Fort Hood shooter was Iraq vet being treated for mental health issues
I am sorry for the people lost in this tragic accident.
That being said, this is another example of how the media portrays mental illness. Tomorrow, everyone with a mental illness will be looked at in a different light by people who don’t have mental illness themselves. I not saying your mother, brother, wife, or child. I am talking about the “world” view.
I wish in cases like these, they tell you what mental illness is, how it can affect a person’s mind and life. I wish they would let us talk.
Bipolar, Unemployed & Lost 
Perhaps if mental health were a topic covered in health class rather than psychology… However I think the problem isn’t so much that we as those who suffer don’t have a voice or aren’t allowed to be heard, it’s that we’re afraid to stand up and stand out. I’ll admit it; I blog anonymously because my boss doesn’t know. The stigma has pushed me into hiding. It is cooler to be homosexual than bipolar these days because people who are gay continue to collectively fight back in the war for social standing. At some point we must concede that in a democracy the group without power is not the group with the weakest arsenal, but the group with the weakest organizational skills.
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I agree to some extent. Using ‘mental illness’ as a vague, pejorative term is simply unacceptable. If the newspapers handled race in the same why (“A non-white gunman..blahblah”) then they would be subject to an instant backlash from the bleeding hearts out there. Challenging Mental Illness Stigma is one part of the battle, the other is that children need to be educated about Mental Illness very early in highschool.
When you have figures like “1 in 4” in certain countries for people dealing with depression in a year, and suicide as the leading cause of youth mortality it seems absolutely ridiculous to me that Mental Illness is still only dealt with after the fact. It takes someone being suicidal or murderous before their illness is given any credibility. Before that the issue is swept under the carpet completely in most cases.
Making public noise and forcing the pedagogists to implement a curriculum which has pertinent information about the various forms of mental illness that a huge portion of the population suffer with has to be the way forward. Kids are forced to learn things which have very little relevance to most peoples’ lives and yet allowed to live a life where terms like “Schizophrenic” and “manic depressive” are just insults rather than medical terms used to describe life threatening illnesses.
All the best,
H&J
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