latter requires fact, analysis, and empathic dialogue”. Newell’s words could not be more true or ingenious. We can hastily and easily place blame on everything around us, we can out of anger and remorse push off the blame onto this or that instead of taking responsibility for the course of action that was taken. Blame is a quick fix, responsibility would require us to think about what we should do from now on.

With that in mind, let’s turn to where my concern sets in. Like I’ve mentioned, I’ve tuned into the news and watched them jump the gun to blame this and to blame that. One thing I have seen blamed was the fact that Jared L. Loughner has psychological issues, the possibility of schizophrenia or bipolar. Okay, so it has already begun, blaming a mental health issue rather than taking responsibility for their being a huge deficit in the care of mental health.

First, I want to mention that we already have a huge stigma against mental health disorders. People have been unfortunately raised to think that a mental health diagnosis makes you “crazy”, and who wants to be categorized as crazy. The worst part is, no one realizes that each and every person has some sort of mental obstacle to overcome. No one has a perfect brain, no one functions 100% perfectly. We all learn to deal with our mental obstacles differently, some of us are better at it than others. Some of us need to seek out help from counselors and psychiatrists. There shouldn’t be a stigma against seeking out help for these issues, we all have them. Now, we can be afraid to be diagnosed with something that Jared L. Loughner had, and that we will end up just like him if we are diagnosed with it. It would be better to just pretend otherwise so we don’t have to be judged negatively.

I can say that I have a lot of experience within the mental health field within my professional and personal life. I have met more than a handful of people who self-medicate with the use of alcohol and other illegal drugs. Heck, I’ve even known people to take other people’s prescriptions of anti-depressants because they couldn’t go to the doctor themselves. When ever I’ve brought up seeking out a real counselor, people will insinuate they don’t need to, there is nothing wrong with them. Yet, day in and day out they are seeking escapes through drug abuse? Then I’ve seen the other end of the spectrum, the people who seek out help but receive treatment regimens that are never going to help them. I worked with children with mental illnesses and I seen so many that were put on high dosages of medications that made them drool and lack coherency. So we either aren’t seeking and getting treatment or are receiving treatment that isn’t going to help the problem.

So there are articles and suggestions for parents to help seek out professional help for their children to prevent another Jared L. Loughner from happening. That surely is great and hopefully eventually would work, but right now we lack professionals capable or willing to actually work on the problems our children and people have. They’d rather we give the quick fix of medication, so we can end up with scenarios like Michael Jackson, a mentally ill individual dying of a drug overdose because his doctor prescribed a handful of medications and never thought for a second that there could be a consequence of an early death. Sure, some people do need medications to regulate the neurotransmitters in their brain, but, beyond that turning any person into a medicated zombie is just unnatural and unnecessary.

The most interesting part of this whole scenario, at least to me, is that it is constantly brought up that yes, Jared L Loughner (oh and PLENTY OTHERS) slipped through the mental health system. There were several reports from the staff at the community college where Mr. Loughner attended that clearly showed that there was fear that he could harm others. SEVERAL REPORTS and attempts for Mr. Loughner to receive an evaluation. However, he slipped through the cracks because our laws can only force this upon someone if he is a direct threat to causing self-harm or harm to another. When will America learn that have such loose laws is just going to continue with people like Jared L. Loughner or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to be able to continue without receiving appropriate medical attention for their mental health issues. I’ve personally been involved in situations in a work scenario, where I’ve called the police because a child was acting in a harmful way and needed an evaluation but because he did nothing to hurt himself or another (yet), there was nothing they could do. What is that? Who are we really helping by doing this?

Until we raise awareness, until we stop the stigma against mental health issues, We will never truly get people the help they need. We will never truly take responsibility for what needs to be done, what hasn’t been done, what our mental health professionals should be doing and aren’t. Until then, we will continue to see this trend increase and continue to experience these unfortunate tragedies. If you are reading this, do yourself a favor and educate yourself. Become aware and support the cause for Mental Health. We should support and love each other, and that means accepting each other even if we need help. We do owe taking this responsibility to each other.