My Wish for the New Year: More understanding less sanctimonious self – interest when it comes to talking about mental health in the public domain

So my New Year’s wish is that for 2013, the public discourse addressing mental health and mental disorders are civil, based on best available evidence, welcoming of all and not driven by sanctimonious self-interest.

The year that was 2012 saw lots of the opposite, to the above wish.  Two issues that stand out for me were: the reporting of youth suicide in the mainstream media & the NRA statements on school shootings following the Sandy Hook tragedy.

First, the mainstream media and youth suicide perturbations: The Amanda Todd suicide became a lightning rod for concerns about the responsibilities of media reporting related to youth suicide.  The relationship between suicide contagion in young people and sensational media reporting is well recognized and although good & useful guidelines for reporting on youth suicide in the media are well known, many of Canada’s mainstream media ignored these in their rush to titillate disguised as reporting.  Even the Globe and Mail, usually a vehicle of some considerate reflection jumped on the bandwagon in an editorial crying that the push to sell the story (in their argument, their need to keep the public informed about each emotionally driving tragic details of what happened) trumped the evidence to help keep vulnerable youth safer. 

To my mind, the mainstream media has a responsibility to keep the public informed.  It also has a responsibility to keep the public informed responsibly.  Young people contemplating taking their own lives are ambivalent during the period of intense emotional crisis that accompanies this consideration.  While in this vulnerable position, they can be pushed to choose life or they can be pushed to choose death.  We have noticed a substantive co-relation between the recent rise in suicide rates (after a decline for over 20 years) and the amount of sensationalized print and electronic media reporting of this issue.  I wonder if this is causally related.  Selling newspapers or advertisements for the newest blender, skin care product or automobile is, to my mind, not a reason for increasing the risk for choosing death by suicide for young people.

Second, the NRA pronouncements following the Sandy Hook tragedy:  Not only did their initial suggestions (turning America’s schools into armed camps) defy logic and any semblance of civil social organization, but their idiotic (and there is no nicer word for that) statement that there should not be a registry of guns but a registry of those who live with a mental illness is so absurd and so stupid and so dangerous that it gives me cold chills.  Just what other kinds of registries should there be?  Immigrants, people of color, people whose shoe size is between 6 and 7.5, and so on? Lets just register all those who live with a mental illness (that would be about 70 million Americans) so we can watch them like a good Big Brother.   Lets just register everyone and give guns to those whom we like and call them the “good guys” (those are the words the NRA used) and lets just allow them to shoot all the “bad guys” (those that we do not like).  What a solution!  So, why stop at guns?  Why not give all the “good guys” personal nuclear bombs and turn schools into chemical war factories.  Then the “good guys” will really be much better able to defend themselves.  After all, why use a semi-automatic/automatic weapon that can only kill 30 people at a time when you can use a nuclear bomb and get rid of millions.  Responsible gun ownership is one thing, killing humans is quite another.

So, that is my New Year’s wish.  Wonder if it will come true?

-Stan