Trigger warning: mentions of violence against others, suicide, and graphic ideation.
And that is why we need tighter gun control laws in the United States.
I have Bipolar Disorder and OCD. And by OCD I don’t mean the kind you see in movies, where I wash my hands 800 times a day. I mean the kind no one talks about, where you get obsessively violent and sexual thoughts in your head. You don’t want them and you don’t know where they come from and yet it is almost impossible to realize that these aren’t actually your thoughts. Your brain is hurting.
And by Bipolar Disorder I don’t mean the kind you see in movies either. I mean the kind where you have short hypomanic episodes and extremely long depressive episodes; even worse, I spent much of my time in something called a “mixed state.” A mixed state is where you are so depressed and yet you have all the energy of hypomania. And mixed states are incredibly dangerous to yourself (and potentially to others) because you are hurting so badly mentally and yet (unlike “regular” depression, where there is a lack of energy) you have all this agitated energy coursing through your body. Mixed states are where you’re most likely to kill yourself and they are the reason Bipolar has one of the highest suicide rates out of all types of mental illnesses. It’s also the time where you could have the energy to take your pain out on others.
I have severe mental illness and I’m here to argue that you shouldn’t allow me to carry a gun.
When I was 19 years old, I started to have intrusive thoughts, fantasies almost, of killing everyone around me. Before that, I often thought of hurting myself. But one day, out of the blue, it started extending to those around me. I frequently sat in my classes freshman year of college and, instead of paying attention to the lecture, planned how I would take a gun to class, which person I would kill first, and how I would take each one out. I fantasized about people cowering and blood spattering. And then, at the end, I knew I would take that same gun and put it to my head and pull the trigger. We would all go out together. This vision repeated itself everywhere: walking down the hallway, on the bus, out on the campus mall, in discussion groups, when out with friends. It never seemed to stop.
Despite what the above paragraph seems to suggest, I am not a violent person. I’ve never fought anyone, injured anyone, even shot a gun. So why was I, an attractive 19 year old girl with a loving family who was in the Honors program at her state university, fantasizing about murdering anyone I set my eyes on?
Because I’m crazy. (And yes, I know there are issues with the word but I have no problem applying it to myself. I’m here to reclaim it.)
I was in so much pain for the first 25 years of my life, I just wanted out. And I wanted to take other people out with me. Sometimes, I felt that I was honestly going to be doing them a favor – preventing them from having to spend another minute living. They didn’t know what I knew, that every moment alive is unnecessary pain, but they would be grateful when they were dead. And so would I.
Does that sound crazy? That’s because it is. It makes no sense at all. Yet before I was properly diagnosed and medicated, there was nothing you could have done to convince me that these thoughts were not the only real, logical thoughts. To me, they were how the world worked, they were the truth, and so what if only I could see it?
That’s the thing about people with mental illness – our brains aren’t working properly. When we aren’t medicated and/or in some form of therapy, we are subject to our brains working the way they work. And what that means is that, in some cases, we literally live in a different world from everyone else. It was only after starting anti-psychotics that I realized that not everyone gets dizzy because the flat ground is moving, that actually the edges of everything were not pulsing, and that the world was indeed three-dimensional. You read that correctly: I could not perceive the world as three-dimensional. It was all fake to me. If you opened a door and walked me out and showed me that the only thing out there was black empty space, I wouldn’t have been shocked. I didn’t feel as though my physical body was connected to my brain; sometimes, it did things and I would stare at it, surprised. Sometimes I would find a mirror and slap myself, hard, so that I could see that the hand was making contact with the face and the face was hurting and therefore that face was mine. I didn’t recognize myself in mirrors. That’s the world I lived in.
And that is not a world where guns should be allowed.
Because here’s the thing: I could have done severe damage to a lot of people, just like those shooters you read about on the news. But I didn’t. I didn’t because I have a great family, supportive friends, and good health insurance. I didn’t because I was able to get into therapy, and even though it took another 6 years to get a proper diagnosis and proper medication, I had at least one professional looking out for me and checking in with me every week. And most importantly, I had no access to a gun. I wasn’t even sure how to go about getting one. My family didn’t use them growing up, I didn’t have friends who had them, I didn’t know how one worked, really, other than that you pull the trigger and it (hopefully) fires and kills.
Far too many mentally ill people in the U.S. are not as lucky as me. They do have access to guns. They’re able to get their hands on them and they know how to use them. And then they do terrible, terrible things. Every time I see a report of a new mass shooting, I feel a deep rooted sadness because this is preventable. We can minimize the incidences, if not stop them altogether, just by making sure that people with some forms of mental illness are not allowed to legally purchase guns. By making sure that a psychiatrist has to give a clean bill of health first. It’s required for airline pilots. Why isn’t it required for gun owners?
And there’s an even bigger problem we could be minimizing: suicide. Most of the deaths by gun that occur in the United States are suicides. I was speaking with my therapist the other day he asked me, “If you had access to a gun, would you be sitting there in the chair across form me today?” Without a moment’s hesitation, I responded, “Absolutely not. I would have killed myself a dozen times over by now if it was that easy.” Because other forms of suicide are hard and not always successful. Cutting your wrists, for example, is extremely difficult to actually complete. Overdosing doesn’t have any guarantee of success – believe me, I’ve Googled it a thousand times hoping for a different answer. Throwing yourself in front of a bus or a train just inconveniences other people, and I didn’t want my death to get in anyone else’s way.
So, I’m imploring the people who govern this country, please take away my right to own a gun. Take it away so that one day if my meds stop working I can actually stay alive long enough to get help and be put back on track. Take it away so that my 19 year old self can’t hurt anyone around her. Take it away because there is a tiny voice in the back of my mind that doesn’t want me to argue for this. And take it away so that we stop seeing new mass shootings every single day.
I have severe mental illness. I’m medicated now. I have a psychiatrist and a psychologist, I’m a fully stable human being. But that still doesn’t mean I should be allowed to own a gun. For the safety of ourselves and for the safety of others, please require mental health examinations before gun ownership. Let’s give everyone the chance to live.
Plastic Barbie Girl 