Mental Health: Talk About It.

By:  Sweet Jane St. ClairI've ignored much of the internet this weekend because of how upsetting all of the events related to Friday's horrific tragedy are. I've tried to form an opinion over what's been going on. Here's the best I can come up with.

I grew up in a house with guns. A lot of guns, actually. I learned how to use them, maintain them, and clean them properly. My dad taught me how to make bullets in our garage. I remember helping him from a very young age. I plan on keeping guns when I have my own place some day. I've never turned a gun on any person, and never plan to. As such, guns are clearly not the only issue at play here.

On top of this, however, my mother in particular taught me how mental illness is a serious issue that gets ignored. People with mental illnesses are invisible in our society, and the services available to them are poorly funded and few at best. My parents volunteered with one of these services in our home town. They taught me what is important in life. Care. It is really easy right now to talk about gun control, and I won't pretend it's not an important topic. But please, please, please, take some time today to think about how you can help to improve the state of mental health care for the people around you. If we as a nation and as a broader society spend as much time *talking* about mental illness and services for mental illness as openly and as often as we talk about gun control, we may see an improvement in the lives of so many people around us.

So yes, please talk about the victims. Please remember them. Respect their families and the grief they are dealing with and will deal with for the rest of their lives. But I can't agree with further making mental illness invisible. We make mental illness invisible by boiling this horrific tragedy down to an issue of gun control, the Second Amendment, or the Long Gun Registry. We make mental illness invisible by projecting our own mental state onto others without knowing theirs, assuming they would make the same choice as you, or assuming you would ever be in the same position as them with the mental state that you possess. We make mental illness invisible through individual pathology while neglecting the systemic criticism necessary to destroy the stigma, and improve/multiply services and awareness around mental health. We make mental illness invisible by ignoring the fact that there are mentally ill people who do things that hurt. I've seen so many "motivational posters" that use images of people with disabilities - mental or physical - talking about overcoming challenges, always remaining positive, what beautiful people these are, and other such stereotypes. Disability and mental illness do not exist only when they are convenient to post about on your status in a way that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy about yourself. It exists when it sucks, when it hurts, and when it damages. The point is, it exists. We need to treat it that way.

Feel free to dissect or denounce my argument here, or elsewhere, and everywhere. Hang me out to dry if you would like. But please, talk about it. Talk about it often, loudly, and critically. While you do that, here's how you can get involved in some of the services around you:

http://www.carp.ca/2012/04/10/the-centre-for-addiction-and-mental-health-camh/

But, seriously, why can't we just shoot all the rapists?

The following is cross-posted from the Damsel in de Tech blog. Click here to see the original.


*CONTENT WARNING FOR DISCUSSIONS OF RAPE AND GUN VIOLENCE*

As a follow-up to the post "Kill all rapists!...", here are some practical considerations to take into account when trying to tell women that they all should arm themselves as a method of rape-prevention.

To start off, here are some quick groups that armament won't help, that I really don't think need any further clarification (or least I sincerely hope not):
- infants and children below the age that are legally able to carry firearms
- persons with disabilities that prevent them from being able to handle a firearm
- persons with mental health issues that would make possession of a firearm exceptionally unsafe and irresponsible

I hope we can agree that persons from those groups should not have to arm themselves. Unfortunately, those groups make up a large portion of the victims of sexual violence.

Next, there are some people who may not want to have firearms:
- pacifists who do not believe in responding with violence under any circumstances, including those whose religious beliefs dictate such
- parents who are afraid their young children may get a hold of their weapons
- persons with abusive partners that have not been able to move out and have reasonable fears around keeping weapons in the household
- persons who are not comfortable around guns due to a history of family violence, PTSD, having lost a loved one to gun violence, or any other of a million valid reasons

Now that we've got those groups out of the way, we'll assume that the advice of "carry a gun" is just being directed at this time towards women who are old enough to legally own and responsibly handle a firearm, who want to carry a firearm, and who can conceivably arm themselves at all times because of the particular gun laws where they live.

Let's say that I'm walking through an alley (I know, I know - why would I do that if I value my safety and vagina?) Let's just say that there's construction on the street and all foot-traffic is being diverted through the alley. Let's say I hear footsteps coming up quickly behind me.  I'm armed, I'm alarmed, and someone grabs my arm! I turn and fire off a bunch of shots into... a nun who was trying to return the wallet I dropped. Well, that was a justifiable homicide, right?

Ok, let's be more serious. Let's say that I'm on the subway and it's later at night, maybe around 8 or 9pm, and this far up on the line it's deserted except for me and a man who is staring at me. His stares are making me quite uncomfortable, so I try to keep myself occupied by reading Facebook on my phone. Then, I realize he's masturbating. Can I shoot him, yet? Do I have to wait to see if he approaches me? If I wait, am I just giving him signals that he's safe to assault me because he's already violated my boundaries and I haven't done anything about it?

How about I'm at a house party and a friend is drunk and being really overly friendly and handsy with me. She pulls me in for a kiss, even though I've been trying to keep her at bay all night. Do I shoot her now? Do I wait until she tries to stick her hand down my pants? And if she does, is that enough to shoot her? Or am I only supposed to be shooting men? And what if it's a woman sexually assaulting a man? Can he shoot her? Is this just the kind of protective violence we sanction in theory coming from straight ciswomen to straight cismen, or can people of any gender identity shoot anyone else who attacks them without concern for how the law sees them?

Let's say that I'm fast asleep in bed at home and I wake up and my husband of 20 years is having sex with me in my sleep? Can I casually reach over into the nightstand and grab my gun and shoot him? Do we run drills like we would fire drills so I can practice going throught the motions of shooting someone when suddenly woken up out of a dead sleep?

What if it's a Thursday afternoon and I'm catcalled on my way home from work? Can I shoot the catcaller in the face? I don't know if I ignore him or respond if he'll react with anger. I don't know if this interaction will escalate. I don't know if I'm in physical danger or if he just wants to spook and publicly humiliate me. How long do I have to wait to make sure?

What line has to be crossed before I get the go-ahead?

What threshold has to be met in order for me to shoot any of the people who make me sexually threatened in the course of a day or a week or a month or my lifetime?

Do I have to wait until it's "too late" and they've already penetrated me? How is carrying a gun then a prevention measure as opposed to a measure of vegeance and inhilliation afterthefact?

Does the advice of "carry a gun and shoot all rapists" have anything at all to do with a realistic notion of safety, or is it a gratifying way for people to feel like they're adding something constructive to the conversation without having to do any of the heavy-lifting of understanding how rape happens?

I don't know if the people who give the advice of "carry a gun and shoot all rapists" know how often women feel sexually threatened. The thing about sexual violence, is it's a part of a continuum of unwanted sexual behaviours, and we never know whether or to what degree it will escalate. That's not because we're not aware of our surroundings, or we're inexperienced, etc. It's because the degree of escalation is not up to us - it's up to the perpetrator.

Things like peeping, public masturbation, groping, breaking and entering, etc, can all be a pre-cursor to more extreme levels of sexual violence. Or the perpetrators may not escalate. The people they target do not know whether or not this will escalate, because we are not psychic.

If you really, sincerely think that giving a good number of the population access to and permission to use lethal weapons against people who they fear will rape them, then be prepared for a lot of bloodshed, because these transgressions against our physical boundaries happen to a lot of people on a regular basis.

Or, you can passing along some tangible, effective safety advice that can start working right now, today, towards reducing the instances of sexual violence, and that doesn't require people to kill each other.