Mass shooting after mass shooting, the news media boils the trend down to an issue of mental illness. How do they continually get it so wrong?
As a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I prefer to use the term "neuro-divergence" with the aim of not continuing the trend of dehumanization that attributing mental illnesses to people often does. I’d like to be embraced as a person and to destigmatize mental illness and related words that despicably come to mind like "crazy" or "psycho."
Last week, a 26-year-old man opened fire at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, which led to the deaths of 10 people. Nine people were reportedly injured.
News reports indicated the gunman specifically targeted Christians. The shooter allegedly committed suicide after an exchange of fire with police, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said to CNN. The supposed cause of death was then reinforced by the state medical examiner, who determined it was a suicide.
Although there are well-founded indications the shooter was troubled with respect to his mental health, that does not mean it should be a precursor for associating neuro-divergence with mass shootings.
When President Barack Obama spoke at a press conference shortly after the shooting occurred, he fell into this very error.
"It’s fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds, regardless of what they think their motivations may be," Obama said.
"But we are not the only country on earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people."
Inhabiting such an influential role in government, Obama is essentially stigmatizing a whole group of people.
To gauge the number of people within this category, an estimated 43.8 million adults were diagnosed with a mental health condition in the U.S. in 2013, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
In a recent study conducted by two Vanderbilt University researchers on the relationship between neuro-divergence and mass shootings, they found "fewer than 5 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness."
In another study at North Carolina State University, they found the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence rather than perpetrators.
So what are mass shootings in the U.S. about then?
What Obama said depoliticizes the trend at the expense of an already misunderstood and marginalized segment of the population.
In this particular case, the shooter had a consistent online presence. For many of his accounts, he used the email address ironcross45@gmail.com. The iron cross is a symbol associated with Nazism, which could give some implication he could have had Nazi or fascist sympathies.
He also had a Myspace account in which he posted Irish-Republican Army photos and videos depicting soldiers in masked garb holding guns.
As it’s been noted, he also possessed a disdain for Christianity and those who follow it.
The point I’m making is whenever these horrific moments ensue, the shooters have, more often than not, motives and ideologies.
They hold onto something that drives them into a fit of violence, and it leads to the loss of human life.
If we don’t take notice of that and we continue to blindly use a vague definition of mental illness as a scapegoat, this will happen again.
Or maybe it’s just difficult to actually consider the ideologies that represent intolerance of religion or toward particular groups of people — those that have become so entrenched in our culture — have the capacity to motivate gun violence.
Aubrey Krampert is a UF journalism junior. Her columns appeaer on Thursdays.
