The Missing Mental Health Element in the Ferguson Story

By now, everyone has heard the news from Ferguson, Missouri.  An unarmed 18 year old named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer.  Michael Brown was black.

Some of the events surrounding the shooting are in dispute.  But what isn’t in dispute is that for the past two weeks, a community has been torn apart by race – a community that until recently was best known for its proximity to St. Louis and its designation as a Playful City, USA.

Picture credit: Health Affairs

Media reports since the August 9^th shooting have focused almost entirely on one angle – race relations. 

We’ve heard about unrest in the city, the National Guard, police in riot gear, and danger in the streets.  We’ve heard about the District Attorney’s ties to law enforcement, and concerns that a too-white Grand Jury may be racially motivated not to indict the police officer involved in the deadly shooting.

But the media have been strangely silent about a different angle – this community is experiencing an ongoing trauma.  And where are the mental health services it so desperately needs?

Make no mistake about this.  Race matters.

I have written in the past about people such as Anna Brown, Miriam Carey, and Allen Daniel Hicks, Sr., a mother, a dental hygienist, and a coach.  None survived encounters with the police during times of crisis.  

And we know they are not the only ones.

But what these people had in common was that the final crises they experienced were in part medical. In some respects, that makes them more sympathetic than Michael Brown.  In others, unfortunately, it allowed media to dismiss what happened to them as aberrations brought on in part by their medical emergencies and suspicion of mental illness (an assumption that proved to be fatally incorrect in all three cases).

So the message frames in those stories quickly dissolved.

But when we’ve got a community at “unrest,” the story frame lives on. 

But let’s read between the lines.  This isn’t just a community at unrest, this is a community in distress.

And it is time we did something about that.

I have posted a version of this blog on Mental Health America’s web site, which you can find here.  In that blog, you’ll find several resources to help communities in distress, ranging from local MHA affiliates to national helplines, to tools and training aimed at helping communities recover from tragedies.

You’ll also find a call to action to join our #B4Stage4campaign, which launches in September, at Mental Health America.  You will hear much more about this campaign in the coming months.  It is designed to move our attention around mental health to where it belongs – on prevention, early identification of concerns, and early intervention. 

And it is designed to get public officials and the media to recognize that managing distress comes first and prevents violence, and to demand that they put resources into families and communities before mental illnesses progress to “Stage 4,” when “danger to self or others” is the only standard we have – a standard that leads too frequently to incarceration or tragedies like these.

Finally, you’ll find mental health screening tools and other resources you can use for yourself or with family and friends, especially if you – like me – keep imagining what your life would be like if your child were the victim here, or if your community was the one falling apart.