Shootings for the masses: They are mentally ill

This is a brief elaboration of my 9/1/2019 NYT comment:

A comment on the cosmic meme of attributing, or not attributing, gun violence to “mental illness.” The problem comes from people’s very primitive sense or fear of what “mental illness” is. It’s not a singular disturbance, but rather unhealed psychic pain that manifests in literally countless ways. It’s serial killing and biting your fingernails from anxiety; believing you’re Jesus or being the eternal cynic. The issue is which mental illnesses are behind the destruction. Look to Intermittent Explosive Disorder, or Antisocial Personality Disorder, or psychopathy, or Borderline Personality Disorder – see C. Lawson’s “Medea” manifestation of BPD in her book, Understanding the Borderline Mother. Focusing on the specific disturbance leads us to identifiable causes, such as atrocious parenting, or serial neglect, or birth trauma. From that perspective, realistic ameliorative or preventive approaches (at least theoretically) might be found.

Are people really this simple-minded, that they think the avatar of psychological illness is the drooling, lobotomized freak in a straitjacket, screaming down the halls and smearing feces on the walls of the psych ward? Or a catatonically depressed mother petrified in her bed for days while her kids run the streets? The stubbornness of such stereotypes, I believe, must originate in people’s fear-based faith that their disturbed feeling or thinking couldn’t possibly be actual mental illness.

But it is.

From that conceit derives the assumption that if we can think reasonable, normal thoughts – “I’m mildly depressed but I know that exercise helps.” “Who isn’t anxious these days?” – we must be normal or average or fine, not emotionally injured.

Quite wrong. Thinking in rational sentences, being a powerful intellect, or having a sense of humor doesn’t save you from mental illness.

It turns my placidity into an HR Giger grotesquery to hear intelligent adults say these misfits are not disordered. There are even some psychiatrists who proclaim this, and say that a personality disorder such as the president’s narcissism is not a mental illness. They need to leave their profession and work at Walmart, or some place where fools get paid. 

See an earlier post – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/03/ocean-and-boat.html – for a kinder and gentler explanation of mental illness.