NARRATOR: Mass shootings in the US inevitably lead to national discussions about mental health...
But people who actually experience mental illness are routinely left out of the conversation.
So we sat down with some to get their response to messages in the media.
CHRISTIANA: Pressing play.
EMILY: How are we supposed to catch these really psychotic, socio-schizophrenic people…
COURTNEY: “Psychotic, socio-schizophrenic."
She said it like it was one word.
She clearly like, has no idea what she’s talking about.
EMILY: None of us want crazy people having guns, look what happened.
MAN: Can we not use the term “crazy people”, please.
People who have mental illness are not crazy. (EMILY: Why?)
There’s a huge spectrum of mental illness. (EMILY: This man is schizophrenic.)
NAOMI: What I think about that is, um, people use terms
and I don’t think they know what they mean.
CHRISTIANA: Here I am, in the flesh.
You wanna talk about a schizophrenic person?
Hi!
MARÉ: They use mental illness-related words like “psychotic” and “schizophrenic”
to basically mean like, “bad” and “violent."
IVANOVA: They keep putting violence and mental illness together
like they’re the two same things and it’s not!
MARÉ: I’m glad that that other person was kind of arguing back at her.
JOE: These people are almost entirely on some form of psychiatric medication
whether it is anti-anxiety pills, whether it’s anti-depressants…
I’m not saying that correlation equals causation.
I’m not saying that.
But to say that they’re not...this is just a bullshit, click-bait headline.
They’re mentally ill 100%.
100% of them are mentally ill.
IVANOVA: I’m disappointed in you, Joe Rogan!
I usually like your commentary.
CLARK: First of all, he’s completely wrong
that 100% of people who have ever shot up anything
are on drugs for psychiatric care.
More importantly though, the idea of like,
stigmatizing people who are getting help
is really dangerous!
MARÉ: For many years, I struggled to seek help and I felt so ashamed because of people like this,
and people like this are everywhere.
COURTNEY: With this kind of rhetoric, it just makes people more hesitant
to go get treatment and help themselves and,
the reality is what really happens is that people commit suicide
or hurt themselves more often than anything else.
NAOMI: “I feel attacked”, I guess, is the right thing to say.
I don’t think I should have to hide the results of a hard life.
I think I should be able to wear my battle scars proudly and not have to like, uh,
convince everybody I’m not gonna go out and murder them.
COURTNEY: I’m ready.
RACHEL: The first materially significant stand-alone legislation
that was passed after the 2016 election.
It was a single-purpose piece of legislation
to make it easier for mentally ill people to buy guns.
That’s all it did.
So many questions about why anybody would take overt action to make sure people adjudicated
to be seriously mentally disturbed (NAOMI: Rachel!)
could get guns more easily! (NAOMI: Rachel, Rachel!)
NAOMI: I love Rachel!
And Rachel, you’re wrong!
People aren’t being adjudicated, uh, or even diagnosed.
It assumes that people who do have, as Rachel said, "mental disturbance," are also the very
same people who are going to be killing people.
IVANOVA: We’re actually more likely to be victims of violence and crime, than perpetrators.
COURTNEY: People have this misconception about this legislation that Trump signed.
That legislation had more to do with people who have representative payees.
MARIKO: The reason that these people have representative payees
is because they need assistance managing their finances.
CLARK: So gun control is one thing.
But you know, you can’t just target a certain part of the population whose only commonality is,
you know, not being good with managing finances.
There’s really no correlation there between like, “Hey, do you have trouble managing money?
Well then clearly, you can’t have a gun.”
MARÉ: Some of those people on the left still are spreading, like, really bad things like this.
MARINA: In response to the shooting, liberal comedian Chelsea Handler tweeted:
“Mental health illness without guns are people with mental health issues.
With guns, they become murderers.”
CLARK: Yeah...okay.
COURTNEY: “With guns they become murders,” like, what a stupid generalization.
IVANOVA: Every single person that has mental illness, if they touch a gun,
they're not magically gonna become murderers.
CHRISTIANA: And imagine what it may feel like for someone who may have psychosis or
you know, may be struggling with their mental experience in the moment
and then they’re hearing how the public is essentially
grabbing their torches and pitchforks
specifically looking for someone like them.
COURTNEY: I’m being put under a stigma where I’m a violent person
and I’m not, and it’s just really frustrating.
TRUMP: We used to have mental institutions, and I said this yesterday.
We had a mental institution where you take a sicko like this guy, he was a sick guy,
and you can’t put him in jail because he hadn’t done anything yet
but you know he’s going to do something.
So we're gonna be talking seriously about opening mental health institutions again.
MARIKO: The fact that he’s even talking about bringing back institutionalization is like
fucking terrifying.
COURTNEY: We’re gonna like regress back to like Willowbrook days, when people with disabilities were
not allowed to go school and all of our rights were taken away.
CHRISTIANA: When you have the president of the country, talking about bringing back institutionalization,
that’s going to have a disproportionate and radical effect on the lives of people
who may have never even seen a gun in their life.
NAOMI: You can’t force all people who have mental illnesses into hospitals
and think that's gonna solve the problem of gun violence in this society, which is pervasive.
This presumption, it just doesn’t work.
CHRISTIANA: Linking mental health to gun violence is going to increase, kinda like we saw in these videos,
the public's reaction to people with mental illness.
And that is the problem.