You want real change to stop gun violence?

Content/TW: Liberal profanity (including many f-words), gun violence, institutions, police violence, racism, ableism. 

Photo: Hand-drawn cartoon of a hand holding a gun, and another person's hand putting the index finger down the barrel of the gun.

You want real change to stop gun violence? 

Stop throwing people of color and psych disabled people under the fucking bus.

I received an email yesterday from President Obama's White House Office of Public Engagement outlining his new set of executive orders (to be announced in full later today, along with the parent of one of the children killed in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut) on stopping gun violence. 

The email notes the following orders (necessary context, and you're welcome, to everyone wondering what the orders say since they haven't been totally public yet as of time of posting): 

[long quote begin]

Ensure States are providing records to the background check system, and work cooperatively with jurisdictions to improve reporting.   Congress has prohibited specific categories of people from buying guns—from convicted felons to users of illegal drugs to individuals convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence. 

 ... 

The Administration is committed to improving care for Americans experiencing mental health issues.  In the last seven years, our country has made extraordinary progress in expanding mental health coverage for millions of Americans.  This includes the Affordable Care Act’s end to insurance company discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, required coverage of mental health and substance use disorder services in the individual and small group markets, and an expansion of mental health and substance use disorder parity policies, all of which are estimated to help more than 60 million Americans.  About 13.5 million more Americans have gained Medicaid coverage since October 2013, significantly improving access to mental health care.  And thanks to more than $100 million in funding from the Affordable Care Act, community health centers have expanded behavioral health services for nearly 900,000 people nationwide over the past two years.  We must continue to remove the stigma around mental illness and its treatment—and make sure that these individuals and their families know they are not alone.  While individuals with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, incidents of violence continue to highlight a crisis in America’s mental health system.  In addition to helping people get the treatment they need, we must make sure we keep guns out of the hands of those who are prohibited by law from having them.  Today, the Administration is announcing the following steps to help achieve these goals:

Dedicate significant new resources to increase access to mental health care.  Despite our recent significant gains, less than half of children and adults with diagnosable mental health problems receive the treatment they need.  To address this, the Administration is proposing a new $500 million investment to help engage individuals with serious mental illness in care, improve access to care by increasing service capacity and the behavioral health workforce, and ensure that behavioral health care systems work for everyone.  This effort would increase access to mental health services to protect the health of children and communities, prevent suicide, and promote mental health as a top priority.   

Include information from the Social Security Administration in the background check system about beneficiaries who are prohibited from possessing a firearm.   Current law prohibits individuals from buying a gun if, because of a mental health issue, they are either a danger to themselves or others or are unable to manage their own affairs.  The Social Security Administration (SSA) has indicated that it will begin the rulemaking process to ensure that appropriate information in its records is reported to NICS.  The reporting that SSA, in consultation with the Department of Justice, is expected to require will cover appropriate records of the approximately 75,000 people each year who have a documented mental health issue, receive disability benefits, and are unable to manage those benefits because of their mental impairment, or who have been found by a state or federal court to be legally incompetent.  The rulemaking will also provide a mechanism for people to seek relief from the federal prohibition on possessing a firearm for reasons related to mental health.

Remove unnecessary legal barriers preventing States from reporting relevant information to the background check system.  Although States generally report criminal history information to NICS, many continue to report little information about individuals who are prohibited by Federal law from possessing or receiving a gun for specific mental health reasons.  Some State officials raised concerns about whether such reporting would be precluded by the Privacy Rule issued under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Today, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a final rule expressly permitting certain HIPAA covered entities to provide to the NICS limited demographic and other necessary information about these individuals.

[long quote end]

Obama, you need to stop throwing psych disabled people into the sniper's crosshairs of political expediency. Your order urges the public not to add stigma to mental illness and people who have mental health related conditions or psych disabilities, yet its very substance directly contradicts this purported objective. Your order relies on stigma and fear around psychiatric disability, mental illness, madness, and neurodivergence by including this very section, let alone including it as part of your goal to keep guns "out of the wrong hands." 

I'm all for gun control in theory, but here's some cold, hard reality that you clearly need to swallow. 

(1) You can criminalize guns, but look how well that works with drugs. If someone really wants to get their hands on a gun, it won't matter whether they are legally able to obtain the gun or not; they will find a way to obtain the gun themself or through another person. 

