One of the first places people and the press go to when the tragedy of a mass shooting occurs is “was the shooter mentally ill?” as if that would magically explain away all of their motivations, environment, upbringing and recent events that led to the killing. First off, I have to disclose, I am no expert on mass killers. I’m not even an expert on mass-shooting events.
What I am, is mentally ill. I have Bi-polar II, the form of Bi-Polar that is essentially one long, bad depressive trip where you mostly feel emotionally dead, with brief blips of happy energy that might last a few days or even hours, with months-long depressions, then it’s back to what I like to call the “Neutral Zone” of next to no emotion. That part can last for years. I’ve been called Spock by people for it. :-p I also have a form of OCD, Generalized Anxiety that centres on social situations, Panic attacks, and Chronic PTSD stemming from extreme physical and sexual abuse as a child.
What I am is a survivor of brutal bullying of the kind that has sent kids like this boy into the murderous spree we saw the other day. What I am not?
Is a mass-murderer.
Those are incredibly rare among the mentally ill, and it grows tiresome, incredibly tiresome to have the press, and virtually everyone I hear talking about events like this, say, “The killer was a mentally ill person. He HAD to have been, to do something like this...” We’re vanishingly non-violent. Something like 5% of people who have mental illness of all kinds will commit a violent act, let alone a murderous one.
To be clear, yes, the person pulling the trigger is a monster: we need sensible gun-laws, NOW.
Roughly 26% of the population of the United States has a diagnosed mental illness of some sort, mostly various forms of depression and anxiety. 26% Let that sink in. That means slightly more than 1 in 5. That means YOU KNOW SOMEONE CLOSE TO YOU WHO HAS A MENTAL ILLNESS. They could be a friend, a co-worker, your significant other, a family-member.
That’s just those who have diagnoses. Let THAT sink in for a minute.
Almost none of them will raise a hand to another, let alone a gun.
To use mental-illness as a catch-all for “spree-killer” just makes all of us with mental-illness sit out here and go “Greta, here we go again, the so-called ‘healthy’ ones get to say we’re all monsters again...”
No, the monsters are the people who would do these kinds of things, and they aren’t always suffering any kind of mental-illness or break. Sometimes, they’re weirdly “normal” in the ways so many of us define normal: quiet, unassuming, generally follow the law, don’t make a fuss, dress and act like everyone else around them, don’t step outside of acceptable norms in terms of common behaviours.
About bullying. What I experienced was vicious, it was brutal. It was mobbing of the sort you’d expect from fucking Lord of the Flies. It was the kind of thing that killed Piggy in the story. I have physical scars from it. I also have Chronic PTSD from that and from physical and sexual abuse at home, but that’s another diary—let’s just say I had no “safe space” and my childhood was hell. I literally had no friends at all because of the bullies and the mobs.
I fought back, of course, few would just take what I was being given. I was fighting for my life. I believed these assholes were going to kill me. I fully believed that, being neurodivergent, mixed-race, creative, “strange” and just too stubborn about my sense of self for these racist little monsters to handle. I got into a lot of trouble for the fights, always being blamed for them and being put at fault, even though, to anyone with a brain, five to ten kids swarming one who was keeping to themselves and practically screaming, “Leave me the fuck alone, I never did anything to you!” should have been a clue something was not up to snuff, here. But, they never got it. Not once. Sometimes, adults can be incredibly stupid.
I fantasized a lot about killing them all, often in horrific ways. Knives, mostly, but I liked teeth and claws, too. I loved vampire and werewolf movies and would see myself as the monster, finding them and tearing them apart for what they did to me. No one else, just them. No “collateral damage”. I fantasized about killing my parents, too—they were violent to me, as well, and I hated them as much as I hated the bullies. Really, they were no different: they called me names, they slapped me around, pulled my hair, left bruises, told me I was worthless, mocked me when I made mistakes—how were they any different, other than they were adults?
To the bullies...
Other than that I really didn’t like hurting people—it made me feel vaguely nauseous, frankly—Canada is a nation where it’s really difficult in which to get weapons. I was also rock-bottom poor, and I had no fucking clue where I’d get gun, even if I’d thought to get such a thing. I also despised loud noises of the banging variety with a passion (I loved drums, though).
I could just see it now, the headline: “Winnipeg saw a horrific knife massacre today...” Seriously, it’s really hard to get your mass-murder on with a baseball bat, some chain, a flip-knife and really harsh language. I mean, c’mon. (I read that in Robin William’s voice and actually chuckled.)
