In My Voice: For Years, I Equated Mental Illness with Violence. I Was Wrong.

“Shedding personal prejudices is an important way to live a more open and inclusive life.”

Throughout Mental Health Month, we will be sharing Q&As with individuals who have experience with different aspects of mental health and gun violence. Today, we share a Q&A with Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Executive Director Josh Horwitz. Josh has spent nearly three decades working on gun violence prevention issues. In 2013, Josh helped found the Consortium for Risk-Based Firearm Policy, a group of mental health and public health experts who examine the intersection of guns and mental health.

1. How did you think about gun violence and mental illness at the beginning of your career?

I have been working in this field for almost 30 years, so it is hard to remember exactly how I approached this issue at the beginning. For a good chunk of my career, I did not give it a lot of thought. To the extent I thought about it at all, I had a very simplistic, binary, and ultimately stigmatizing mindset; I equated mental illness with erratic and violent behavior.

2. How and when did that change?

That began to change with the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, and as mass…