Virginia Tech: This is Not Mental Illness

Since the Virginia Tech shooting the media and numerous politicians have speculated that we should ban mentally ill persons from purchasing guns or require States to engage in a higher level of reporting of the medical records of mentally ill persons.

I find this hypothesis incredibly ignorant and offensive. Further, before you vote on legislation imposing a per se restriction on the rights of the mentally ill, even the 2d amendment right to bare arms, I suggest you take a good hard look at the legislation and ask yourself whether the legislation is based in science or pure political opportunism.

The reality is that mentally ill persons are no more violent towards others than the general population: violence towards others occurs at approximately equal rates among the mentally ill and non-mentally ill population. In fact, persons with schizophrenia, perhaps the most feared and misunderstood serious mental illness, are about 2,000 times more likely to harm themselves than others. Yet, a year-long study of media portrayals of persons with mental illness found that persons with mental illness were depicted as violent -usually homicidal - 90% of the time. No wonder the general population has such a grossly inaccurate perception of persons with mental illness: stories about a schizophrenic mother killing all her children sell, stories about life time survivors of bipolar or schizophrenia attending college and graduate school, working and leading perfectly ordinary, if not unusually challenging and expensive, lives do not.

We do need more Mental Health legislation. But if the concern is Mental Illness, let’s look at the statistics. The truth is, a person with severe mental illness is ridiculously more likely to blow their own head off than anyone else’s. Why not legislation protecting the real victims of Mental Illness, persons with mental illness and their families? Health Care Parity. Legislation requiring colleges who accept federal funding to provide adequate mental health care to students during the age when the first episodes of serious mental illness are most likely to occur? Legislation making it easier for families and law enforcement to commit persons with mental illness who are unable to care for themselves, often homeless or self-medicating with alcohol and drugs, but don’t legally pose a danger to themselves or others? You know, legislation that might have kept Cho in a hospital or working towards a diagnosis and medication rather than just barred from buying a gun rather than making a bomb?

Legislation restricting the rights of all mentally ill persons is terribly overbroad. There is a critical distinction between a person – with or without mental illness - who has been determined to be a threat to others and a person who simply has a mental illness or has been hospitalized because they pose a danger to themselves. I have no problem with governmental regulation in the name of safety in the former category: when people threaten public safety, public safety outweighs certain individual rights (especially rights that might abet threatening behavior). But without any legitimate threat the government has no business eroding the rights of an entire class of Americans who are no more violent than the general population.