If You’re Feeling Numb and You Think This is Normal, Something is Very Wrong

If You’re Feeling Numb and You Think This is Normal, Something is Very Wrong

Mental Health Awareness Equity Month 2022

By: Madhuri Jha, LCSW, MPH (she/hers), Director of the Kennedy-Satcher Center for Mental Health Equity

The Kennedy-Satcher Center for Mental Health Equity advocates for the safety and well-being of all because access to safety and well-being should be seen as a basic civil right. Mental Health Awareness Month is when we call upon our mental health system to identify solutions so safety and wellbeing outcomes can improve. This month alone there have been three separate incidents of mass shootings in the United States.

10 African-Americans murdered in Buffalo in a racially motivated shooting crime at a grocery store.

5 Asian-Americans critically injured in a shooting crime at their church in California.

And this week, 21 people, 19 young children and 2 adult teachers, in Uvalde, Texas, murdered at their school by an 18 year old who purchased a rifle on his birthday.

No other country in the world experiences mass incidents of violence and racism like we do here in the United States. I am concerned that policies have historically seen the mental health system as the remedy to the complex trauma and rage that our society is burdened with due to exposure to such violence. It’s time we started treating violence and racism as public health and national security crises.

The news cycle has rekindled a memory of a case I was assigned some years ago. He was a middle-aged male of Puerto Rican descent, recently released from prison on parole. Within a few sessions, his psychiatrist and I became aware that he was pharma-seeking, as he kept “losing” his clonazepam supply and would appear to appointments under the influence. In response to being told he was not going to receive any more controlled medications, he stated he would bring an assault rifle to the clinic, and I was his target. I was not allowed to go to work for a week, while law enforcement discovered he had indeed illegally acquired weapons. He was quickly arrested and sent back to prison.

This story haunts me for many reasons. He had been in and out carceral facilities since he was 9 years old. I met him when he was 53. I’m haunted that someone could spend 44 years of their life knowing nothing but carceral settings. I am also haunted by the fact that we narrowly avoided a mass shooting at my clinic, and then went back to work and pretended like it never happened.

Too many of us have stories like this. We have been both numbed and conditioned to normalize these incidents, just as we have been numbed and conditioned to normalize mass incarceration and police violence. Numbness and the impulse to normalize are signs of exposure to prolonged traumatic stress. 27 school shootings have taken place this year, and there have been 199 mass shootings this year in total. Only halfway into 2022, the US is averaging about 10 incidents a week. Where do we find the capacity to heal when the credible threat of trauma is constant? How do we as healers heal ourselves in lightning speed, so we can continue to be healers for our patients and students?

I remember in 2018, when children across the country walked out of school and marched to Capitol Hill, demanding reforms to ensure there was school safety and stricter policies for accessing weapons after the horrific tragedy in Parkland, Florida. I also remember the brown and black teen clients who came into therapy that night distraught because their public schools didn’t take their walkout seriously. One said, “Why don’t these powerful people care that there are guns in our schools every day? Do they think this is supposed to be normal for us?” I struggled to have words for those grieving kids that night. I hugged every single one of them.

May 25th is the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. And in two years, despite all the momentum advocates have gained to address reform, we have been unsuccessful in being able to pass any legislation that addresses mass violence. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed in the House, and then collapsed last September, when negotiations from both parties in the Senate could not reach consensus. HR 1446 is a bill that passed in the House that closes the “Charleston Loophole”, which would ensure gun sales cannot proceed without background checks being completed. But it is also stalled in the Senate.  That loophole is the reason why Dylan Roof was able to legally purchase a firearm and kill nine people at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.

Here’s what I implore this Mental Health Awareness Equity Month: we must stop seeing solutions in a silo and recognize that they are systemic. At the Kennedy-Satcher Center, we pledge to ensure that every conversation held towards policy change, is backed with concrete, intersectional evidence that it is necessary. Children should not believe this is normal. Parents should never have to suffer a trauma like those in Texas are experiencing right now. Teachers and providers should not have to go back to work and pretend like these things don’t happen to them. We must change our approaches to policy reform because it can be life-saving.

About the author/for immediate inquiry: Madhuri Jha, LCSW, MPH is the Director of the Kennedy-Satcher Center for Mental Health Equity – an entity of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine. She has over a decade of service devoted to being a clinical practitioner, consultant, and leader in the public mental health and health equity fields. For immediate inquiries about the author or the work being done at KSCMHE, contact kennedysatcher@msm.edu.

 

Children are standing, holding hands in a circle to play school