To clarify: I’m not here to talk about my feelings about guns themselves or take a side on gun reform. And most importantly- I am not here to dismiss any actions or downplay the crimes committed by students like Nikolas Cruz or even Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
I’m here to address a topic that we observe for a second then simply skip over and ignore.
I’m here to talk about the last thing we want to pay attention to.
Recently, I've read articles about TV shows like "13 Reasons Why" gaining heavy criticism for its graphic images and portrayal of mental health issues and taboo situations. Even with this criticism, mental health is becoming an open discussion in media and on college campuses, but we often forget how it affects young Americans.
As of Fall 2017, 50.7 million students attended American Schools. Within those millions, 1 in 5 students shows symptoms of mental health issues and eighty percent of these students never receive help.
We've become obsessed with arming teachers with weapons. But why are we not talking about arming them with mental health resources?
Recently, the Florida House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow certain staff members on public school campuses to carry firearms. This bill also featured a three-day wait period on gun sales, raising the age requirement for all firearm sales to 21, and allocating $69 million to the state’s Department of Education for mental health programs.
This funding for mental health programs is awesome, but almost every post I read about this new bill briefly mentioned it. Since it is important to include all aspects of new legislation in the media, why do we attempt to ignore that which may be most effective?
Quite honestly, ignoring mental health is almost as bad as ignoring gun violence itself.
And what's even worse, is that sometimes we like to ignore the idea that men can be shy, nervous, or even considered 'weak' like their female counterparts. Men do not have to be strong. Men do not have to be your 9-5 working class American husband with no signs of emotional being. This is just like how women do not have to be full-time moms whose only true skills are doing the laundry and baby burping.
In American Psychological Association's Journal of Abnormal Psychology, women were found to be more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression, while men levitated towards substance abuse or antisocial disorders. The study also found that women are more likely to internalize emotions, and men are more likely to externalize emotions leading to aggressive and impulsive behavior.
This could just be the reason behind why the overwhelming majority of gun violence situations on school campuses have been pursued by male students. This simply stems from boys learning from their parents and from other children that they are not supposed to express vulnerability. Boys learn to suppress their feelings so much that they cannot express emotion and in the end do not understand how to act on them.
Yes, I am throwing statistics and information from studies at you. But I am doing this because if I didn't know these things myself, how can I expect you to know and understand?
How can a child expect you to know and understand what they are going through when you are never given the tools or education to do so?
With this new funding to the Florida Department of Education, I hope that public schools can start to address mental health from a young age, just like they do for drugs with programs like D.A.R.E. I wish to see more psychiatrists in schools instead of a couple for a student body count in the thousands.
Even better, faculty and staff need to be armed with the knowledge to prevent destructive behavior. Students need to be armed with awareness and mental illness education. But most importantly, we need children to be armed with the idea that it is okay to be kind and caring no matter their gender or sociocultural status.
In the end, you can never kill a tree without also removing its roots.
