When Will Gun Violence Survivors Receive The Mental Health Resources They Need?

By Lincoln Anthony Blades


because the country keeps it up and continues to witness horrific mass shootings, it seems the national conversation is finally beginning to shift towards recognizing how traumatic it is for people to witness, survive, or lose a loved one to gun violence. The recent deaths of 19-year-old Sydney Aiello and 16-year-old Calvin Desir, both survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and Jeremy Richman, the 49-year-old father whose young child was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, in particular directed our attention to this wholly preventable epidemic’s collateral effects.


They’re not alone, and never have been. Though our media, our law enforcement, and our legislators can with little effort enumerate on the severity of a shooting by counting the collection of people who have suffered by some form of bodily damage, few in power account for the fact that gun violence leaves lasting scars, for those affected by both mass shootings and everyday violence.


“I grew up around violence. I have a best friend and she comes from an entirely different environment,” 18-year-old anti-violence activist Kenidra Woods tells MTV News. “Say if I hear a noise outdoor or I hear something, like, pop, I’m thinking, oh my God, somebody got a gun outdoors. My anxiety just goes so high however she wouldn’t be trippin’ off it.”


Not only are teens leading several of America’s gun reform movements, yet they’re also organizing around mental health awareness: Kenidra, who lost a cousin to gun violence in 2009, founded The objective for Humanity Project and organized the Project’s National Rally for Peace in St. Louis. She has been a major voice in the young, anti-gun violence movement, acting as a local leader for the March For Our Lives movement that was traditional in response to the Parkland massacre. However, despite her unwavering support for the victims of the shooting and the whole Parkland community, she found that the legislative response to their trauma was treated far differently than young, affected communities of color.


Yet Florida has frequently lagged in spending on mental healthcare services per student compared to other states across the country, the Parkland attack motivated Florida lawmakers to pass a $400 million gun and school safety bill, with $69 million committed to early mental health screening and services. Unfortunately, the bill left out the Democrats’ call for a ban on semi-automatic rifles, while adopting the “Guardian Program” which would permit school staff, like teachers, to carry guns in school.


Kai Koerber, a senior at Marjory Stoneman and the president of Societal Reform Corporation, a nonprofit mental health charity serious about the cultivation of a peaceful world, believes that several of the mental health programs offered by the bill are lacking. “I honestly don’t think [lawmakers’] approach was the ideal way,” he tells MTV News. “They coupled the counseling sessions with an extension of the drug-use prevention program and also you had to take a mandatory drug test to get help. A lot of people don’t desire to do that.”


And while communities like Parkland are left to analyze the effectiveness of their mental health programs, America’s most underserved and weak communities have been mentally and emotionally suffering from the effects of gun violence for decades without any assistance or maybe recognition. As a result, some activists are pushing for comprehensive reform that affects a vast swath of people; the March For Our Lives Arizona students ensured that mental health resources were a key component of their anti-gun violence legislation, and Parkland activists are using their platforms to also bring focus to underserved communities. The fact that it's right now up to youth activists to repair a systemic societal failure is not lost on Kenidra.


“In no way am I saying it’s their fault and I love that they’re getting support, although there was a lot of calls for [Parkland students] to get free mental health services. I never saw that [for] the Black community,” she remembers. “We just have to get through it. And we have to pay for it. We don’t have free resources.”


Laws that reform access and care, no matter how comprehensive, rarely account for the specific barriers that block marginalized people from deriving the mental and emotional healthcare they require. While fantastic loss has the capacity to shake people to the core, so several people in neglected communities just push forward, untreated, with mental and emotional wounds that never heal, and proliferative scar tissue that never matures. They are forced to stay in a country where oppression is inescapable, and the trauma that results is a feature of the system, not a glitch.


