by Phyllis Vine

Nearly one week has passed since the shooting at Northern Illinois University thrust the nation into another conversation about public safety.

Like many of us, when I heard the news, my heart stopped, waiting for a description of the scene. I was driving in my car, away from home when the first reports began coming over the radio. Sketchy at first, the news identified a shooting incident, a gunman, and an unidentified number of victims. The details followed slowly and, waiting for them, my mind focused on a dear friend on the faculty of Northern Illinois, hoping to learn, of course, that he was safe.

With Virginia Tech still fresh, and knowing how easy it is to tarnish an entire group of people with the actions of one, I hoped the still-nameless gunman had no trace of a psychiatric history. So I inched along in bumper-to-bumper Los Angeles traffic, punching different stations in search of news that I feared would only be bad.

Of course I was not so naïve as to doubt that anybody who walked into a lecture hall with a small arsenal – I didn’t not know at the time that it was purchased from the same gun dealer who sold arms to Virginia' Tech's gunman – had to be fundamentally disordered at that moment.

But I also knew numerous voices would weigh in as the nation grieves for the students, the five killed and the 16 injured, their families, the campus and the larger community. It was yet another loss of an idealized world in which innocence and life were randomly snuffed in unpredictable carnage.

How to address this seemingly incomprehensible event in the present, how to plan for the future, have been on the minds of many. It is clear that competing visions enter the picture. One is the often-overlooked fact that people with a psychiatric history are statistically not more violent than their neighbors on any street in America; the other is the belief that they are.

The question persists: what does it mean to be in treatment for a chronic mental illness such as the anxiety disorder we have been told Steven Kazmierczak suffered? From all reports, he does not fit into any mold predictable of violence. That he had been in treatment for mental health issues after high school, that he was taking anti-anxiety medication, puts him in the same category as tens of millions.

Kazmierczak was successfully coping and managing symptoms, and we still do not know what went wrong. Yet some would like to see people like him assigned a life-time sentence “mental patient.”

The stigma surrounding mental illness, the lock-‘em-up movement sanitized as protective civil commitment, and the state and federal governments’ policies attempting to balance budgets on the backs of the vulnerable, all need to be turned around. They are easy answers but hardly the solutions to terribly complex problems, especially the impact of stigma in discouraging people from seeking help, even some from giving it.

It is clear that the nation’s political leaders have failed to wrestle with the issues. Hillary Clinton’s knee-jerk response, “keep guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists, gang members and people with mental health problems," feeds the problem. Calls for reform of health care are vague and comfortably omit the issues facing people with mental illness. It will be up to those most immediately involved, the community of mental health advocates, to define the discussion and set the agenda while they engage the friends, families, employers, employees, teachers, educators, ministers, and neighbors in the process.

In the past few days, college educators have done just that. In the Chronicle for Higher Education, a faculty expert on college student violence writes "the United States Secret Service concluded: There is no accurate or useful profile of 'the school shooter'" Another editorial in the February 18 issue notes: “the count of undergraduate and graduate students murdered at school numbered 43—fewer than 10 per year, on average.” He cites figures from noted expert Dr. Paul Applebaum indicating that

"the odds that a student with suicidal ideation will actually commit suicide are 1,000 to 1. . .Thus policies that impose restrictions on students who manifest suicidal ideation will sweep in 999 students who would not commit suicide for every student who will end his or her life — with no guarantee that the intervention will actually reduce the risk of suicide in this vulnerable group."

The answer is not stricter gun registration laws asking for a treatment history. (Unless it is an outright ban of all assault weapons, exempting, of course, the muskets which were in vogue when the Second Amendment was drafted.) Nor is it involuntary commitment and the erosion of civil liberties.

As a nation, we need to work through these problems. And it is clear that it will only come from within, not from people who fear and misunderstand mental illness, or those who get paid to write provocative headlines or catchy phrases for columns. We need to hear from people who use services, and from those who plan them. These are the people we need to put first.