Art: Mental Health in Plants

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by Pakmum

An Alternate Viewpoint on School Shootings

 

The focus on gun control and mental illness after school shootings is largely unjustified. Of course, this is common knowledge to people with any shred of logicality, but I’m going to take it a bit further. There are many factors involved in these shootings, including parental neglect, reading insane material, depression, and…..

ZERO TOLERANCE POLICIES!

Yep, I said it. The very policies that the schools supposedly ‘rely on’ to ‘prevent’ violence are actually a major cause of explosive violence and school shootings.

Why? They don’t differentiate between self defense, retaliation, and aggression. This creates a catch 22 for people who are made fun of and feel as though they have nothing to do. Their parents can commonly be seen calling the school, but the school does little, and if they do, the insults continue behind administrators backs. Even so, they’re called rats and made fun of even more.

This unintelligent school policy not only reeks of lack of empathy, but is blatantly in line with the ‘politically correct’ groupthink of today.If these individuals ignore aggression, they run the risk of getting hurt but much more likely being completely humiliated. This leaves one option: fight back.

However, with zero tolerance policies, all parties involved are almost always punished equally. This leads to many who just defend themselves or stand up for themselves to think that they are at fault, and even if they realize that this is not the case, it creates a lot more frustration than necessary.

People who are made fun of and snubbed thus have no option other than to suffer, or explode like many of the school shooters do. Even before these ‘zero tolerance policies’, school policy largely started leading up to this. It clears the school’s ass of blame no matter what and makes for an easy method of ‘processing’ cases without any real critical thought, time or effort.

I’m not condoning school shootings. I understand that they are the minority of those put in this situation; those who have come across certain rhetoric, those who are often abused the worst, those who have formed thoughts that it is okay to commit such a horrible act. But just imagine a poor kid who has been verbally and physically abused in school for eight years. He finally gets the guts to fight back and guess what happens? He’s suspended, or worse, maybe expelled if he does a number on the other guy. What’s more, his parents make him out to be bad. In the short term, it may shut things up, and make the school look peaceful. But in the long term it fuels an explosive rage that just doesn’t go away.

So, next time you see this on the news, don’t think ‘That guy just must be crazy!’ It’s certainly true that some may be in a rather unstable state of mind, but think of the causes of this. Think of the treatment they endure, and think about how all their exists are blocked. Different people have different tolerance levels depending on many different factors, and though we should not condone violence, we must give suffering individuals a method to alleviate that suffering.

Otherwise, we are unfortunately contributing to the problem.

by sociopathicregret

The main cause of the stigma of mental illness.

I’m going to point out something that many may find convenient to skip over.  This is the reality that the ‘medical’ view of depression, suicide and mental illness promotes stigma. Of course, this medical view and the pharmaceutical establishment are ultimately derived from both misunderstanding and greed, the former which can be further derived much from a high paced lifestyle in which critical thinking is discouraged and so on and so fourth.

If a mental illness is an ‘illness’, it’s very easy for people to say ‘Oh, it couldn’t happen to me!’. Perhaps they might say ‘That guy is just messed up! Don’t bother trying to help!’. See, if it is an objective ‘disease’ or ‘illness’ it’s easy to pass off as not subject to influence by others, including themselves. That means that their actions supposedly will not have an impact, and they don’t need to intimately spend time trying to help. It isn’t a human problem, ‘you can’t talk to disease’!

The ‘genetic’ theories of mental illness have been around since before DNA was even discovered, merely on presumption based on no evidence whatsoever. Thus, the cart has become before the horse, and by this it can be shown that these theories have arisen due to social construct rather than genuine scientific evidence.  Perhaps personal ignorance and lack of empathy has played into this, after all, it has never been convenient to have to deal with someone who is ‘mentally ill’, especially if you had something to do with it.  A bigger picture is that society has a big role to play in why people are mentally ill. We have little left to offer in terms of quality; all that is left comes mostly in the form of mass quantity. Much of the time we are too busy scrambling through a rat race to attend to ourselves or others. In the meantime, we are showered by shallow rewards and distractions so that we don’t wake up from this stressful state. It’s far easier for society to blame the individual for a flaw rather than look at not only the immediate environment around such a person but their large scale environment. In the past, societies did indeed try to cover their tracks, but because interactions were commonly more honest and direct (executions instead of life sentences, etc), poor systems fell more quickly. Now, society covers its tracks very well by virtue of sheer massiveness and replaceable parts.

The stigma of mental illness mostly results from lack of empathy and caring, to tie this up. But that lack of empathy,  if one looks closely, has many roots.

by sociopathicregret