(2) Your executive orders and virtually all policy proposals on the topic rely on background checks as the means for controlling gun purchases and ownership, regulating gun possession, and monitoring gun owners. As numerous other people have already discussed at length, background checks rely on arrest and conviction records, which mean that those who will be precluded from gun ownership (as you yourself already noted) are disproportionately Black and Brown people, since that is the demographic most likely to be impacted by the criminal (in)justice system.  

(3) Your executive order announcement here is waffling between emphasizing the importance of your mental health bullshit and apologetically trying to disclaim involvement by resorting to, "Well, we have to keep guns out of the hands of those legally prohibited from owning them by reason of mental illness." So are you doing it because you genuinely believe it's the right thing to do, based on your ableist, sanist prejudices against neurodivergent and psych disabled people, or are you doing it because the law so requires? And if the law so requires, why not consider that sometimes sorry, not sorry, most a ridiculously huge amount of the time, the law is fucking unjust and dependent on the same fucking systems of oppression and their underlying assumptions and values.

(4) Your executive order apologetically mentions that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims than perpetrators, but then goes right on ahead blazing into its scapegoating, business as usual. Stop. 

Some people with mental illness do violent things, including using guns in violent crimes. Plenty of people with absolutely no mental illness whatsoever also do violent things. Putting mental health into this conversation AT ALL is evidence of deeply rooted, ingrained, and thoroughly unexamined ableism. It is irrelevant. 

The relevant thing to be focusing on is actual violence and its actual causes. Not whatever scary scapegoat you want to pin it on so you can avoid critical discussions of the real problems in this country. 

(5) Your executive orders will require various federal agencies to ensure that states' can more easily share private health information about people with psych disabilities by creating specific exemptions to HIPAA. 

(For those who don't know what HIPAA is, it's the law that protects your private health information from the prying minds of anyone who randomly wants to know what STI's or STD's you have, when you've ever been prescribed psychiatric meds, etc. etc. etc. It's the law that makes sure your employers can't discriminate against you based on your health history by protecting your information. It's the law that for many people with psych disabilities, lived experience of mental health conditions, and others who have survived traumas, means that seeking any kind of services, supports, treatments, or therapies can become possible -- precisely because it protects against external judgment steeped in pervasive ableist stigma.)

You can't have it both ways, wanting to improve mental health services and also weaken the HIPAA protections that can prevent many kinds of discrimination, abuse, and exploitation. 

(6) Do we need improvement in mental health care? As a disabled advocate with pretty significant public policy experience, especially at my tender age, abso-fucking-lutely yes. Our system for mental health care service models and delivery is seriously fucked up. And that's the most polite way I can put it. We one hundred percent need better services, better quality services, more accessible services, more multiculturally competent services, more affordable services. Enforcement of the mental health parity law. Strengthening of network adequacy, especially in lower income and rural areas. Significant, vast improvements in services and care available for queer and trans folk. Et cetera. 

But that conversation does not belong in a conversation about gun violence. It is a separate conversation that deserves full time and attention, not to be inserted into this conversation as a placeholder for addressing actual underlying issues of widespread gun violence in this country.

(7) You don't specify what kind of care or services you'll be funding, so, excuse me if I'm skeptical, but I have a hard time believing you mean anything other than coercive, involuntary treatment along the lines of Murphy's proposal.

I keep hearing criminal justice reform advocates talk about how some people need treatment, not jail. Sounds great in theory, but institutions are just medical incarceration.

No thank you to ableist confinement and paternalism in the name of public safety over bodily autonomy and dignity.

If you want a conversation on mental health care, let's talk about disparities in access for rural people, for immigrants. For queer and trans people. For people of color. For other disabled people. Let's talk about the duplicitous nature of group homes with institutional environments. Let's talk about the insidious nature of guardianship -- "civil death." Let's talk about the severe funding shortage for peer services and supports.

Where are those conversations? Please tell me and I'll happily join.

(8) You want to stop gun violence? Demilitarize the fucking police, because it's the police that murder Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, and disabled people in droves. It's the police that implement policies like broken windows policing and stop and frisk. Where's your real talk on gun violence coming from the police who are in theory supposed to serve and protect? Who are they really protecting? 

Who will your background control really protect? 

(9)  Here are some of the real issues in this country: Unchecked (trans)misogyny. White supremacy. Male entitlement. Toxic masculinity. Quasi-property status of children and youth. The presumptions of caregiver benelovence and disabled incompetence. 

Here's a thought: maybe start addressing these problems, and see if you can stop some gun violence. 

You wanted a conversation on how to #StopGunViolence? Sit down, shut up, and start taking notes. 

