“Bipolar and Off His Meds”: A Rant

After reading the CNN story about the most recent school shooting (which really wasn’t a shooting, it was a guy with guns inside an elementary school who COULD have turned it into a shooting), I feel I must register a complaint about the way the so-called mainstream media handle these things:

I’m tired of the way they blame mental illness for absolutely every freaking gun crime in this country. Every one. I think the thought process (if there IS one) goes like this: bringing a gun into a school automatically makes you a lunatic, ergo, merely having a mental illness means you’re apt to be a criminal. Now, I remember reading somewhere that correspondence does NOT imply causality, but to hear the big news sources tell it, you’d think everyone with MI is potentially violent.

This particular idiot-of-the-week is a 20-year-old alleged bipolar who “hadn’t taken his medication”. Well hell, I’M bipolar and I sometimes miss a dose of meds too. So are a lot of other people…..does that mean we’re all planning to go out and shoot up a school? The last time I checked, being mentally ill doesn’t absolve one of the duty to be a decent human being, nor does it render one incapable of knowing right from wrong. What happened to good old-fashioned morals?? Or personal responsibility?

I get so damned sick of seeing psychiatric issues used as a scapegoat for all sorts of terrible crimes that I could just SPIT. You’d think journalists would know better than to perpetuate stereotypes, but no, they stoke the fires with every atrocity that occurs. The Columbine killers? Angry and possibly post-traumatic from abusive childhoods. The Virginia Tech gunman? Mentally ill, a loner. The Aurora theater shooter? Possibly bipolar or schizophrenic—he “looks crazy”, so it’s got to be one or the other. The Sandy Hook killer? Suspected of as-yet unidentified mental health problems. And the list goes on and on and on…….

Let’s get down to where the cheese binds, folks: It is simply too easy to blame everything that goes wrong in this country on mental illnesses and their sufferers. The media play up the popular images of “psychos” everywhere and every time the opportunity presents itself, which only encourages the masses to be intellectually lazy and gives the American public an excuse not to make mental health a priority. After all, who cares about the crazies, the nutters, the whackos—right?

Makes me mad enough to bite a rock. But NOTHING would make me mad enough—or is that psychotic enough?—to leave my house with an AK-47 and threaten a school full of little kids. (Or anyone else, for that matter.) I don’t care how bipolar the dude is or isn’t, nor how long he’s been off his meds: anyone who would do that is evil, not sick.

And as far as I’m concerned, the lamestream media can go take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut. Is that crazy enough for ya, MSNBC?