In the wake of tragedy comes opportunity. The gunman who killed ten people at Umpqua
Community College in Oregon was the latest in the seemingly endless run of mass
shootings. Each one of these alarmingly
common occurrences provides another chance to logically evaluate the reasoning
behind them, an absolutely vital step in determining the appropriate actions to
take after twenty years of watching the problem worsen.
One of the most popular reactions in America to mass
killings is to demand greater gun control.
Any topic that becomes political in the modern climate evokes polar
viewpoints hyperbolized by the media. If
we are to seriously assess the mass shooting problem, though, the political
undertones need to be stripped away.
Studying the issue on a more humanistic level, this is a
people problem. At the heart of this
debate is that people are deciding that it’s OK to kill other people in schools
and other heavily attended public places.
The theme behind the firearm regulation argument is certainly worth
exploring; it absolutely makes sense to find a way to keep guns away from
people willing to commit heinous acts of violence. However, this is not a simple matter of the
presence or absence of guns. Given that
people are far more complex than the weapons they use, it is imperative that we
acknowledge that this is a multi-faceted problem.
Societally, we have developed a bad habit of black and
white thinking, which limits our collective ability to develop a well-rounded
understanding of various issues. Take
mental illness, for example. 63% in a
recent Washington Post-ABC News poll said that they think mass shootings are
more likely due to the difficulty in identifying and treating people with
mental health problems. Reasonably, one
could assume that no sane individual would enter a public forum with the intent
to harm and that if a previously unstable individual could regain his/her
soundness of mind, tragedy could be potentially avoided. It is in pulling that narrative thread that
we then engage the most complicated question of the subject matter: what is
mental health?
The Mayo Clinic staff begins an article on their website
designed to answer the above question with the statement, “Understanding what's
considered normal mental health can be tricky.”
Search the term “mental illness” and you may notice the trend to
describe it as a disease in a rather arbitrary effort to separate the sick from
the well. Hence, we are generally
categorized as either mentally stable or mentally unstable. A mental illness is defined as a wide range
of conditions that affect mood, thinking, and behavior. Their common traits include sadness, loss of
interest, fear, doubt, worry, mood swings, obsession, impulsiveness, and misinterpretation
of reality. Tricky indeed; if they read
as familiar symptoms, it would be because nearly everyone deals with them to
varying degrees at some point. So, do we
not all vacillate somewhere between mental stability and instability?
Each of us should be concerned with our mental health and
we should be encouraged to explore various ways to keep ourselves mentally well,
as there is a fine line between stability and instability. Unfortunately, we live in a world that
professes symptoms to mean disorders and disease. Those who are diagnosed with a mental illness
become stigmatized, simultaneously discouraging others who may exhibit
consistent signs of emotional turmoil to seek help. One in four adults (nearly 62 million
Americans over the age of 20) and one in five children (19 million kids) will
go through a significant mental health issue that has a pronounced affect on
their daily lives in any given year. 60%
never ask for support either through apprehension, denial, neglect, etc.
Mental health issues are not well understood; the manner
in which they’re dealt with even less so.
As is the case with most diagnosed health conditions, medication is the popular
treatment route suggested for the so-termed mentally ill. The mechanism of action that dictates the
efficacy of such medications is interference with brain and body chemistry. There are 75 trillion cells on average in the
human body, each of which perform 200,000 chemical reactions every split
second. Disrupting the normal processes
that control our body chemistry is a dangerous, controversial method that
addresses nothing but the symptoms and takes no account of their cause or
context. Consider that the human body is
still developing its normal chemistry during the teenage years and that the
last two decades have seen a sharp rise in the prescription of anti-psychotic
drugs to teenagers and young adults.
Dr. Peter R. Breggin, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and
former full-time consultant at the National Institute of Mental Health, insists
that there has been overwhelming scientific evidence for decades correlating
psychiatrically prescribed drugs with violence.
He has testified to Congress that research demonstrates a causal
relationship between antidepressant drugs and the production of suicide,
violence, mania, and other behavioral abnormalities. Accounts like Breggin’s help in understanding
the results of alarming statistical analyses like the one in 2012 which
revealed that the common link between over 80% of the mass shootings was a
perpetrator on anti-psychotic drugs. The
four most commonly prescribed psychotropic drugs all share side effects that
include difficulty concentrating, mood or behavioral changes, feeling like you
cannot control your actions, suicidal tendencies, confusion of identity,
paranoia, sleeplessness, aggressiveness, and sudden loss of consciousness. Such are the potential dangers of
interrupting brain chemistry.
Mental well-being, one of the pillars of overall health,
is an intricate thing and its integrity can be challenged or broken by
environmental, social, emotional, spiritual, and biological causes. Our food crops are sprayed with weed and
bug-killing chemicals and the animals that keep our meat supplies replenished
are pumped with synthetic hormones, resulting in nutritional deficiencies and
internal systemic chaos. Traumas, both
emotional and physical, are extremely common especially during youth, each
creating functional discord in different ways.
Physical traumas deplete structural integrity and weaken our central
nervous system’s ability to regulate basic processes, including the limbic
system that controls our emotions and motivations, while emotional trauma often
creates destructive psychological patterns.
None of the above areas of discussion can be left out of
our exploration into the reason why people are choosing to commit mass
murder. It may be easier to blame the
instrument instead of the person wielding it or to blame altered brain
chemistry for terrible actions; it may be easier to view the issue as a mental
illness recognition problem that does not apply to you. Meanwhile, mass shootings have spiraled out
of control. It is not the result of one
thing, but many. Attempting to fully
understand the underlying problem will not be easy, but the time has arrived to
do the difficult work. We must accept
that sometimes the answer is not black or white, but somewhere in between.
Sources: The Journal of Ethical Human Sciences and Services, The National
Alliance on Mental Illness, The Mayo Clinic website
Dr. Chad McIntyre
owns and operates the Triad Upper Cervical Clinic in Kernersville. Though his practice specializes in Upper
Cervical Care, emphasis is also placed on nutrition, physical activity, and
stress management. With his pre-doctoral
education centered on the field of Psychology, Dr. McIntyre takes a particular
interest in mental health.
