It’s a Queer Issue: Offender profiling and mental health stigma

By Charlie Tetiyevsky

“Is there any reason why you’re filming us, sir? I mean given the current—the current terrorism climate and stuff, sir, I’m just saying, I’m just saying, sir—what was your name?”

The words came from Senior Constable M. Sanchez in a video released last Saturday by the group Save New South Wales of two officers interrogating a traveler at Central for legally filming police officers in a public space.

“This is going in a circle,” an unnamed officer continues after a Kafkaesque round of questioning, “Do you have any mental health issues at all, sir?” The man behind the camera gives a stunned laugh and the officer also smiles, as if he were using a playground retort and not asking an investigatory question (or whatever the purpose of asking someone about their health status is).

There has become something of a targeted deferral among NSW police from combating occurring crime to preemptively profiling lawfully behaving citizens in the name of preventing “terrorism” and “stuff,” even when what they screen for has no influence on criminality. I wrote last week about the overzealous (and ineffectual) use of sniffer dogs to punish those with a substance use disorder (an issue that disproportionally affects LGBTQI individuals), but what I didn’t mention was that substance use disorder is considered a mental illness—one of the three most common types of mental illnesses in the country (the others being anxiety disorders and depression).

Misunderstandings about non-neurotypical people (who some people refer to as “mentally ill”) are fueled by a public and legislative concern with the amorphous concept of “anti-social behaviour.” Certainly there can be times when people who are unable or unwilling to access adequate mental health treatment seem to be acting in an anti-social manner: yelling or otherwise behaving “strangely.” These acts are anti-social only in the sense that they are opposite of (anti-) the social mores (-social) that neurotypical society is used to and promotes. What this behaviour is not is anti-social in a criminal sense: actively opposed to (anti-) the existence of society (-social). A person experiencing psychosis who communicates with a radio, though perhaps uncomfortable to watch if you don’t know what you’re looking at, is not dangerous. Someone filming police lawfully—either because they are amused or uncomfortable or mentally ill or gay or a reincarnated bird or whatever—is not dangerous. If anything, a police officer should realise that filming in public—in front of a line of bored policemen—should exonerate a person from suspicion; after all, what sort of an ineffectual dissident would be so obvious?

In all seriousness, there is a misunderstanding even to this day, even when one in five Australians experiences a mental illness in any given year (over one in four within the 18-24 age group), that being mentally ill makes a person violent against others.

In Australia, explains the Black Dog Institute’s look into mental health demographics, thirty people a day unsuccessfully attempt suicide. At least six a day succeed. These six are more likely to be from the LGBTQI community than they are from any other population in Australia. “Same-sex attached Australians have up to fourteen times higher rates of suicide attempts than their heterosexual peers,” details the National LGBTI Health Alliance in a 2013 Mental Health & Suicide Briefing Paper, and even just being attracted to the same sex brings with it a six times higher likelihood of attempting suicide. Up to half of all “trans people have actually attempted suicide at least once in their lives.”

The violence is not directed outwards. Mental illness is not linked to violence in general, and it’s not even linked to crime, the American Psychological Association found (unless, as in the case of substance abuse, the disease itself has been criminalised). Not only that, but the American Psychiatric Association in 1994 made a definitive statement that looks at the problem from a different perspective: “the vast majority of people who are violent do not suffer from mental illnesses.”

And yet, in Australia, nearly half of all prison entrants (49%) “reported having been told by a health professional that they have a mental health disorder.”

Like sniffer dogs, such false-flag indicators and lines of questioning obviously do not result in the prevention of crime (and “stuff”), and they place unreasonable burden upon groups of people that might be stigmatized not only for their mental health, but also for their sexuality, gender expression, race, or any other number of qualities that engage public biases.

I often hear the phrase, “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about.” But what when about society has decided that who you are is wrong?

Mental health is not a niche issue, and the non-neurotypical are not members of a special interest group. More often than not they are our queer or marginalised peers or family members—or us ourselves. Certainly overeager policing, if allowed to continue on too long, eventually harms everyone in a society by dampening civil liberties—but first and foremost, before such long-reaching effects are felt, it harms the most vulnerable communities of all.

And to do so in the name of preventing unsubstantiated alleged violence when it simply delays directing state funds towards affordable, accessible, and adequate public mental health care? That’s just criminal.