Stand Up!

Bipolar Disorder Information

When it comes to politics, I like to think issues through, get the facts, and listen to other people's opinions. This holds for my opinions on gun control as well. 

One of the most disturbing aspects of the ongoing gun control debate is the same tired trope we hear over and over again: mental illness and gun violence go hand and hand. On the one side, there is NRA president Wayne LaPierre, who advocates the use of a national database to keep firearms out of the hands of those with mental illness. On the other side, there is Mark Kelly, husband of Gabby Giffords, who is advocating for gun control reform. While I applaud Kelly's dedication to stop mass shootings, my skin crawled when I read his statement that the gun show loophole should be closed to keep guns away from "criminals, terrorists and the mentally ill."

Why does my skin crawl? The answer is that I have bipolar II, a serious and extremely dangerous mood disorder with a suicide rate 10-20 times that of the general population. I also have many friends in recovery from serious mental illnesses, amazing people who would never even consider shooting up a public place. In spite of the fact that we are part of the nefarious and misunderstood group "the mentally ill,"  we do not keep company with criminals and terrorists. The problem is not "the mentally ill," or even mental illness. It certainly isn't treated mental illness. And it isn't even really untreated mental illness. The reality is that most people with mental illness, even when it is untreated, do not commit violent acts; in fact, they are likelier to be victims of violence. Just because Jared Laughner, who has paranoid schizophrenia, is a mass shooter does not mean that everyone with a mental illness will shoot up a grocery store parking lot. 

With respect, then, to how gun control applies to those with mental illness: it doesn't, UNLESS the individual with a mental illness has a background of violent crime. That anyone in the year 2013 would argue for excluding a whole group of people from their constitutional rights astounds me. I am a person with a mental illness, who has never committed a crime, and I should have the same Second Amendment rights as any other law-abiding citizen. 

Gun control is about guns and crime. It is not about mental illness and guns.

Kudos to MSNBC for having a thoughtful discussion of mental illness and violence this morning.

One of the topics covered today was NRA president Wayne LaPierre’s remarks yesterday about establishing a national gun registry of “the mentally ill” in this country. Interesting, isn’t it, that “the mentally ill” don’t even get a noun after their name, as if they aren’t humans at all. “The truth,” Mr. LaPierre opined, “is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters—people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?”

What underlies LaPierre’s idea is the belief that people with mental illness are inherently violent. Statistics present a different side to this story. People with mental illness are actually 14 times likelier to be victims of violence than the general population, accounting for only four percent of all violence in this country. That means 96% of all violent acts are committed by people without mental illness.

But let’s put it in different terms that are much easier to grasp. If one in 17 people in this country has a serious mental illness, that equates to seven percent of the population, or some 18 million people. Where are all of them? Shouldn’t they be coming out of the woodwork with assault rifles and mowing down thousands of strangers every day?

I am one in 17. Yes, that’s right, me, one of those people, sitting here at my computer, typing like any other logical person. A person, one of many millions, with a mental illness. A person who has been so depressed at times that I couldn’t even leave my house, much less go to the trouble of purchasing a gun and committing mass murder. And yet because I have bipolar II, a mental illness that affects an estimated 5.7 million people in this country, I am automatically declared a monster. No firearms for me, I might go to a mall and start killing people.

What steams me is that Mr. LaPierre presumes to know my story, and the story of the millions like me with mental illness. But our real story is not violence, it is shame. A full two-thirds of us, or a staggering 14 million, will never get any help at all. Stigma is a substantial reason; no one wants to be thought of as a monster, after all. It’s attitudes like Mr. LaPierre’s that kept me from getting help for a full 17 years, and in that time my disease ran rampant, taking many years out of my life. And yet I am one of the lucky ones. There are millions of people in this country who will never have my good fortune, who believe that they couldn’t possibly have a mental illness because they don’t want to kill anyone, people living in the shadows, seen only when something goes wrong, dying on the streets and by their own hand.