Active Incidents on Planet Entertainment: A Psych Patient’s Perspective on Mass Shootings & Mental Illness

I am a citizen of the United States, and I have never thought about owning, purchasing, shooting, touching, or engaging in any way with a firearm. I am also a psychiatric patient. As a psychiatric patient, I have seen a few crises in the mental health field firsthand (one might argue convincingly that the entire mental health field is just one giant, persistent crisis with many sub-crises; though certainly no one would argue COVID-19 didn’t exacerbate it, along with every other societal ill). I can write, and have, about inpatient psychiatric treatment: the fixtures that illicit comparisons to a bygone era (think, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and the very real human suffering which I witnessed being perpetuated by the boredom and suppression intrinsic to these kinds of places. The first time I left the hospital after release from a 72-hour hold (for those unfamiliar: in my state and most states, if a professional deems it unsafe for you to be unsupervised, you will be held in a nursing-intensive psychiatric unit for 72 hours, during which time your case will be assessed – this will happen whether you cooperate or not). I sat on a bench outside the main doors because I wanted to be outside, waiting for the taxi (yes, a taxi) with all my belongings in a paper bag, shoelaces freshly restrung, feeling like I was different because of this experience, because who else in my peer group had been strip-searched and held against their will for three highly unpleasant days in the name of preserving their safety? Whether people could look at me and see a psychiatric patient, I would always feel like one, and to not feel like one would take sincere and sustained effort: a realization I came to when I got in the back seat of the taxi and made eye contact with the driver in the mirror and his eyes darted away. Okay, things are different now. 

One of the things that became different was a sense of involvement in dialogues involving mental illness, and the oft-invoked “mental health crisis”. One of the main questions posited in the wake of a mass shooting is if keeping firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill will curtail these events. This question hinges on the presumption that everyone who commits a mass shooting has a mental health issue (the governor of Texas said as much: anyone who wants to shoot another human being with a gun has a mental health issue). Indeed, in the United States, the scope of psychiatry is such that meeting the criteria for mental health diagnosis is the norm rather than the exception: but this is not what people tend to refer to when they are referring to the mental health epidemic. 

There is a dramatic distinction between the safe and unsafe mentally ill, and nowhere is this more evident to the layperson than in advertising: corporations have seized on the movement toward mental health awareness, co-opting therapy and recovery language to encourage the consumption of products for depression, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms. I have yet to see (and have fun imagining) a mass-marketable product to help one manage symptoms of psychosis and homicidality. It doesn’t exist. It will never exist, because psychotic disorders are wildly misrepresented and misunderstood: as it stands, the cultural narrative of mass shootings is that someone with an existing mental health issue entered some kind of altered state of consciousness and proceeded to procure a weapon and kill people. It does not matter that people with psychotic disorders are far likelier to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of it. It does not matter that psychotic disorders have specific and complex pathology, and the level of preparation that tends to go into planning a mass casualty event is definitionally incompatible with psychosis. It doesn’t matter, because the people and corporations who profit from the sale of firearms in my country have seats in the highest echelons of government, and a gun ban or any action that would cut into the profits of these entities is out of the question, and so the blame is assigned to a highly marginalized group of people for whom few of my fellow citizens lack even the most basic knowledge of. If mass shootings are caused by mental illness, posits the politician, the solution is more psychiatry: incredibly, this incentive has not worked. 

More psychiatry means more hotlines, more involuntary hospitalizations, more medication, more mandatory reporting, more psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, therapists and social workers accessible in schools and workplaces: a solution that has been implemented on a national scale since Columbine (which should be understood as a failed bombing, not a school shooting, but nonetheless often signifies the “beginning” of regular mass shootings in the collective consciousness). So why isn’t it working? In the plainest terms, it is because mental illness is not the cause of the mass shootings that scourge our nation: my country is sick with something else which evades psychiatric diagnosis, and part of the problem is how we engage with these events on an individual level. 

I have the opportunity to access the internet whenever I want, and such an opportunity brings about infinite possibilities for entertainment: an emotional experience curated by an algorithm, which is smarter, more insidious, and more damaging than we probably know. And yet, it’s fun. How can one criminalize fun? It’s more than fun: it is redemptive. One of the defining experiences of my generation will be finding a community of people online with whom you shared an experience or understanding. I do not think this is a light and frivolous thing, and I don’t think it is fair or accurate to say broadly “the internet is bad”, or “entertainment is bad”: it’s our lack of insight into how to use it that’s making us a lot sicker. 

The fact that news of mass shootings comes to us via the same channels by which we are entertained is disadvantageous for several reasons: it dulls the emotional impact of a mass tragedy, and it demands very little of us on a personal level. It is undifferentiated from the stream of media we consume which has been sold to us as a seemingly innocuous balm for our psychic pain. I get notices of mass casualty events on my cell phone or my work computer alongside banners and alerts for everything else, particularly entertainment news. I would not like to live in a world where I have to read about the slaughter of elementary students by a gunman. I would not like to live in a world where this does not horrify me because I am both used to it, and so far removed from it that news of it registers to me as a notification: a transmission from the planet entertainment which I receive from the removal and safety of my life curated on screens by forces outside of my comprehension. I imagine myself aboard the International Space Station, and the world below is in chaos, and it is neither my responsibility or my fault because I am just a consumer: the news which rips one community’s world apart is just words on a screen to me. 

I fear my point may become convoluted here. I am not advocating for the abrogation of citizen responsibility: I am merely reporting on what I see in my peers, and what I experience in myself in the wake of a gun-related mass casualty incident (the use of the word “incident” derives from a workplace training I received, which referenced a mass shooting situation as “active incident” – the word “incident”, invoking images of a hazmat spill or fall from equipment, used in reference to mass homicide struck me as funny and indicative of how mass shootings are now recognized as things that can happen at work). I do not think doing nothing is an acceptable response, but I think it is a very human response, and I do not fault anyone for being too paralyzed by fear or numbness or exhausted to “do something”. Increasingly, calls to action are invoked from audiences and art is evaluated on the basis of its moral fortitude. I do not think this is bad: I think it is in part a response to the irony which dominated the cultural landscape for older millennials. In an age where so much stimulus competes for our attention, to ask for an emotional response to a tragedy is no small thing: we are all exhausted. I still think this is the only antidote to our collective life on the ISS. 

The antidote is to try to feel, if even for a moment. This can be one small movement in the larger practice of untangling our minds from the ills wrought on us by capitalism, corporate greed, and pressure to produce and consume in an economy in which nothing is ever enough. My point in writing this is to articulate my own discontent with the way I engage with media and news of the mass shootings that keep happening and happening. My second motive is to say, as succinctly and elegantly as I can: I am a mentally ill person and I will not commit a mass shooting. I take an antipsychotic every day, and yet I am lucid enough to write this for you. The mentally ill are not procuring weapons of war and unleashing them on civilians. We live in a nation that places the exorbitant profit of the wealthy at the top, and those on the fringes of society, including the mentally ill, are hated, misrepresented, and relegated to prisons and psychiatric institutions to turn a profit. This is the system under which we live, and it will not connect us, unite us, love us, or save us. If mass shootings are to ever transcend their status as active incidents we must engage with the stories buried in headlines, statistics, and opinion. This is mine: I am a psychiatric patient in the United States, and I will not kill you.