Some Answers and a Bigger Question

Here are the answers to yesterday’s tagline quiz:

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Godzilla

Erin Brockovich

Meet the Parents

And now here is a question: How come a root problem is often overlooked while the consequent, lesser problems get full attention?

Let me tell you a story. Several years ago at my daughter’s high school, there was a violent attack. I was scheduled to speak on tobacco prevention at the school that afternoon, and that morning my daughter sent me an e that read: “Mom, don’t come to school—too much violence.”

I didn’t read her e before leaving home that day. When I got to the school, the halls had been secured and the knife had been confiscated by the authorities. People told me what (they thought) happened.

I didn’t find out what really happened until several days later, in the evening, in the school gymnasium during an address by the principal that I had requested he give. The district superintendent was present as were many concerned students and parents.

It turns out that there was a student attending the school who had severe psychological illness. His illness was manifesting in many ways, including alignment with Nazism. The white student had been picking on black students for weeks. The black students couldn’t take it anymore.

Prior to the outbreak of violence on campus, the administration of the school, not recognizing the student’s mental illness, went to the trouble of hiring a mediator to come to the school to fix the poor race relations. The mentally healthy students were forced to sit in a room for several hours a day with the mentally unbalanced student to try patch up their differences.

Only after violence erupted at the school, did administrators look back on the situation and say, “We didn’t know what we were dealing with.” I can still hear those words as plain as day.

Mental illness goes unrecognized all the time. Awareness of mental illness is lacking. Until we address this problem, violent acts like the one at my daughter’s school and the one at the Safeway in Tucson will continue.

It is growing increasingly difficult for me to bite my tongue when every day, a new spin is given to the Tucson shootings—the need for concealed weapon permits, the consequences of political hate rhetoric and anything else you want to mention. The moral of the story should be let’s do more to spread awareness of the symptoms of mental illness and to make the general public aware of how to report mental illness.