James was interviewed for this exclusive article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Perhaps you’ve become sickeningly aware this week that the response by law enforcement to the Uvalde school shooting May 24 did not unfold as it should have. Mistakes, as they say, were made. Boy were they.

All of those mistakes, of course, were predated by the first mistake, the one made by anyone and everyone, directly or indirectly, who helped put an assault rifle in the hands of an 18-year-old.

When the 18-year-old loaded his legally purchased rifle, shot his grandmother in the face, drove her pick-up truck to the local elementary school and killed 19 elementary school kids and two teachers, mental illness suddenly became a hot topic again.

How about that?

There’s little doubt that mental illness is at work here in some form, but it’s a little less clear whom you should be calling crazy.

I spent a few minutes on the phone the other day with a licensed psychotherapist, which I’d recommend for just about anybody, but particularly if you find yourself carrying an assault rifle into a school or a mall, for example. In that case, you probably should have already done this, but in post-pandemic America, where one in every six or seven of us has some form of mental illness and half of us don’t get treated, things don’t always, as we’ve seen, unfold as they should.

In our conversation, licensed psychotherapist James Miller, with a quarter century of experience in the mental health field including years as a forensic analyst in the Washington, D.C., area determined such matters as who was and wasn’t competent to stand trial, and me, nothing so much as a licensed fisherman, agreed just about immediately on one thing.

America would be much better off if everyone in the country played the piano.

“I’m a little biased but yes, you’re absolutely right,” laughed Mr. Miller, who in addition to his mental health career is a pianist and composer who has sometimes invoked those skills to good use with listeners of his syndicated radio show. “I started playing in Grade 3 and music’s always been something that’s so powerful to me that I was eventually able to research the neurology of how sound affects a person. When people play, using their left and right hands, it actually allows their brains to process things a lot more quickly. So what I always tell people is that even if you don’t play very well, just play anything at all and think about something that you’re working through, and you’ll actually find that you have more introspection about it, and whatever emotions you have about it all of a sudden are minimized significantly.”

See? The entire mental health crisis in America solved, right there, except . . . sure, there are challenges. Pianos are expensive, for one thing, and so are lessons. Funny no one ever complains about the price of guns though. We’ve got more of those than we’ve got people. Pianos? Probably not.

Even when the evidence is robust and in little need of interpretation, we’re awfully hesitant in America to ascribe our quotidian tragedies to mental illness. From the riotous, insurrectionist events of Jan. 6, 2021, to 2022’s fusillade of mass shootings to people who are suddenly willing to kill you for putting too much mayo on their sandwich, the picture of a nation that’s mentally unwell should be more in focus every day. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 11% of adults in the United States reported symptoms of anxiety and depression prior to the pandemic. Amid the pandemic, that figure went to 30%.

Why then, does mental health remain a mostly marginalized issue in the context of our national dysfunction?

“In Western society — it is a melting pot so there are many different cultures within the U.S. culture, there are elements who don’t necessarily understand or agree with mental illness,” said Mr. Miller. “With some of those it’s more of a medical aspect and they can qualify it by saying, ‘Oh, the person has a thyroid problem and it’s caused this,’ or, ‘the person didn’t sleep enough,’ or ‘the person is partying too much, and they don’t really ascribe it to a mental health struggle.

“The difference now is, pre-pandemic, there was this baseline understanding of how everyone should act, a societal construct had been created on right from wrong. During the pandemic, there was a lot of information, disinformation, everyone was cloistered for so long that when people weren’t quarantined anymore, you’d find there was a lot more risky behavior. And so that baseline that had been set, pre-pandemic, has been moved so that now people are being much more risky and adverse to rules and norms, and it’s aggravated by political divisiveness — pro-vaccine/anti-vaccine. People are voicing that divisiveness and that voice is coming out in behaviors. The more risky behaviors people do, they’re resetting what’s considered normal and that’s unfortunately creating a new trend, and you have a copycat aspect.

“There’s a lot more a cavalier response to what’s considered socially acceptable.”

Which is why, in an admittedly roundabout way, four people getting shot at an Indiana mall on a quiet Sunday can’t sustain even one full news cycle of indignation anymore.

If anything remains certain in this hellscape summer of 2022, it’s that if you’ve got a piano, you had better sit down and play it.

With both hands.

Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter @genecollier.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | First Published July 19, 2022, 3:42 pm