Psychopathy: Racism and Ableism from the Medical-Industrial Complex

Trigger warning/Content: Disability-related slurs and other ableist language, mention of rape, racism, and ableism.

Edit: In the original post, I neglected to ntion the connections between Antisocial Prsonality Disorder and Cnduct Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Dsorder, nd structural racism, sxism, and ableism. typos b/c eited from pphone.

Psychopathy: Racism and Ableism from the Medical-Industrial Complex

When we commit to examining our language and our ideas and deconstructing the ableism we find in them, we must make a full commitment, no partial or half-hearted commitments allowed. When we stop using "autistic" and "retarded" as insults, when we realize the urgent need to stop scapegoating mass murder and rape on "mental illness" and "emotional instability," when we learn to stop referring to our political opponents as "blind," "deaf," or "crippled" in their ideologies, we must also critically re-examine our use of the psychopathy label.

This constructed term of art does not in fact refer to an accepted diagnostic label in psychiatry or psychology. In the recently-replaced DSM-IV (the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the closest label was "Antisocial Personality Disorder," a diagnosis that still exists in the current DSM-5. The DSM-5 also contains the newly created diagnosis of Conduct Disorder. The diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder and Conduct Disorder come perhaps the closest to the lay definition for psychopathy that is usually intended when the term is invoked.

The lay definition for psychopathy typically goes like this:
Someone who has little or no empathy for other people and no real control over their behavior.

Psychopathy is usually invoked when referring to either

1. violent people, such as murderers, serial killers, school shooters, terrorists, or rapists, either by the mass media or by legal professionals, including prosecuting and defense attorneys, judges, sentencing advocates, probation and parole officers, and corrections officers and prison guards
2. other disabled people, such as autistics, people with mental health or psychiatric disabilities, or learning disabilities (though usually when a person in this group has been accused of or formally charged with a crime)
3. members of oppressive classes, such as wealthy people, cisgender men, or abled people, and especially when the member of the oppressive class is in a position of political power in addition to apolitical structural power

Yet, as noted before, psychopathy is not even a medical or psychiatric diagnosis. It doesn't exist in the DSM-IV nor does it exist in the DSM-5, and as much as I hate lending any further credence to the medical-industrial complex's state-sanctioned and socially-approved authority, this is important to recognize. Even the medical-industrial complex does not officially recognize psychopathy as a diagnosis. 

On the other hand, Antisocial Personality Disorder is recognized as a psychiatric diagnosis by the medical establishment. And who are the people typically diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder? They are overwhelmingly poor students of color who frequently have other disabilities. Antisocial Personality Disorder, the diagnostic category that comes closest to approximating the lay definition of "psychopathy," is a tool for criminalizing poverty, blackness and brownness, and disability. It is the diagnostic label to legitimize non-compliance as a mental health problem.

Refusal to take psychiatric medications? Non-compliant. Doing poorly in math class? Non-compliant. Stimming in public? Non-compliant.

If you are non-compliant, you are anti-social. You are mentally ill. You have Antisocial Personality Disorder. You are a psychopath.

The language of pathology, of mental illness, of disease, of disability, has long been used to reinforce existing structural oppressions like racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, binarism, cissexism, and ableism. I spoke at UC Berkeley this past Friday on the need to recognize and move beyond ableist metaphor. Ableist metaphor is all-pervasive in public discourse, in academia, in grassroots organizing, in progressive and radical movements as well as in conservative, neoliberal, and nationalist movements. Ableist metaphor draws on the language of disability to characterize, to denigrate, to attack, to rhetoricize, to politicize -- and it does so based on the presumption that deviation from typical thought, movement, emotional processing, communication, bodily/mental functioning, learning, remembering, sensing is evidence of defect, deficiency, disorder, and ultimately, moral failure. And if this is so, then it is certainly justifiable to refer to one's political opponents as blind or deaf to progressive ideas, or to refer to structures like capitalism or anarchy as social diseases, or to refer to violence visited either by individuals or oppressive systems as evidence of psychopathy.

To use psychopathy as the lens through which one views systemic or individual violence -- the violence of capitalism or patriarchy, for example, or the violence of a single serial killer or rapist -- is to reinforce the structural power of the medical-industrial complex, and to do so at the expense of disabled people, poor people, and people of color who have been victimized by the labels of non-compliant, anti-social, and psychopathic.

