Part II: How We Talk About Mental Illness Is Racist
Talking about mental illness usually is not a priority for most of us. Unless we live with mental illness or a loved one does, we simply don’t discuss it. We don’t even think about it.
We especially ignore the mental health of people of color, and we should be talking about their mental health. As we saw in Part I of this series, people of color often struggle to find adequate mental health care. We should focus our efforts on how to improve mental health and mental health care for them.
But whose mental health do we focus? White people.
We’re overcome with sympathy and sadness for white celebrities who commit suicide. We post on social media. We urge those who are struggling to just “get help.” We claim that “our door is always open” and “someone is always listening.”
We are not listening to people of color. We are not supporting people of color. We are not including people of color in the discussion about mental health.
This focus on white celebrities shows how much we dehumanize people of color. We mourn those people as if they’re our personal friends, but where is our grief when people of color kill themselves?
Why don’t we care about Indigenous children dying in suicide pacts? In 2016, the small community of Attawapiskat First Nation declared a state of emergency after more than 100 people attempted suicide in just seven months — 11 of them in a single day, including children as young as 11 years old.
Why aren’t we devastated when black activists commit suicide? Or when black children aged 5–11 take their own lives? Their suicide rate has almost doubled in recent years. Why don’t we care?
The deaths we do grieve speak volumes about which groups we show compassion. How we talk about “just reaching out and getting help” in the wake of these tragedies is also a white-centered perspective. For people of color, who face extra challenges when trying to get adequate mental health care, “just getting help” isn’t so simple.
We’re concerned about mental illness when a white man goes on a killing rampage. We don’t want to believe a white man could simply be a horrible person who decided to kill innocent people. We look for any explanation to make sense of his actions. We use mental illness as a convenient excuse.
And it’s just an excuse. 75% of mass shooters have no diagnosable mental illness. For those who do, the disorder did not play a part in their decision to commit murder. In fact, “less than 5% of all gun-related killings in the United States were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.”
The way we jump to excuse white murderers says a lot about our willingness to constantly give white people the benefit of the doubt.
When a person of color commits a crime, white people don’t think about their mental health. We label them terrorists and criminals and use the incident as an excuse to discriminate against every other member of that racial or religious group.
When a white person commits a horrific crime, white people aren’t lumped in with them. We use “mental illness” to distance ourselves. No one assumes that, because we’re white, we’re more likely to commit mass murders. Our concern about white criminals’ mental health allows us the privilege of distance. It’s not the same for people of color.
Finally, we use mental illness as an excuse for racism. When a white person goes on a bigoted rant or spews hateful ideas, we decide that person must suffer from a mental disorder. What we really mean is they’re a bad person, a racist.
We use mental illness as an excuse. We don’t address the real problem — that white people allow racist (and sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and xenophobic) behavior to continue.
How can we say racism is a form of mental illness, yet allow it to be socially acceptable?
We allow people we know to be racist even in positions of power. We allow racist comments and slurs to go unchecked and laugh at racist jokes at work or family gatherings — and it never costs us our friends or jobs.
We inflict this cruelty on people of color as we perpetuate bigotry and hate. Then we excuse it as mental illness. Distancing ourselves in this way allows us to claim that we, as normal healthy people, are not racist (because only someone “mentally ill” would say or do such horrible things) while letting racist behavior by our white family, friends, and co-workers go unchecked.
Crueler still, by excusing racism as mental illness in white people, we ignore and erase the way racism causes mental illness in people of color. We fret about the mental health of racist ranters and forget to worry about the victims of these rants.
We don’t talk about how living with constant racial oppression and fear of violence impacts the mental health of people of color. We ignore the ways in which allowing a racist to be elected President and employing racists in our police force, judicial system, schools, and hospitals threatens not only the mental health but the lives of people of color.
Our conversations about mental health perpetuate racial biases and harm. We are too sad, too excusing, too concerned about the mental illness of white people, and we dehumanize and neglect the mental health problems more likely to affront people of color.
White people need to stop talking about mental illness when we really should be talking about racism.
We should cultivate sympathy for people of color suffering from mental illness and stop using speculation about mental illness as a way to distance ourselves from racism.
Instead, we must start listening to people of color — and talking about the serious threats to their mental health.
Part I: Families of Color Face Challenges when Seeking Treatment for Mental Illness
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