A quick note about addiction, as there are reports about the shooter’s mother apparently being an addict of some sort (to what, I don’t know, yet). I’m from a family of addicts, too. Yay! The trifecta! My mother is an alcoholic—sober these last twenty-five years or more, but an alcoholic. She wasn’t sober when I was a kid and that was a problem. She was a secret drinker, mostly on the weekends. Her life, up to that point, had been it’s own form of hell, (abuse in her history as well), and booze was her ticket out. She did all the classics: she hid her booze, denied her drinking, she’d steal money and rationalize it, she’s blow up out of nowhere over ridiculously minor shit, slap me around for simply expressing my own very real frustrations in normal healthy ways… like frowning...
Rambling back to my point… Mental illness wasn’t this shooter’s problem. Being bullied wasn’t this kid’s problem. Lack of resources to get help wasn’t this kid’s problem. His family situation, shitty as it was, with all the red flags I’ve read about, with the addictions, fights with his mother, regular police presence and so on, wasn’t this kid’s problem.
All-too-easy access to guns that he used to “solve” his problems? THAT’S the problem.
Laying the blame on mental illness is an easy scapegoat, even though it may have been a factor. Bullying is another easy scapegoat, even though it may have been a factor in this boy’s spiral down into darkness. His broken home situation, one so many of us have experienced is also an easy out for laying blame. What we all forget, is that these people who go out, grab a gun and make their way to a location to shoot the place up, are as complex as any other human being. We’re trying to figure out why they’re doing such a heinous thing, but we fail and drop into the simple explanations.
It’s never one simple explanation. It’s going to be a muddy mess of that guy’s life process: everything that person has experienced and lived. Everything that went into making them who they are, and maybe mental illness is in there, maybe not.
Yes, the ingredient labeled “bullying” was in the mix. The boy had it. He was ostracised and isolated. So was I. I sometimes hated it. Other times I didn’t care. I’d say mental illness in the form of PTSD may have been in the mix, too, but more likely, this was a “blow-out” in the form of rage. Though why he didn’t go after those who actually bullied him has never made sense to me. But then, I’m not a killer with an axe to grind.
Some think this was a suicide-run. His way of going out in a “blaze of glory”. Sad way to go, in my opinion, just a day or so after his birthday. Sad to think that you believe your life is such shit that you feel you have to take a bunch of fourth-graders with you on the way out.
I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist. I’m not a professional anything. I’m just an unemployed clothing-designer/artist with agonizingly-bunged up shoulders in physio-therapy trying to get back into some form of functionality so I can work again.
I have to admit that I do have some sympathy for this painfully-twisted young man. I was like him, once. Very much so. No friends, abusive home, addiction in the family, a series of disabilities that ostracised me, viciously bullied, constantly from day one in school, until the day I left… I’m left with mental and physical scars from it, and every time I hear of another tragedy like Uvalde, Texas, I wince, and think, “How did I manage not to be like that one? How did I do it? It would have been so easy for me to go that way, but I didn’t. Why?”
Painfully angry, hurting, with seemingly nowhere for that rage to go. So I put it into my writing—you don’t wanna read the shit from those days, it’s pretty whiny! And some AWFUL Goth poetry. LOL, and into my art. I let my work drain it out of me. I’d go for long walks by the river to soak up nature. I’d make funky costumes—Post-Apocalyptic being a favourite theme. Heh, still is, really. Going to a Con this next week-end, actually, so I’m getting my costumes ready.
That boy didn’t have anywhere healthy for his anger and pain to go. He had no one to talk to, no apparent support-system, just like I didn’t, when I was younger. I’m a creative, so I made a place for my anger. I had to make do with what I could create on my own, just to survive. I came close to suicide, twice, but I’ve made it, so far.
I’m not really sure where this diary is going, at this point, just that using the easy outs of “Oh, he has a mental illness”, and “He was bullied” are bullshit excuses. It’s a cop out. It’s the guns. So I’ll just end it here:
GET RID OF THE FUCKING GUNS. GET THEM OFF THE STREETS. WE HAVE TOO MANY GUNS IN THIS COUNTRY IN EVERYONE’S HANDS. RIGHT HANDS, WRONG HANDS, THAT PART OF THE “DISCUSSION” DOESN’T MATTER, ANYMORE. JUST. GET. RID. OF THEM.
STOP SACRIFICING OUR KIDS TO THIS MONSTER.
