The only person I consider to be mentally ill is me ( at times ) at the same time the people I hear saying they are very sane are delusional .

This case is going to get very ugly ......nest not to watch TV for a few years .

Mentally ill people do bad things sometimes. Every once in a while they do horrendous things. However, a lot of times people make the jump to "he must be mentally ill" because they don't understand how a normal person could do something horrendous. The vast majority of people in prison who have done horrendous things are judged to be sane. People somehow overlook that fact.

I don't think it can be said enough. It has been shown that people who are mentally ill are much more likely to be victims of violent crime, at the hands of sane people, then they are to be perpetrators. If you look at the data, that's what it says. I don't have time right now, but maybe later today or this weekend I'll look up those studies that show that.

i know i shouldn't be disgusted or surprised, but i still am.

I'm pissed because of the latent and not so very well hidden prejudice and chauvinism that casts the mentally ill as icons of badness.

It just runs through DUers fingers onto the internet with no thought that they are spreading and maintaining the mindset that has real consequences in discrimination.

This place won't stand for LGBT slurs, or slurs against women, or ethnic minorities (and it shouldn't). But it's perfectly ok to do with the mentally ill.

And it wouldn't matter much if it was just being called names or every couple months supposing some mass murderer's behavior has roots in a mental illness.

It's the day in day out industrial strength support for maintaining a system of language that encourages public attitudes that default to accepting discrimination against the mentally ill as the proper order of things.

that is a code phrase used to excuse racism. They won't say Roof is a racist. They say he is mentally ill.

Let's call him what he is: evil.

But my unhappiness isn't really about that. I'm open to the notion that a person with mental disorders could commit mass murder, but then I'm also open to every strata of society having that potential.

What pisses me off is DUers is how it is a general disparagement. Something that isn't tolerated for many strata of DUers. And that wouldn't piss me off so much, but these DUers think they are liberal, and expressing empathy and solidarity when they employ references to mental disordes as disparagements. And that is precisely how prejudice and discrimination is maintained and spread from one generation to the the next. It's not liberal...it's bigoted, it's not progressive...it's hanging on to ignorance. And they do it as recreation.