A friend asked a really good question regarding a lot of recent horrific crimes. I won’t share their name, in case they don’t want to be mentioned, but their question was: “For those of us who are trying to get better (with mental illness) how do we go about telling people that some people who have mental illness are not scary or out there to kill other people.”

This was my response.

Well, I think the first problem is clumping all mental illnesses into the one category of ‘mental illness’. There are SO MANY different types of illnesses that people suffer through. What’s sad is they aren’t clear on what exactly these people were suffering from and just say “suffered from mental illness” … well, 99% of Americans suffer from some type of mental illness, whether they want to admit or not. How many people suffer from Anxiety? That is considered a mental illness. Maybe Anxious people murder too, I really don’t know the statistics on that, but my gut says these people’s ‘illnesses’ were a lot worse than just anxiety. Know what I mean? The news needs to be clearer and not just start tossing around generic words to cover a whole spectrum of things.

Problem with the news (and there are lots of them, but this is just one), is that they never really get down to the root of things. They give you ‘fluff’ to sell their stories, get more clicks. The ROOT is where the real story is, and it’s not until WEEKS later that you find out the whole story about a horrific killing … but which news company wants to wait WEEKS to get the right story, when they can spout out 10 catchy words that don’t really encompass the full scope of a story and all that it actually entails. It’s sickening and I think that’s why humanity is falling into the pits and the news only encourages it further. Stop giving these sickos their 10 minutes of fame and clumping them all under one generic ‘mental illness’ heading.