Stop Saying This About Mental Illness, Homelessness, and Violence

It’s not a good argument, and it makes advocates for marginalized communities sound silly

Photo by Randy Laybourne on Unsplash

If there’s one thing I dislike almost as much as right-wingers wielding bad arguments, it’s people on the liberal-left doing the same.

In fact, sometimes the latter bothers me more, precisely because, as someone invested in a progressive worldview and the positions necessary to sustain and propagate it, I find it especially important to get one’s facts and analysis straight.

But sadly, an awful lot of progressive folks fail at this basic task, resorting to arguments that are utterly unhelpful and even damaging to the causes they support.

So, for instance, whenever the subjects of homelessness and violence or mental illness and violence come up — often raised by someone whose politics are clearly hostile to both the unhoused and the mentally ill — advocates for those groups respond predictably with the same mantra, almost instantaneously.

You know what it is.

Those who live on the street or who experience mental and emotional illness are “more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of violent crime.”