10:57pm April 16, 2015

Mentally ill persons are more likely to be victims of violence then the average person.

I work at a mental health and substance abuse supportive living facility. One of the buildings is half and half, so we do have a few residents without severe mental illness.
One of our residents with a severe mental illness, I’ll call him C, has paranoid schizophrenia. He has frequent panic attacks, and has physical tics including shaking his hand and walking around a lot. He doesn’t always know where he is, and he is often unable to sit still. Some people are annoyed by or creeped out by him, and think he is trying to follow them around or get in their rooms.
This isn’t usually an issue, since C is a really polite guy, and usually other residents with mental illnesses will just yell at him a bit or express that they are annoyed. They have their own stuff going on, and we (peer staff) always just explain calmly that C has some symptoms that might be off-putting, and that it’s best to just calmly talk to C or to just ignore him.
However, we do have some non-mentally ill residents, most of whom are senior citizens. One of them, R, is a man with a concealed carry permit. That’s his right, fine, and I’m not stopping him from having his gun on him. The other day, though, R came in to the community room in which I was working, and made a vague threat.
“That boy needs to watch out or he’s going to end up in the hospital or worse”
“Who, C?”
“Yeah, he keeps following me around and I think he was trying to get in my room”
“C doesn’t always remember which room is his, I wouldn’t worry too much about it”
“I’m just saying that if it isn’t me, someone is going to shoot him one of these days”
So my hugest problem with this isn’t the vague threat of gun violence, it’s how confident and justified R seemed to feel while saying these things. I obviously reported the whole situation to my supervisor, and she has talked to R, and he said it was his way of blowing off steam. We doubt very strongly than anything is going to happen, but this isn’t the first time violence has been threatened against C. Another one of the non-mentally ill residents apparently threatened to “beat C to a bloody pulp” a week or two ago.
The shocking part of this to me is that there seems to be an idea that violence, specifically gun violence or other deadly force, was accepted by these residents as an appropriate reaction to being creeped out or annoyed. There seems to be an idea that the right to protect oneself extends to protecting oneself from inconvenience even, by any means necessary, if the perceived “threat” is mentally ill. C is polite and entirely non-violent, but the fear is that someone will take his symptoms as a threat to themselves and seriously hurt him. I fear almost more than that that the perpetrator would get off on the charges, as C is markedly mentally ill.
Our society treats the mentally ill as dangerous, even though they are largely in more danger than the rest of the population. I could go pull up stats on that, but I’ll let y’all google them. They should be easy to find. This incident at work just pissed me the fuck off since this sort of thing persists. Don’t ask me if I’m worried about the mentally ill people “snapping” on me at any minute. I’m not. Mentally ill people are no more violent than the average person. I’m worried about abled men with guns deciding that mentally ill persons are an “immediate threat” with little reason to believe such a thing, shooting the mentally ill person, and getting off because a “jury of their peers” agrees that “creepy” or “annoying” symptoms represent an actual threat, rather than just a set of symptoms that must really suck for the mentally ill person.
/end rant (for now)