Showing posts with label justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label justice. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Stop blaming mental illness for violent crimes.

Just read Stop blaming mental illness for violent crimes by Dean Burnett over at The Guardian. It reminds me of  some tweets I’ve been seeing regarding the media coverage of this - and all recent - shootings. First, that "mental illness" is used as a descriptor in regards to white shooters only, whereas terrorism or other racially charged language is used with people of colour, and also, white folks are often represented with "nice" photographs - never their mugshots. Especially young white people.









These last few weeks have been heavy. 2016 is a fucking brutal son of a bitch. The Ramsay Bolton of recent years (the Game of Thrones episode "Battle of the bastards" just played this past Sunday). It's shooting after shooting. Celebrity deaths (Bowie, Prince, Anton Yelchin just died). Personally my family had its medical issues, Global Transient Amnesia, Vertigo, and Bell's Palsy (all in early 2016). It's just been exhausting. I'm tired. But the onslaught continues.

Politically lately the rhetoric and news coverage has been tense. The UK has Brexit, the Americans have the presidential race and their gun debates, and locally it seems like the economy and jobs has been the big issue. I've been having trouble at work, my hours have been cut, it's super quiet, I just feel zero job security and its playing on my anxiety and depression.

It just feels like a tense time. And right now I feel like terms like "mental illness" are being thrown around a lot in the media, especially in regards to white shooters. Burnett's piece pulled out certain points I'd like to talk about here.
But the idea that certain mental illnesses inevitably cause violence is far more prevalent than the evidence warrants. Numerous studies have shown that those with mental health problems are more often the victims of violence, not perpetrators.
It seems out of every few stories coming out of the united states where a black man was killed by police, information surfaces afterwards about that man having been in crisis. Overall the media coverage of the last few months has been torn apart on social media because of how lacking it is. Intersectionality is rarely applied.
Mental illness doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s tangled up with everything else in a person’s life. Upbringing, background, poverty, general health, experiences, genetics, and so on. Essentially, if you exclude the contribution of all other possible factors, the link between mental illness and violence becomes increasingly small. It’s far more common for people to be violent if they also have a substance abuse problem. You could argue this implies the mental illness is a consequence, alongside the violent behaviour, of other issues affecting the person. So blaming mental health for crimes is often like blaming the getaway car for a bank robbery; it’s just one part of the whole situation, and not even the most important.
How is it that some of us feel it all, and some of us don't? We see it. Don't they?
You’d think if the people/media who blamed mental illness for violent crime genuinely believed that, they’d be more alarmed about the state of mental health treatment and facilities. But no, there’s rarely a mention as mental health services are put under massive debilitating strain by cuts and ignorance. We live in a world where a pensioner can’t take a bottle of water onto a plane because they might somehow turn it into a bomb and countless rights are sacrificed in the name of security, but those who think people with mental illness are all killers-in-waiting are fine with them not getting adequate help or care.
Is it all about money and power? Is it about easy blame and distraction? It's all too much these days. I need a break. A vacation. A holiday. I'm broke. My job situation is a mess. What are my options? Lately, it's been a shower and going to bed real early. It's all I've got right now.
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Wednesday, July 15, 2015

On emotional intelligence.

The Atlantic has an article up called The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence, which they define as:
the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions.
I'm not 100% on managing, but I’d say I'm practically a sharpshooter regarding the first two. The article goes over how emotional intelligence should not be assumed to be a moral characteristic, and how as a form of intelligence, it can be used for both “good and evil.”
There was no relationship whatsoever between emotional intelligence and helping: Helping is driven by our motivations and values, not by our abilities to understand and manage emotions. However, emotional intelligence was consequential when examining a different behavior: challenging the status quo by speaking up with ideas and suggestions for improvement.
Emotionally intelligent employees spoke up more often and more effectively. When colleagues were treated unjustly, they felt the righteous indignation to speak up, but were able to keep their anger in check and reason with their colleagues. When they went out on a limb to advocate for gender equity, emotional intelligence helped them keep their fear at bay. When they brought ideas for innovation to senior leaders, their ability to express enthusiasm helped them avoid threatening leaders.
This was the part that stuck with me, since the friends I value as being extremely emotionally intelligent are also the most likely to notice when something isn't fair, or is inappropriate at the workplace. We’re often quick to notice work-policies we feel to be counter-intuitive or lacklustre.

I would argue that it’s a sensitivity to environment, and to the lived experience of policy and procedure. Especially in a working environment, where we live daily. It’s also a way of reading people I’d say is akin to instinct. Reading certain cues is a way of communicating that is mainly lost to us, but was a way of surviving for thousands of years. Similarly to the way in which a cat twitches a tail in annoyance, seeing someone purse their lips or grind their teeth can signal a similar state.

I wouldn't really say it’s my ability to “express enthusiasm” that allows for a smooth description of a problem to a boss, I would say it’s a navigation of their ego, explaining a basic logic and also trying to express the benefits of the idea.

I think emotional intelligence also involves an understanding of context and environment. External factors are always at play, no matter how enthusiastically you pitch more vacation time.

And, as always, there's also power at play. There are power-dynamics and hierarchies. When we describe emotional intelligence as being a major root to standing up to the status quo, we can't ignore the way in which identity politics and privilege inform our relationship to that structure.

I can't help but think of "emotional intelligence" as a classed term. There's privilege in it. It's academic. Also, considering the original researchers define emotional intelligence as:
focuses on the individual's ability to process emotional information and use it to navigate the social environment.
"Oh, you mean be a fucking human who feels things and notices stuff?"

Maybe the reason old, white academics needed the term is because they don't understand human fucking experience the way anybody who doesn't carry the privilege of white maleness does.



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