Mentally ill deserve better

Some more bad press — not about my writing, I haven’t received any new reviews — about mental illness.  It is everywhere.  I should no longer be surprised.  In this case it was a feature story on the PBS Newshour, a program widely respected for its balanced reporting.  

They were doing a piece on the Tenderloin District of San Francisco.  After acknowledging that nobody knew where the name came from, the reporter made the point that the Tenderloin is the one remaining neighborhood in that city that has resisted gentrification.  They may have used a different word, but they made the point repeatedly.  While the rest of San Francisco has undergone a noticeable upgrade, this part of town has not, despite its proximity to the most fashionable of districts.  All of this was part and parcel with PBS reporting.

The part that got under my skin was the reporter’s choice of including the mentally ill as inhabitants of the Tenderloin, along with drug addicts, homeless, and the desperately poor.  I know it seems like the thing to do these days, maybe it always has been, to look at the mentally ill as being entirely beyond the pale, as responsible for school shootings, or airport shootings, or all the heinous crimes the evening news has no other way of explaining.  It should come as no real surprise that the mentally ill should be grouped with the marginalized of San Francisco.

My problem is not with this PBS report alone.  It is with the lopsided aspect of the whole thing, the way mental illness is portrayed in the American media.  Doubtless, there are mentally ill in the Tenderloin.  The mentally frequently have a hard time making a living and wind up where the rents are low.  This, however, is not the whole picture.  It can’t be.  

The numbers don’t add up.  Measured by drug sales alone the numbers of mentally ill far outdistance the poor and impoverished, living on the margins.