Mental illness is when one feels so despairing that they'd almost rather be dead. This, apparently, is fairly common. This is sad and I wish I had some idea of just how to help.
Or mental illness can be when one has actual hallucinations. To the point where they are genuinely not cognizant of reality and their ability to function in society is highly questionable. I'm sure this is less common than depression. Such people might be a danger to others and their own culpability could well be questioned.
But when someone is simply angry and decides to extract revenge by misery on others at a ratio something like 10,000:1 against their own so-called misery, that's not mental illness.
It's plain old human viciousness run amok.
It exists in all of us to some extent. Those of us who view attacking fellow human beings as evil are, thankfully, able to suppress those minor urges in that direction and live a life where we avoid such behavior.
Those who don't avoid such behavior don't avoid it because they kinda don't want to avoid it. Others misbehave frequently because they actually want to hurt others. In some cases, they want this pretty badly. (Personally, I don’t understand it at all. But observation leaves me no choice but to conclude that such desire does, indeed, exist.)
This is about all the explanation we need for those who are always angry and always quarreling with their loved ones, through the guy who impulsively grabs some teenage girl and molests and strangles her, through the guy who walks into a night club and shoots fifty people and right up through guys like Osama bin Laden.
Cleaning our society of such people will not be simple. But I don't think we'll get far by anguishing over whether they have proper access to mental health services. And some of the folks around us use that idea as an excuse to do nothing, anyway.
But there is one thing the rest of us can start doing today. Quit listening to, supporting and voting for people who embrace scorn, anger and hysteria.
Edit, June 13 afternoon:
I’m not a particularly accomplished writer. Can you tell? :)
Maybe this diary would have been better finished with something like this;
Don’t listen to those who say ‘it’s a mental health problem’ about mass shootings and other atrocities. They are merely scapegoating.
These are the folks who will fight tooth and nail against even the most incremental gun control measures.
And these are the same folks who will fight to the death any public spending on mental health services. Don’t vote for them.
We all know this already. This is a reminder.
And if anyone wants to view the people who commit these crimes as being mentally ill, I guess I won’t deny you that right. But I think it’s a mistake.
This is a very different thing than depression or bi-polar disorder.
These people feel that causing the most horrible agony to others, taking their very lives even, is a not unreasonable thing for them to do if they feel that the world has ‘disrespected’ them. Or something like that. And some don’t go as far as killing, yet still cause plenty of misery. These are much more common.
These people are encouraged by the politics of disdain.