Reply to Family of six killed by depressed and suicidal 19-year-old

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is a terrible, sad story and I feel awful for everyone involved, especially their surviving family who must be in such turmoil right now. My heart goes out to them.

Gun control IS a joke.

The thread title makes it sound like depression/suicidal ideation caused this awful event and that's not accurate at all. There is already so much stigma around mental illness, I feel like I must note: depression doesn't make you kill people. And the greatest threat of suicidal ideation is to the person who has it. There are lots of things happening in this story and likely we still don't know what sequence of events led to this terrible outcome. But it wasn't "depression". Please do not further stigmatize people with depression, who already struggle so much and need love, support, and understanding. Not unfounded fear.[/quote]

I understand what you’re trying to do here, but it’s misguided. Please understand that I comment from the position of someone who has suffered mental illness for 40+ years. And someone who has spent more than half that time working in the criminal justice system with adults and juveniles and who has read voluminously in the research on the links between mental illness and violent crime.

It’s both naive and wrong to state that there isn’t a correlation between the two, and in many cases causation. It doesn’t help mentally ill people to deny that reality. The stigma of mental illness in our society is awful, but pretending the horrors of mental illness don’t exist does nothing to tear down that stigma. It creates a cognitive dissonance that people will recoil from.

And the fact is - something we should all be able to grasp with little struggle - many policy makers are far from altruistic and won’t be convinced to finance and back expanded mental health resources on the basis that it will help some people who suffer mental illness. Sell it as a means to reduce violent crime and you’ve got a much easier sale.

Mentally ill people experiencing unstable illness (untreated) kill themselves, kill their children, kill their parents, kill strangers, commit violence assaults, etc. The rate at which this happens varies depending on the research you look at, but the fact that it happens and is not by any means anomalous is undisputed among the professionals who study this issue and treat the afflicted. It doesn’t help anyone to pretend this isn’t so.[/quote]

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