My Turn: We need to get the conversation about gun violence right Posted on October 16, 2019 Peter Evers, for the Concord Monitor published: 10/14/2019 Mental illness occurs in any given society at exactly the same rate – about 5% of the population. That proportion is roughly the same throughout the world, whether in China or Papua New Guinea or the United States. So, why is it then that so many make the assumption that mass shootings are perpetrated by people with mental illness? The story is complex and far more political than those who stigmatize mental illness would lead us to believe. As the CEO of Riverbend Community Mental Health and the vice president of Behavioral Health at Concord Hospital, I work on both the acute side and preventive side of mental health. On a daily basis, community mental health centers across this country provide services for people with severe mental illness that helps them live, work, love and thrive in their communities. Many of them are working in competitive jobs contributing to our local and national economies. This work is often hard, but thousands of employees do it every day and feel the real satisfaction of being part of an army of carers in the fight against stigma for people with mental illness. We still need to do more, but we have moved toward a culture of acceptance and understanding. Unfortunately, when Donald Trump pins a mass shooting on mental illness, he is reversing that hard-earned progress, causing more Americans to fear something they should not be afraid of. Rather than using hateful language like “monsters” and “crazy people,” he should recognize that the people of whom he speaks are the mothers, fathers and children. He might also pay attention to the inequities that exist for people who struggle with mental illness, such as parity of treatment in health care, holding insurance companies accountable to paying for care, and diversion of people with mental illness away from the criminal justice system into care and treatment. I want to be very clear: Mental illness is not a public safety issue. It is a public health issue, and our society should treat it as such by investing in care and treatment – not in punishment or prisons. The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s imprisoned people. Eighty percent of those people have a behavioral health disorder, whether that be mental illness or addiction, and 20% of those are imprisoned directly because of their disease. We can and must do better than this, especially when mental illness treatment works and is more effective than most other chronic disease treatments such as diabetes. I believe we need to have a realistic conversation about gun ownership in the light of the statistics and the evidence that is available that allows us as human beings to decide what is in the best interest of this country. Here are those statistics: There are more guns than people in the United States (390 million guns vs. 320 million people); the United States has a higher rate of violent gun deaths than any other developed country; and many experts estimate that there are over 10 million assault weapons in circulation. Donald Trump and the gun lobby are wrong to blame mental illness. The true culprits are our lax gun laws and the lack of political courage to make the changes we need. We need to have a conversation about an assault weapons ban, red flag laws and background checks to make sure that those weapons are not in the hands of people who really shouldn’t have them. We need to have a conversation about those laws – a conversation rooted in public safety rather than the rights of individuals to own as many guns as they wish, including weapons of war. To make real progress, now more than ever, we need brave leaders. We need leaders who are willing to make a statement about assault weapons and common-sense laws, even if it puts their political future on the line. It’s that kind of bravery that will bring the change that we all need. This conversation is too important not to have. We cannot keep waiting until the next atrocity to rekindle desire to change, only to see it extinguished by special interest groups. Lives are literally on the line. We need to be thoughtful, and we need to get it right. (Peter Evers is the CEO of Riverbend Community Mental Health.)
