Mental Illness Isn’t A Motive For Murder. It Just Isn’t.

“The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalise the people who most need our acceptance. 

What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candour, more unashamed conversation. ~ Glenn Close

Mental illness, is just that, an illness. It’s not a motive. Not for murder. Not for anything. It’s like TB. It just is.

I have mental illness. I don’t just float around with no control guided by my mental illness not doing anything for any other reason.

There are reasons and motivations for the things that I do. And refrain from doing.

Even the things that I do that I most likely wouldn’t without the illness have an underlying reason,an internal consistency that goes beyond, “Oh, well, I have BPD, CPTSD, anxiety, depression or whatever.”

Whether this man had a ‘history of mental illness’ or not there was still a reason why murdered #JoCox, an actual motivation for doing it.

That motivation appears to have been political. She was an MP after all. He apparently shouted Britain First and spoke of the EU.

But even if in, what appears at the moment to be the unlikely event, it turns out not to be politically motivated it was still motivated.

And mental illness isn’t a motivation or explanation. We have to look deeper than that.

You can’t address any problem until you’ve correctly identified it.

Another problem I think is that ‘mentally ill’ appears to be conflated with ‘bad person’.Which isn’t the case at all. Lots of us are lovely.

(Earlier today this post linked to a Storify of a Twitter thread I wrote earlier, but that stopped working and the tweets for some reason wouldn’t embed in the posts. So I’ve copied and pasted the text of the tweets above.)

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