Ravings of a Madman

So, a friend of mine posted about the Virginia Tech shooting recently. I suggest if you haven’t read it yet, to go take a gander. I wanted to leave a comment there, but after trying to write it twice I decided that it would come off more as a rant… perhaps a Raving if you will and decided it would be better to just post it up here. I think near the end she comes up with some extremely pertinent points about the state of mental health treatment in the US. Where I disagree with her is in the middle of her post and the premise that getting the story out of the media will help the situation.

I believe that not talking about someone or something is the opposite way that our society should go. We already have too much pre-edited news, “sanitizing” it for the American people. We don’t see the bloody and wounded in conflicts around the world – it would be too much for the our sensitive eyes and ears. We don’t really want to see that. Except, if we only hear about things in an abstract sense then we become further desensitized to the issue. “Another 89 dead in Iraq today due to a car bombing.” has become a subnote on the news, barely newsworthy anymore, and you certainly wouldn’t see anything graphic about it. It has reduced tragic events like what’s happening in Iraq or Darfur down to a simple statistic.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons that the normal populace in other countries (say, Italy) are more impassioned about the events happening around the rest of the world. Indignant if you will. And I’m not talking just about Iraq or Darfur, I’m talking about everything. The news here SHOWS what’s going on and talks about it at length. And not some simple stat or freeze frame away from the action, but the actual explosions or beatings or whatever is going on.

If we, as the American people, firmly DO believe that the current direction our public policy has taken us is the right way, then we should be able to stand strong enough to see the effects of that policy. What happened at Virginia Tech very likely could have been avoided, had more medical attention been given to this obviously very mentally unstable individual. How are we ever going to realize how important mental health care is, if we employ tactics to remove the consequences of it from the air as soon as possible?

I think you should show it. Keep it in front of us. Make us look at it. Perhaps next time we go to vote, we’ll be voting with that in mind, rather than the pothole maintenance or more road-building. Those things currently get our attention – because we’re reminded of the concequences of not spending that public money every single day.

The impression I got from the videos of this guy is he felt so slighted for so long that it eventually built up and exploded. In his case he took it out on defenseless individuals at his school, but many, many more every year just off themselves. These are symptoms of the real problem. Very generally speaking mental health treatment, both in the US and abroad, is viewed as something that you treat crazies with, people with REAL problems in their head, but normal people are just fine without any kind of mental health counseling.

Is that the right path? I’m sure every one of you at some point or another has felt as if you were on the edge of breaking – I know I have. I feel lucky that I have found the tools to deal with it when I feel like that, but so many people in the world don’t have those tools at their disposal, and as much as our parents love us, most of them have not able to teach us those tools. Our society (and especially American society) has gotten to be much more of a pressure cooker than it used to be. It’s hard to keep up, and there are many more pressures on the individual person, fragmenting each person so that you feel like you’re being pulled in 1000 different directions at once. There has to be some way to let off the steam from the pressure cooker and most people don’t have a constructive way to do it. And this doesn’t even delve into the fact that the Virginia Tech shooter probably had some sort of diagnosable mental problem that needed to be treated.

Do you want a very concise view of how bad the problem is? Take a look at this graphic from the New York Times. It lays out, rounded to the closest whole death how many deaths happen from guns each day. They took the overall numbers for 2004 (the most recent year statistics were available) and laid out how many people die each day from the different demographics. I’m sure they adjusted where the dividing lines fell to make it more striking, but even so the results are very sobering. And very different from what my preconception was of who was being killed by guns and why. A full 43% of the deaths were suicides of white males aged 26 and over, with 31% of those white males aged 40 and over. This is a symptom of a problem that needs some urgent attention.

I did find it interesting that the coverage seemed to center around who to blame for this tragedy. I think it’s a healthy conversation to have, not because it’s important to blame someone or something, but because by finding out what went wrong you can try to fix it for the future. I just wish that they actually talked about at length what the real issue is (mental health treatment) instead of their typical blame targets. Let’s go down the list, shall we? Violent video games – this MUST be it… except he never played them. But they were very quick to talk about the video games. Violent TV and movies – talking heads were espousing how it must be because of that. Except he watched WWF on Friday nights occasionally and no other TV. Let’s call it how it is – this guy needed help and he didn’t get it.

But that is a much harder pill to swallow because that puts the onus back on us. We are the ones who vote our politicians into office and vote on the bills that come up in our state and approve new funding for mental health. It’s much easier to point to an industry and say “It’s their product that’s causing all this mess.”

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