Mental Illness Is a Cynical Deflection From Gun Violence — Don’t Fall for It

Whenever another mass shooting makes headlines, as with the recent killing of six — including three nine-year-old children — at a private Christian school in Nashville, the response from conservatives is predictable.

Unwilling to do anything to regulate guns, even the weapons of war so often used in these events — which, in the case of the Covenant School shooting, fired over 150 rounds in a matter of minutes — they pivot immediately to the issue of mental health.

As in, the issue isn’t guns; it’s mental illness. If we could address the latter — perhaps along with the sinfulness they often mention as part of their tendency to reduce everything to some Biblical struggle between good and evil — the problem would disappear.

And yet, when pressed to do something substantive about mental illness, these same forces always punt.

They never propose any legislation to improve access to mental health services.

In fact, when such legislation is proposed, inevitably by more liberal and progressive lawmakers — who agree that guns are not the only problem and, yes, addressing mental illness is also a great idea — they almost uniformly oppose it.

For instance, consider the Mental Health Matters Act, introduced in Congress last year and passed by the House, only to die in Senate Committee, at least for now.

The bill sought to provide substantial new mental and emotional health care resources, especially to young people who need them.

It called for evaluating best practices for delivering such care to children and youth and ensuring access to such services in schools where they could be provided to all kids.

It sought to provide trauma-informed care for young people impacted by various adverse childhood experiences and to ensure that counselors are appropriately trained in providing such care.

And all but one Republican in the House voted against it.

They didn’t try to fix the parts they didn’t like. They didn’t offer their own alternative.

They merely rejected it out of hand, content to do nothing.

Why?

Well, if you ask, they’ll gladly tell you.

Providing mental and emotional counseling to teens might require discussing things like sexuality, gender identity, sexual abuse in the home, drugs, or other matters parents think should be left to them.

Counselors might use Social Emotional Learning principles (like empathy, self-regulation, and conflict resolution) which the right views as gateway drugs to things like Critical Race Theory or “wokeness” more broadly. After all, if we have more empathy and learn to regulate our own emotions, we might come to care when others are in pain and not be as controllable by outside forces, including parents.

Kids might think for themselves — the horror.

Think I’m exaggerating or being hyperbolic?

Just look at what happened recently in rural Killingly, Connecticut. Although teens there were experiencing a myriad of mental and emotional health issues — as young people often do — when a mental health clinic for the high school was proposed, most parents rejected it.

For all the reasons mentioned above.

Even though the state legislature had overwhelmingly supported the expansion of school-based mental health clinics throughout Connecticut, in Killingly, it ran into stiff opposition from conservatives worried about the usurpation of parental authority.

The fact that students would be able to receive therapy without parental consent was among the many sticking points, even though there are many good reasons why a child might not want a parent to know they were in counseling.

One school board member complained that several years earlier, a therapist had “meddled with my teenaged son’s mind because at that age they are most vulnerable and they want someone to talk to.”

No word on whether or not his son might have a different take on things, like who, for instance, was trying to meddle with his mind.

Another man stood up in a school board meeting where the plans for the clinic were being discussed and insisted that “our modern-day psychology is rooted in occultism” because Freud used drugs and Carl Jung “channeled spirit guides.”

So even though a survey of Killingly students indicated that more than one in four had thought about self-harm, and about one in seven had made suicide plans, to the parents of the town, maintaining their control on their children was more important than helping them access the services they might need and desire.

Ultimately, the people who insist we should focus on mental health every time someone shoots up a school don’t have any ideas about how to address that problem. And they reject most any solution offered by mental and emotional health experts because they don’t trust what they perceive as the political agendas of those in the field.

Which leaves us with what, exactly?

Send kids to a priest or minister? Christian counseling? Conversion therapy if they’re LGBTQ?

Sweeping up the mentally ill and involuntarily institutionalizing them?

It’s hard to imagine any other mental health plan these folks would support.

Unless it’s rooted in Jesus and punishment — the Bible and the rubber room — it won’t likely pass the test for reactionaries bent on stigmatizing mental illness rather than genuinely addressing it.

Which is why we know they don’t care about the issue. They say things like kids should “toughen up” and that they’re “too soft nowadays.” They (meaning the parents) got by without therapy, and their kids should too, they insist.

All the while ignoring that perhaps the fact that they never received therapy is precisely why their kids are in such desperate need of it now.

Meanwhile, young people are crying out for services and help. And when they don’t get it, some will become violent, either against themselves or others. But the right would bury their heads in the sand about all this, only feigning interest in mental health when it serves to deflect from having to address gun violence.

However hard it is to admit, their actions demonstrate that conservatives are more scared of their children exercising autonomy than being slaughtered by semi-automatic gunfire.

They are more worried about losing hegemonic control over their kids than whether or not those kids are struggling with addiction, depression, being bullied, or other forms of emotional distress.

They do not love their children except as appendages of themselves. They view and prefer them as dependent beings who should be manipulated to think as they think, act as they act, and believe as they believe.

And if they die, they die.

Next to the guns themselves, these parents are the biggest threat to their children — to all of our children — by far.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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