“It bills a lot of cash to go to therapy or converse with a mental health practitioner. You typically have to take off time from work because they’re only obtainable throughout certain hours,” Dr. Funké Aladejebi, an anti-racism researcher and educator, tells MTV News. People who aren’t building a lot of cash feel as if they are denied access to advantages, and worry about being able to afford to take time off work; they don’t have the same luxuries of time as other communities. “It’s either having practitioners who are more obtainable or more affordable, and even more active — who can actually access people in their homes or private community spaces,” she continues.


Dr. Aladejebi also believes in actively combating the stigma surrounding mental healthcare, given that several low-income people believe it is only a necessity for either the susceptible or the crazed. “Go talk about mental health as soon as things are going good,” she says. “Part of how the Black community has been taught about as soon as mental health should be treated is once things are bad, yet that’s not how mental health works. Mental health is about seeking out care to support you prevent and deal with moments of trauma.”


While advocating for better professional therapy options for minorities in underserved communities is crucial, our society also needs to fine-tune our entire approach on helping grieving communities. “Therapy is one segment of a puzzle,” says Joyal Mulheron, founder and executive director of EVERMORE, a non-profit company serious about serving parents who have lost children. “What I often attempt to remind folks of is, for those who can even get access to it, that’s one hour in one day. What occurs the other 23 hours of the day?” Joyal believes that there needs to be a more holistic accounting of how society aims to support those dealing with trauma and loss.


“It begins from the starting any time whenever a policeman or paramedic comes to the scene of a crime, how are they communicating this to the family?” She adds. “In my experience, in the event you get an audience of bereaved parents with each other, they'll almost obviously just be talking about death notification because the primary point in where society needs to do better.”


How folks are treated by law enforcement and medical personnel also plays a big role in whether the trauma is, at least, temporarily soothed or exacerbated. In 2014, soon after two Cleveland police officers gunned down 12-year-old Tamir Rice for holding a toy gun, police tackled his distraught 14-year-old sister and harshly interrogated her once she cried. Three months later, right following the city had already realized they killed a unarmed Black boy who was guilty of nothing, the city sent the Rice family member a $500 ambulance fee for “emergency medical services rendered because the decedent’s last dying expense.” (They later revoked the bill.)


In back of dealing with first responders and the systemic obstacles they might face, life doesn't stop for people experiencing loss. Only about 60 percent of all workers have access to bereavement leave which is generally limited to three days, yet residents in underserved and minority communities are far likelier to be employed at a job that doesn’t distribute any access to paid leave. There really is also no national guideline or policy involving how schools should help students who experience violent loss, even if that trauma occurs on campus — which leads to further discomfort for some students. Immediately following the Parkland shooting, as an example, the school district significantly increased the police presence on campus, although little thought was given to how their presence mentally and emotionally affected Black and brown students in particular. A month soon following the attack, Kai told CNN, "The police are making their own rules and are turning our school into a police state,” resulting in even more stress on an already frayed community.


Given the lack of systemized resources for people dealing with loss, some firms are stepping in: EVERMORE provides grief directories for families that are looking for support groups, and also their NORTH STAR program that facilitates connections between grieving families. Firms like Mothers of Murdered Children, Justice for Homicide Victims, and The Dougy Center for Grieving Children and Teens also distribute support for families dealing with grief.


Chicago Survivors Youth Program Manager JaShawn Hill, a licensed clinical social worker who lost her brother to gun violence, stresses the significance of adding the element of lived experience into their work. “A lot of times people view the families we serve as an audience of people who have ‘chosen’ impoverished and violence-stricken lives, although the reality is that they are victims of crime,” she points out. “These families have experienced violent loss and right now they are dealing with complex grief because they have lost someone to a senseless act, so people need to be compassionate and look at them as survivors.”


Gun violence In the United States is also crucial of a discussion to fall into a partisan purgatory where the provide will or won’t be adequately addressed depending on which party is in power. The lives of potential future casualties and the critically wounded hang in the balance, and the lives of these intimately related to them are impacted in extraordinary ways. If elected officials are truly really interested in aiding the nation’s mental and emotional health in the wake of violence, those discussions must include our most susceptible communities too.