Evil is Not Mental Illness

Mental illness is not shooting up a theater. Mental illness is not shooting up a garlic festival. Mental illness is not white supremacy. Evil is not mental illness.

PTSD isn't crawling across the floor, screaming orders to imaginary soldiers and throwing imaginary grenades at imaginary Viet Cong.

Compulsions aren't voices that tell you to kill people.

PTSD is having to get up and walk out of a restaurant because the band is playing "Hey Ho" by the Lumineers and the shouting is making you panic.

PTSD is lying to your spouse about trivial mistakes in absolute terror, because your ex taught you that owning up to anything gets you abused and screamed at.

PTSD is being terrified when your significant other behaves erratically, because you're convinced they're going to hurt you.

PTSD is a kicked dog. PTSD is not violence. It is fear.

Compulsions are spending two entire days sitting in your apartment, using tweezers to laboriously pull each individual hair out of your entire mustache, regardless of the fact that it hurts like hell, because you hate having a dark stain across your face. Because you feel ugly.

Compulsions are constantly checking your auto mirrors and getting out of your car at every traffic light to look underneath, all to make sure you haven't accidentally run anybody over.

Compulsions are not voices telling you to shoot people. They are feelings that make you need to perform tasks even if you don't want to, even if they hurt you or inconvenience you.

Mental illness is not a bully from a Stephen King novel, sitting in the dark, having conversations with invisible demons about how much they hate women and want to shoot them. Mental illness is not kids sitting on internet forums talking about involuntary celibacy and "roasties".

Evil is not mental illness.

Evil is your neighbor. Evil is your son, your brother, your father, your classmate, your teammate.

Evil is lonely, isolated men radicalized by toxic masculinity and religion, whipping each other into a frenzy on the internet, tricked and emboldened by a hateful old white supremacist in the White House and his gang of fascist mobsters into doing their death-squad dirty work for them.

That's what evil is. It's not mental illness, no matter how much that trailer-trash Richie Rich currently squatting in the Oval Office blows Nazi smoke up your ass.

​And it's sure as hell not video games.