To defend the use of this term as medically accurate is to imply that you have knowledge that an individual has been medically assessed as and diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder or Conduct Disorder, which in itself, cedes control and power to the psychiatric establishment and the medical-industrial complex. It presumes personal medical knowledge, it reinforces the creative fictions of these diagnostic labels, and it enables the systems of violence that use the language of disability to pathologize and ultimately, to dehumanize.

Be precise in your language, and say that oppressive structures are violent and manipulative. Say that those who abuse their structural positions of power act with reckless disregard for other human beings. Say that they are callous and unabashedly wielding the power that comes with their privilege.

But don't call them psychopaths.

I've experienced enough ableism in my life to last me several lifetimes. I don't need fellow radicals feeding into ableism.

Halloween's Ableism Problem: The Commercialization of Disability Oppression and Mental Health Stigma

Trigger Warning: Direct quotes of ableist hate speech.
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Halloween's Ableism Problem

The Commercialization of Disability Oppression and Mental Health Stigma

A few weeks ago, I was asked to speak for Professor Sylvia Wing Önder's medical anthropology class on disability, neurodiversity, and stigma. During my presentation, I asked the students in the class to raise their hands if they had ever watched a crime drama or police serial on TV that portrayed a character explicitly identified as having a mental health or psychiatric disability, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, in a negative light. Nearly all of the students (if not all of them) raised their hands. When I reversed the question and asked if anyone could think of a neutral or positive TV or film portrayal of a character explicitly known to have a mental health or psychiatric disability, one student tentatively raised her hand.

I asked the students to raise their hands if they had read news coverage of a shooting incident, mass murder, or other violent crime during which a reputable journalistic publication used language like "psychopathic," "insane," "mentally ill," or other derogatory descriptions referring to mental health and psychiatric disabilities as a way of discussing the perpetrator's known or suspected neurology. Most, if not all, hands shot into the air.

The common practice of conflating violence--or indeed, any other ill in society or personal flaw of an individual--with mental health and psychiatric disabilities occurs not only in the popular and news media but in everyday conversations. This myth is perpetuated by TV shows that depict rapists, murderers, and terrorists as "mentally ill," and by supposedly objective and unbiased news reports that use the same dehumanizing language to construct horrifying and appalling visions of what mental health and psychiatric disabilities look like. The rhetorical and discursive constructions of mental health would leave the average individual convinced that anyone with a mental health or psychiatric disability is a raging monster incapable of normal emotions or empathizing with others, ready at any trigger to spring vicious, murderous violence upon anyone unfortunate enough to be in their way or say the wrong thing at the wrong time. These people, we are told, are menaces to society and ought to be locked away in secure facilities for their own good and for the good of everyone else.

And always, they are others. The process of othering is not new to disability, whether in general or around mental health and psychiatric disabilities in particular. Given that the ability to empathize with other human beings--the ability to understand another's emotions not only intellectually but emotionally--is frequently upheld as an innate characteristic of humanity that separates us from less sapient creatures, the message that certain groups of disabled people inherently lack empathy underscores the deeply troubling trend of dehumanizing those people. Whether it's the Autistic like me or those with mental health and psychiatric disabilities, the stigma we face is staggering. Unlike those believed to be non-disabled, we are forced to prove our humanity, to prove our worthiness to be included as having equal value and worth as everyone else. Because we are other, it is possible for the mainstay of society to make light of our marginalization. And, as you may well know or have suspected yourself, the commercial exploitation of disability enfreakment is a lucrative business.

Fright at the Museum: Dead Men Walking is this year's haunted house experience at the Museum of Crime and Punishment here in Washington, DC. I heard about the haunted house experience when reading a list of Halloween-themed activities in the District. The language used on the brief advertisement described the haunted house as "featuring the criminally insane." Appalled at the blatant ableism, I searched for the attraction on the internet and found this language on the official website--"This Halloween the Crime Museum will transform into a hunting ground for the criminally insane." Yet despite my horror and disappointment, I was not surprised.

Every year at Halloween, haunted house attractions pop up across the United States, in people's basements, in stores, in hotels, in museums, in frat houses, in amusement parks, and just about anywhere else one can imagine decorating with skeletons and spiderwebs and coffins and fake corpses with fake blood and weapons nearby. I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the commonplace use of "the insane" or "the criminally insane" as features in these attractions. Firstly, it's dehumanizing of actual people with mental health and psychiatric disabilities. Secondly, it's usually grossly inaccurate. Thirdly, it contributes to the already massive stigma against people with mental health and psychiatric disabilities in potentially extremely dangerous and harmful ways.

