Last week, colleges around the United States, including Luther, were shocked to hear of the campus shooting at Northern Illinois University. A gunman entered a lecture hall, randomly firing at the listening students and faculty. Six people were killed, many more injured, and the gunman committed suicide as well. In the media chaos afterwards, it became clear that the gunman had suffered from severe mental illness.

Many of us at Luther were also quite shocked to listen to Sense of Vocation visitor Mary Beth Pfeiffer speak about the discrimination and injustice many mentally ill people face in America today. That discrimination made itself painfully clear in the NIU shooting.

The way mental illness is treated in society today is certainly not equal to other diseases such as cancer, heart disease or for that matter, even the common flu. We don’t shut heart patients out of the world by sending them to special institutions nor do we discriminate jobs and other opportunities to those who are cancer survivors. We don’t call cancer wards loony bins and we don’t describe those suffering from heart problems as crazy, insane and messed up in the head. What makes this all the more frustrating is that mental illness is just as much a disease as any other physical ailment. It affects the brain, which, unless you failed fifth grade biology, you should know is an organ as much as your heart or your kidneys. Why is it so hard for us to recognize it as such?

We’ve come a long way since the days of electric shock and lobotomies, but for some reason, we can’t seem to work around how we handle those who suffer from mental illnesses. As Pfeiffer pointed out in her discussion last week, America tends to blur the line between mentally ill and criminal way too often. Due to a lack of hospital beds, staff and space, those who suffer from mental illness are not treated to the full extent. That can result in acting out violently, often with harm to themselves as well as to the members of their society. When these individuals are then deemed to be a social hazard and sent to jail, they are refused the treatment and medication they need. Essentially, this begins a vicious cycle that usually has tragic consequences.

If mental illness could only be taken a little more seriously, the strides that could be made and the lives that could be saved would be numerous. Instead of acting out violently like the gunman at NIU, with the right treatment individuals could not only learn how deal with the symptoms of their mental illness but perhaps more importantly, learn how to live their lives without being a prisoner of one’s own mind.

Shutting people away from society and refusing them treatment certainly doesn’t teach someone how live with others and how to express themselves in safe and healthy way. In the same way, it doesn’t allow a person to integrate, which all the more allows the rest of us to become discriminatory to those whose diseases we don’t understand. Perhaps then we wouldn’t have to deal with such negative and shocking consequences as we did earlier this week.