Since we are in the business of saving the world

And this isn’t a pleasant topic, but one that needs discussing. I thought I would take the opportunity presented to me today because of the active shooter situation in downtown Dallas to talk about this topic. And right now we do not know much, so speculation is dangerous, but there are people talking he may have struggled with some sort of mental illness.

So not saying anything about whether he may have suffered with some type of illness just thought I would touch on the topic.

And everyone ignores this like they do the dust bunny underneath the couch. No one wants to pick up and move the couch to remove it.

No no no, don’t let the neighbors know about Johnny cause you know how they talk.

Oh yes, Mary is the quiet type isn’t she, we really do not mind she stays indoors allllll the time.

Billy is just imaginative, he really doesn’t mean what he says.

We hide behind cliches and ignorance hoping that awful truth isn’t in our family. It is better to lie to ourselves than admit our children ain’t right. Why?

Stigma is a well known reason, we, as a society, cannot accept mental illness.

We can spend billions on medicines that only cure thousands of symptoms, but never find cures for anything. Think about how many times you watch a commercial for a drug that is to help you with some illness you never even heard before. And that is what we do with mental illness. We do not want to confront the reality so we developed antipsychotics or mood stabilizers or anti- depressants or a host of other medicines to treat the symptoms. Yet we never spend the resources to do the research. Why?

We are scared. It goes back to stigma. Politicians aren’t going to talk about spending money on mental illness. It is a specialty field in medicine that many doctors cannot understand, nor get help.

We threw the mentally ill on the streets in the 80’s and left them there because no one wants to make the effort to find them much less help them.

And then we developed a pop psychology where every little quirk known to man is now given a name. We label everything and act like we have accomplished something. This makes it even harder for people to separate quirks and idiosyncrasies from real mental health problems. People see the broad definition of mental illness “professionals” like Dr. Phil and think this is the extent of the problem. And they never receive the information on the real problems some people face. Sure we hear the terms schizophrenia or a biochemical imbalance and oohhh we hear scary stories. Stay away is the message.

When in fact we are overdue in going towards the problems. We cannot hide behind closed doors anymore or lock someone away and let the County pay for it until they get back on their “meds” and we can let them out with the rest of us. Again we are a symptom driven society. We spend fortunes on blocking the symptoms in every aspect of our health so mental health is not going to be different.

We need to be different for our regular health and for our mental health. Some mental illnesses are recognizable such as depression, but we avoid people who are depressed. So we develop an assortment of TV medicines so everyone feels better including the people who are depressed and the people who do not want to put up with them. Yet we are not different. We eat pain-killers to feel better. We eat psycho-trobic drugs to feel better. We eat candy to feel better. Our health care in general is based on us feeling better, not being better.

So to actually put forth ideas instead of complaining, we need to address mental illness head on.

The AMA should be charged with a great amount of resources to develop grants throughout the various medical fields to study root causes of mental illness. This work is already being done to a degree in certain communities. We need to move it to the forefront of medical science like Cancer and Alzheimers. People do not die from mental illness like they do from cancer. They do die inside or just as bad someone else is hurt because we are not attentive enough to the problem.

There are heart disease foundations. There are cancer foundations. There are kidney foundations. There are alzheimer's foundations. They advertise on TV all the time.

There is no mental illness foundation that receives the support it needs to reach out to the public for help. Why?

Stigma. We need our political leaders to stand up and say, this is bad we need to do something about it, instead of this is bad God forbid am I going to say anything about it. We need the medical community to stand up and demand the help they need to study mental health and make it the same priority as other debilitating diseases.

What is funny I am wanting to type we cannot be afraid of our fears. Which is true. Our fears of the stigma make the whole problem worse because we are afraid someone will think less of us if we even mention the slightest inclination of a mental health problem. In a way we need a pop psychologist to come up with a term for being paranoid of being paranoid. I am not researching it right now, but I feel confident someone did.

So where does all this leave us? Right now nowhere, but somewhere tonight a family is suffering, a family is searching for a lost loved one, a family is lost in a lack of communication about what to do, a person roams the streets, a person is contemplating suicide, a person doesn’t speak to anyone, a child misses a parent that is sitting right in front of them, a person is scared, a person is chasing windmills in their mind, a person’s mind is eating away at their very soul, some sit in institutions because we cannot do more, some have demons driving them to actions no one can understand, and the rest of us are sitting here avoiding the whole discussion, hoping upon hope that one of those demons doesn’t drive that person into our life.

Unfortunately today that might have happened. One young man is dead, one family struggles and mourns, and by the grace of God, no other person was injured. It may have been different or we should hope it may have been different because his family would have understood better years ago and have him this evening. Right now we do not know because we do not want to know. Better to feel better than be better. Less damn effort.

Doing what is right is never easy, but will make the world easier once it is accomplished.

Take care all.