The attitude that leads otherwise decent people to believe that there is nothing wrong or problematic with featuring "the criminally insane" in a haunted house attraction is one deeply rooted in and perpetuated by an ableism so pervasive in society that it even taints disability rights movements. Ableism against those with mental health and psychiatric disabilities is not only widespread in society writ large, but it is a particularly vile  and virile thorn embedded deeply into the disability community in general, including the autism and Autistic communities. This ableism gives rise to the attitude that sees those with mental health and psychiatric disabilities as legitimate material for twisted humor, freak exhibits, and fright experiences. (After all, if it is legitimate to fear an entire group of people based on dangerously misconceived prejudices against them, then it makes sense that that group of people would be used in a fright experience like a haunted house.)

Let's deconstruct this. To use actors or exhibits portraying people belonging to a marginalized group--in this case, people with mental health and psychiatric disabilities--as a form of entertainment is not only belittling, but dehumanizing. Why? Because it says that they are fodder for entertainment. This process of enfreakment has a long history that includes the freak show sideshows accompanying circuses that put people with visible disabilities and deformities on display for public amusement and pity. When it comes to these types of portrayals, it contributes to the message that says that these are not people worthy of respect or dignity for no reason other than their disabilities.

The suggestion that all or many people with mental health or psychiatric disabilities are now or will in the future become violent murderers or rapists is not only ableist and stigmatizing, but grossly inaccurate. Not only are those with mental health and psychiatric disabilities not any more likely to commit violent crime than the general population, they are at significantly higher likelihood of being targeted as victims of both nonviolent and violent crime. The ableism that perpetuates this harmful myth does a disservice to people with mental health and psychiatric disabilities twice over. It wrongfully insinuates that they are more likely to commit violent crimes--thereby allowing for the disturbing proposition of pre-emptive confinement and containment of these people that sounds suspiciously like Minority Report--and it allows society to ignore their needs when they are victimized by crime.

This is not merely Halloween's ableism problem, but the consequence of ableist attitudes embedded across all levels of society. The commercialization of disability oppression poses a unique problem in that it is doubly exploitative. It harms the disabled and it allows the rest of society to become complicit in its perpetuation. It is morally abhorrent, but rarely questioned. Those in positions of power and privilege can remain unchallenged because they have the social capital and financial resources to maintain their power and privilege. It is no object to oppress people who are already marginalized in society.

In order to combat the frequency of these appallingly ableist depictions of disabled people, we must begin by combating the attitudes that justify and excuse them as harmless and valid. That begins with changing the portrayals we see on TV and in film, in literature, and in the news media. It begins with changing the way we talk about mental health and people with mental health and psychiatric disabilities, whether that be in public speeches or debates, university classrooms or compulsory education, or everyday conversations. It begins with challenging enfreakment as the norm. In the absence of widespread public outcry, both individually and at the organizational level, President Obama will be able to continue to pontificate about keeping guns away from "the mentally ill," reputable newspapers will be able to continue to speculate about how "insane" suspected perpetrators of mass killings must be, and professors will continue to be able to make tasteless, ableist jokes about involuntary restraint and seclusion. The understanding that these rhetorical constructions and public enfreaking depictions of disability contribute to a society in which those with mental health and psychiatric disabilities are unwelcome, unaccommodated, and in perpetual danger of victimization of hate speech and hate crimes is necessary in order to deconstruct them and work toward ending them.






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Note: The idea that mental health and psychiatric disabilities, among other temporary or permanent conditions, can render one legally "insane," for purposes of the popularly-called "insanity defense" (in legal terms, "not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect"), deserves another critique in its own essay.

Addendum: The language used in the DC Museum of Crime and Punishment advertisement--"hunting ground for the criminally insane"--actually has two possible interpretations. I intended to include a bit about this in the original essay, but it seems to have slipped my mind. This phrase might be interpreted as furthering the dangerous misconception that people with mental health and psychiatric disabilities are murderers waiting to happen, and that the "hunting ground" is those people hunting down the "normal" people. Its other interpretation, however, is far more sinister and haunting. The second possible interpretation is that the event planners are implicitly condoning the "hunting" of people with mental health and psychiatric disabilities--i.e. that the "hunting ground" is a place for the "normal" people to hunt and kill the "criminally insane." This carries many problematic consequences, not the least of which is the direct condoning of violence against those with mental health and psychiatric disabilities as acceptable.