This is a
response by the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand to the recent mass
shooting in Christchurch. Is saying that
a white supremacist terrorist is crazy an excuse for not facing our own
racism? Is claiming that Islamic
terrorists are motivated by their religion/ideology treating the group we do
not belong to according to a double standard?
What can be done to fight white supremacy, which seems to be on the
rise?
In the modern world, when everyone is always under pressure and deals with a great deal of stressful situations every day, the occurrence of mental disorders such as depression is just getting higher and higher. The mental health, mental disorders, as well as abnormal psychology (which studies mental health and people with mental disorders) are still not very popular topics, or to say it in a better and proper way, they are very controversial topics.
ReplyDeleteIn many societies, there is still a taboo on mental disorders and many people do not understand them. As there is just a little we know about human brain, psychology – especially the abnormal psychology - is not something that well-studied, exact and provable as physics, biology and other natural sciences. Therefore, people are less likely to believe anything related to human mental health. What is even worse, many people do not believe in mental disorders at all, so they are not willing to provide help to those who need it. And when one is raised in such an environment, they will hide their problems or deal with it by themselves rather than talk about them with other people around them (and they might not get any medical care before it is too late).
It is always easier to give an explanation or reason for something through not so well-known phenomenon or to accuse minorities because more people will agree with that opinion. Unfortunately, as it was written in the article, this is not a way how to help people who belong to these minorities or have these very little-known problems. It just creates more and more negative stereotypes about the affected people and if the society does not accept these people, because it is thought that all of them behave the same (because of stereotypes), these people will hide their problems in order to not to be the outsiders (as I wrote in the paragraph above). It is the same thing as with Jewish people during WWII – they had to hide their religion or change parts of their identities because it was considered as a bad thing at that time to be a Jewish and they were judged, discriminated and even arrested (or dead as it happened with most of the Jewish people). Therefore, if we want to help minorities or the ones belonging to an (discriminated) out-group, no matter if they are people belonging to the LGBT community, people with mental disorders, people with other religion or race, we should support them and not spread negative conclusions and stereotypes about them. If they do not cause harm to us or affect our lives in hardly negative ways, why should they be judged or treated differently?
As it is the main subject of the article, we should all understand the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand’s statement. Extremism has nothing to do with mental illness. We can not excuse all the harm the human beings have made when they were blindly killing people that were somehow different (race, religion, sexual orientation). That is just an inexcusable characteristic of humans and cannot be hidden behind one broad term - mental illness. As it was mentioned, most of the people with depression (as one of the most common mental disorder) would rather kill themselves because they see the problem in themselves and not in the other people.
The last thing but not least thing, we could argue that many serial killers definitely had/have something wrong in their minds. First of all, a serial killer and a mass killer is not the same thing. The terrorist in the Christchurch was a mass killer. Second of all, there are many mental disorders and we cannot generalize this phrase, because it would mean that everyone with mental illness is the same and behave the same. It is like when we would say that scoliosis is the same thing as cancer. Does it make sense? I do not think so.
Interesting input on mental health Kornelia,
ReplyDeleteI agree that mental health or lack thereof is an issue not well understood but I think in modern western culture it has been greatly romanticised. In my experience, I have seen more than enough of ‘tortured artist’ trope among young people, mostly teenagers. I have also noticed that art portraying sadness, whether it be paintings or dance, are deemed more ‘artistic’ and ‘expressive’. A recent example is Billie Eilish where people shallowly associate depression with artistic success.
As far as extremism and mental illness goes, I think the term mental illness is often stretched in all kinds of directions that it is slowly is losing the value of its meaning, so it is slowly becoming more of an umbrella term for people to have outlandish values, feelings or reasons behind their decisions. Nonetheless, I think there is a double standard about labelling terrorists motivated by ideology as mentally ill. Misinterpreting the Quran or the Bible or straight up following David Lanes 14/88 is all some sort of ideology. Nobody likes to be in the same group whether it’s generation, ethnicity or country with someone deplorable, appalling. I think we should keep in mind that there can be extreme personalities without any mental illnesses. Everyone would like to distance themselves from terrorists in their group to not feel some sort of guilt and this distance can be easily achieved by labelling them mentally ill. People need to learn to be at peace with themselves and understand that the bad person is not a representative of the whole group.
This is a comment from Emma:
ReplyDeleteTo begin with, I must say that New Zealand handled this tremendous tragedy with excellence. I have never seen such humane precautions undertaken by a country, as New Zealand did after the Christchurch tragedy. Following the incident, the Prime minister of New Zealand banned all assault rifles in the country and even refused to name the shooter to not give him any recognition. I think that all countries should take an example from how well New Zealand handled this tragedy.
Moreover, I fully agree with the claim that we should not associate mental illnesses with extremist behaviour. As it was stated in the article: "The terrorist is clearly an extremist, but it is an unfair leap to assume we can blame mental illness for his actions.". I think that we can hear these associations even when talking privately with our friends, family or even random strangers. "Oh, he must have had a mental illness to do something like that. A normal person would never do that!" is a sentence that is not very uncommon across our society. I think that this places people suffering from a mental illness in a much worse light. This way, people associate violent behaviour with all mental conditions and automatically expect the worst from people who suffer from them. In my opinion, a mental illness of an individual should be mentioned only if it is absolutely necessary to justify the persons actions.
Finally, the Christchurch incident touches on the issue that is casual racism. Stated by The Mental Health Foundation of NZ: " Casual racism emboldens extremists and puts minorities at risk.". Even small hateful remarks that people say to their friends in a pub can lead to wave of racism in the long run. The butterfly effect affects the minorities, where it can go from seemingly innocent joke to a mass shooting like in Christchurch. To solve this, I agree with the Mental Health Foundation of NZ in that: " Here’s one thing we can do: give nothing to racism.".