By Daniel Klinghard
I spent January 2020 in New Hampshire with a group of undergraduates from the College of the Holy Cross, studying the 11 presidential candidates then campaigning there. More interesting than the candidates, though, were the audiences they addressed--the infinitely curious Granite State voters, ready with their questions.
Only one issue featured in voters’ questions at every single campaign event. It wasn’t immigration. Not the Muslim ban. Not even hostilities with Iran—which the news that month suggested could lead to war. The issue mentioned most frequently was mental health. Tellingly, voters were waiting to hear candidates’ mental health proposals, but candidates rarely even mentioned the issue.
Almost 20% of Americans experience mental illness. Many such illnesses also go undiagnosed or remain hidden, so it’s almost certain that we regularly meet people who, whether or not we know it, have a mental illness. Yet according to New Hampshire voters, the effects of mental illnesses are not only fully apparent, but also distributed broadly throughout families and communities.
During their post-graduate service with JVC Northwest, Fordham University alumni, Dan Stracquadanio, Amanda Foggia, PJ Brogan, and Danny Finnegan (above, left to right), gained a deeper understanding about the impact of homelessness on mental health. Photo courtesy of Fordham University and JVC Northwest.
As I follow the Black Lives Matter movement, I’ve thought about the concern of these mostly white New Hampshire voters. One of the central tenets of proposals to defund police departments is the idea of shifting funds to mental health services and thereby reducing violent interactions with police. This is because, in the absence of an effective mental health infrastructure, responsibility for addressing the consequences of mental illness often falls to police.
In a 2015 report, the Treatment Advocacy Center found “approximately one in four fatal encounters [with police] involve an individual with severe mental illness,” and demonstrated that the risk of being killed in a law enforcement interaction is 16 times higher for people with serious mental illness than for others. A 2019 study found that “responding to and transporting individuals with mental illness occupies more than one-fifth of law enforcement officers’ time.” Such statistics suggest that better mental health services, which could lift the unfair burden on police of having to fill in the void of appropriate mental health care, could significantly change the tenor of a large percentage of police interactions with the public.
The fact that mental health is so often overlooked, when it is so central to the lives of both rural white New Hampshire voters and Black Lives Matter activists in Minneapolis and Atlanta, reveals how our political discourse can prevent us from confronting our problems in solidarity with one another. We see racial justice as separate from the challenge of mental illness, when in fact these issues intersect in ways we’d do well to acknowledge and address together.
The point is not to say that we should re-orient energies away from racial justice and toward problems like mental illness which may be more palatable to white voters. Rather, it is to affirm our nation’s shared suffering from mental illness, and to attend to the fact that we face a vast, but overlooked crisis in mental health that relates directly to the more front-and-center challenges of racial justice, policing, and ultimately so much more of what ails us.
Daniel Klinghard is director of the J.D. Power Center for Liberal Arts in the World and professor of political science at the College of the Holy Cross.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Kyle Encar.