The Mass Shooting in Maine Made Me Defensive About My Mental Illness

I was out to dinner with three friends when I felt the familiar twinge in my throat.

My salmon had just arrived when our conversation abruptly shifted from saving room for dessert to the horrific recent mass shooting in Maine, and instead of eating my salmon, I was just moving it around on my plate.

It was three days after the gunman opened fire at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston, killing at least 18 people, and just like the rest of the world, we were searching for answers to the senseless deaths. But the more I listened to my friends talk about it, the bigger the twinge grew.

I noticed it was becoming more prevalent now, feeling almost as natural as an additional appendage, like an arm or a leg. I took a deep breath and shifted in my chair, as I braced myself for what always comes next in the conversation.

"He was just hospitalized for a mental health disorder," my friend said, shaking her head.

As someone with lived experience in mental illness, I cringe that the nation so quickly blames these horrendous mass shootings on mental health disorders, a connection that is often incorrect. What we don't hear is that people with mental illness account for a very small proportion of mass shooters in the U.S.

Now, the nation seems to have already moved on from the deadliest mass shooting of the year, but the stigma the sensationalized headlines created remains for those who suffer from mental illness and even impacts their beliefs about themselves.

In 2000, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after suffering a psychotic break that led me to the psychiatric unit after being found disoriented, wandering barefoot in my pajamas with my dog, hitchhiking on a busy interstate.

It was one year after the Columbine massacre and I remembered clearly how the media had quickly delved into shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris' connection to mental illness, namely bipolar disorder. Later, it was reported that Harris was a psychopath and Klebold a suicidal depressive, but it was too late. The seed had already been planted in my mind.

A year earlier, I had joined the rest of the world in horror at the death and violence Klebold and Harris inflicted on their high school. But then I found myself equally horrified to have an illness that put me in the same classification as one of the shooters.

A lifelong disease, a part of me wondered if my mental illness diagnosis meant that somewhere I too had a propensity for violence that was just lying dormant waiting to come out, on a much lesser scale, but it raised the question in my mind: Do I too have a capacity for violence just the same?

I wasn't during the first manic episode, but what about the next one? What did this shared diagnosis with the shooter mean for the rest of my life? A doctor had prescribed medication, but what happened if I forgot it, or if the medication didn't work?

At the time, these very real concerns swirled quietly in my mind, and I didn't share them with anyone because I was afraid of being judged, or worried that someone might think I was crazy. Instead, I internalized all the stigmatizing conversations I heard around me, which shaped my beliefs about myself.

Since Columbine, there have been more than 300 school shootings, and the tragedy in Lewiston, Maine marked the 565th mass shooting in 2023. The central theme of mental illness can be found in almost every one of them, when later its extenuating influences such as a break-up or loss, family trauma, lack of empathy, or failed military aspirations are responsible, but mental health is still the first go-to reported cause.

There is a 2022 study on mass shootings, authored by Dr. Ragy Girgis, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry in the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, using the Columbia Mass Murder Database, the largest catalog of mass shootings and mass murder in the world, that examined the relationship between serious mental illness and mass shootings and found only 5 percent are related to mental illness.

He said people who aren't experts in mental illness tend to equate bad behavior, and often immorality, with mental illness, adding that not all bad behavior, and certainly not evil, can be viewed as the same thing.

Today, I find those words particularly comforting, because at times, it doesn't feel like we've made the distinction. When it is estimated that at least half of all Americans will be diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder at some point in their life, the real crisis is that the message we send as a society still holds those who suffer apart.

It was those exact messages that ignited feelings of shame, isolation, and low self-worth after my own diagnosis and hospitalization that stayed with me for many years. I thought that I was broken, or ultimately, that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

Although it's now been close to two decades since I've had a manic episode, I will never be cured. I am always susceptible to a relapse because mental illness doesn't go away, like the flu or a cold, and I am finding the constant correlation between mental health and these senseless deaths are stirring old familiar feelings for me.

I made an excuse and left dinner early that night, saying I'd had a long day and was tired. It wasn't entirely untrue. Like the rest of America, I am tired and saddened by all the mass shootings in our nation, and another part of me is tired and drained that I inexplicably find myself feeling defensive in my reaction.

Perhaps it's because today I don't consider my mental illness a liability in my life and the recent stereotypes and stigma lead me to believe that I should. I made peace with my illness long ago and took the necessary steps every day to nurture it and keep it at a distance.

I had just crawled into bed when the phone rang.

"You seemed off at dinner tonight, are you okay?" my friend asked on the other end of the line.

Suddenly, I noticed the ever-present twinge had subsided and smiled knowingly to myself.

"Thank you for checking. I am well."

Michele Capots is a coach, international speaker, and storyteller on mental wellness and resilience. Her work has been published in The Washington Post Magazine, Marie Claire, and the Tribune-Review newspapers.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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