John Oliver Breaks Down the Mental Health Excuse for Mass Shootings

“If we’re going to constantly use mentally ill people to dodge conversations about gun control, the least we owe them is a f—ing plan,” said Oliver on his Sunday evening show. (Video: HBO)

In the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Oregon — and the subsequent rush by GOP candidates to attribute it to mental illness — John Oliver took a hard look at the mental healthcare system in America.

Mental health seems to only ever come up in public conversation after a mass shooting, Oliver explains, and typically as a way to divert calls for tighter gun control. The problem isn’t the country’s lust for guns, politicians explain — it’s that the person wielding the gun was mentally ill.

“If only we had enough systems in place to help the mentally ill,” they lament, and then the conversation gets swept under the rug. Again.

In a monologue Sunday evening on Last Week Tonight, Oliver took the opportunity to dive deeper into the state of mental health in America. First, he tackled the mental-health excuse: “The aftermath of a mass shooting might actually be the worst time to talk about mental health. Because, for the record, the vast majority of mentally ill people are nonviolent. And the vast majority of gun violence is committed by nonmentally ill people. In fact, mentally ill people are far likelier to be the victim of violence rather than the perpetrators.”

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But mental health has been brought back to the table, so let’s break it down. Mental illness in some degree affects 48.3 million Americans and an estimated 10 million Americans have a serious mental illness, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. That means that a little over one out of every seven Americans has some form of mental illness, but still, Oliver points out, we use language like “wacko” or “psycho” to describe them. And how America treats those who struggle with mental health is even worse.

In the 1960s, Oliver explains, president John F. Kennedy signed into law a plan to shut down the decrepit asylums that existed at the time and instead fund therapeutic centers — which sounds great. Except these therapeutic centers were never funded or built, leaving those formerly locked away with nowhere to go for treatment. Some, says Oliver, are sent to nursing homes to live with patients twice or three times their age. Others are subject to what’s known as “Greyhound therapy” — meaning, when they’re discharged from an overcrowded mental health center, they’re supplied with a one-way bus ticket out of town. Still more are locked up — over 2 million Americans with mental illness are sent to jail every year.

Those who avoid all three are shuffled in and out of overcrowded, underfunded psychiatric hospitals and treatment facilities (like this girl, who spent 10 days in the ER waiting for a mental health bed), trying to tough it out on their own without expensive medication and treatment, or some combination of the two.

It’s hard to swallow — which is why the facts only seem to bubble up when mental illness is blamed for one of the country’s many tragedies.

Will the constant spotlight on mental illness as the rationale behind mass shooting actually lead to any change? Here’s hoping. Oliver put it best: “If we’re going to constantly use mentally ill people to dodge conversations about gun control, the least we owe them is a f—ing plan.”

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