No, Mr. President. Hate is not a mental illness.
Source: Washington Post
No, Mr. President. Hate is not a mental illness.
By Pete Earley August 7 at 1:49 PM
Pete Earley is the parent designate on the Interdepartmental Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee, created by Congress. He is the author of “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness.”
“Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun,” President Trump announced when he condemned shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, which together left at least 31 people dead and dozens wounded.
Mr. President, what you said about hatred rings true. But you are wrong in blaming mental illness.
As the father of an adult son with a mental illness and one of 14 nongovernment experts appointed by your administration to a panel that advises Congress about serious mental illnesses, I’d like to recount some well-established facts.
It’s easy for the public to assume that anyone who commits mass murder is mentally ill. How could he or she not be? And several shooters in recent high-profile mass killings have had a serious mental disorder.
But your implication that the 46 million American adults estimated to have a diagnosable mental illness and the 11.2 million thought to have a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are dangerous and potentially mass murderers is as wrongheaded as declaring that the 329 million Americans who are white are capable of committing mass homicide. After all, being white is one of the most common traits of a mass shooter. Data from Mother Jones shows that between 1982 and 2017, 54 percent of mass shooters were white men. Research also shows that many of them struggle with a sense of entitlement attached to their white, heterosexual identity as well as economic anxiety in the post-industrial economy.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/07/no-mr-president-hate-is-not-mental-illness/