But sometimes there is death caused by mental illness. Death by mental illness is actually very common. There are people who are delusional with Schizophrenia and believe that someone is telling them to kill and there are psychopaths who have no conscience, sociopaths who have no connection with society. But these mental illnesses are the poster boys of mental illness, but they are not the true killers; they represent the smallest fraction of all mental illness related killings, but they are sensational and they hit the public news media and movie screens with flash and glitter.
The big killer of mental illness is depression. I would say that everyone knows of someone who has killed themselves. Some nations have a suicide rate two or three times the murder rate. Some populations within nations have suicide rates many times over the national rates of suicide. Some nations suicide numbers are hidden, because suicide is shameful in their society; how likely is it that ceiling fan malfunctions are responsible for hundreds of deaths in South Korea? Suicide is an expression of the worst of depression as a mental illness but not the most sensational. Most suicide is private with no one to witness the event. Killing yourself is a lot harder than people think, it is easier to hurt someone else than it is to hurt yourself. Some people elect to get someone else to do the killing for them and the people that usually oblige are the police. People often calling suicide by Cop. It is simple, if you want to die pick up a knife and threaten a Cop and they will kill you for you. But how do you get a cop to come and shoot you? Commit a crime. But not all crimes will get you killed, so you have to pick the right crime. The right crime that will get you shot and killed most of the time is to threaten people with death.
Lone gunman going out and killing a lot of people, in a school, in a work place, in a mall, never survive the experience, many of them kill themselves, but often they get shot several times by the police. They are probably all depressed, certainly mentally ill. Usually there is something that instigates the incident, work place murder sprees occur after the person has lost their job, in schools it is usually done by students. These people are hoping to be stopped, some of them are hoping to die. The media does not often talk a lot about the lone gunman that never fired a shot. Mostly that come to their senses before they do anything and are unknown people. They are mentally ill though.
Another twist to this type of "Lone Gunman" scenario has been the "I am an Islamic extremist" version. Strangely not since 911, but since the prominence of Isis in the media and its specific threats towards western governments, but also the radicalization of troubled youth from all countries to Islam and Isis specifically but also other Islamic extremist groups, people have been claiming that they are fighting for them when they commit these acts. It is a radical idea that these people are mentally ill and not extremist like they claim. Most people want to believe that they are extremist for a couple of reasons. Extremists are bad people. Their existence justifies the massive amount of spending that governments have done to protect us from them over the years since 911 and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Mostly, though, because if people recognized that these people were mentally ill, then they would be our, collective, problem and would be our failing to society. An extreme action such as murder and suicide is the last action of someone not getting the help that they need, that we do not provide.
Mental illness, is that special condition that no one talks about, even though it affects almost every family, every household and will affect almost every person at one or more parts of their life. The old saying that, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, has never been more true. How many more painting would Vincent van Gogh have painted, how many books would Hemingway have written, Robin Williams acted in, how would Charlotte Dodge have impacted the world beyond her 16 year lifespan? If you are reading this, you have spent time reading an argument from someone who wanted to die nearly twenty-one years ago enough to try.
When the smoke had cleared from Sandy Hook public school and all the young bodies had been buried and people had time to examine what had happened there were two recommendations made: increase spending on mental health issues and institute more gun control. And the anger and the debates started right away and people were angry and fighting across the airwaves and the Internet about how gun control was unconstitutional and everything else, but mental health spending was ignored, swept away. We spend in North America, billions of dollars, trillions, on keeping everyone safe by locking people up. We spend millions on mental health, but only millions. If we spent a billion dollars on mental health the benefits to society would be huge. More people employed, less people locked up, greater social acceptance for people with mental illnesses, less suicides. Less parents walking into bathrooms and bedrooms and finding their beloved teenager dead. No Sandy Hook tragedies, no Colombines. No Ecole Polytechnic.
I don't mean that all terrorists are mentally ill, well actually I DO believe that all terrorists are mentally ill. I think the process that turns people into soldiers is a process that allows them to kill, is a form of mental illness. Whether the person is part of a terrorist organization or a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, they start out as regular people and are changed into people capable of killing by dehumanizing the enemy, which in polite society would be considered mentally ill. You want to end the mental illness of war? End the disparity between peoples, spend money to help them raise the level of their societies. It would cost less than arming ourselves to fight them off and protect what we have from them getting it.
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