Last week, the Champaign Parent Teacher’s Association held a mental health forum in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 children and six adults were killed. The goal of the forum was to provide information about local mental health services that could possibly prevent similar tragedies from happening.

It’s no secret that there has been an increase in these mass shootings in the past few years. The shootings at Fort Hood, the Colorado movie theater and the Sikh temple in Wisconsin are just a few of the examples of recent mass shootings, but the stories that followed all of these have something in common: mental health. 

After news of the Sandy Hook shooting broke out, most people in America were left with the questions of how someone could carry out this massacre. What kind of person could walk into an elementary school and shoot down 20 innocent first-graders?

Though many possible motives floated around, there was the common assumption that mental illness was the cause for all of this. Following the shooting, there was word that Adam Lanza had some type of mental illness and that his mother was planning to commit him to a psychiatric facility. Though we might never know if Lanza’s mother had planned to commit him, people will associate mental illness with the shooter.

Most of us consider ourselves “normal” in some respect, and because we are mentally sane, we would never carry out such a massacre. Classing tragedies like this on a generality like mental illness is unfair to those who do have one, especially if we don’t know for a fact that mental illness is really what caused the shooting. By labeling these shooters as “mentally ill” without such firm verification, a damaging stereotype becomes real: Anyone with a mental illness could snap at a moment’s notice and ruthlessly kill.  

Mental illness takes hold of society and public opinion as it has in the last month only following shootings like this. Illness is paired with the images of assault weapons and faces of innocent victims, but mental illness and gun violence are two separate issues. 

President Barack Obama announced plans for tougher gun control on Wednesday, and it included improving mental health services. At last, the government is making a bigger push for mental health treatment, but it’s blurring the distinction between being mentally ill and being a mass murderer. 

Now, it seems as if the only reason mental health services have a spotlight trained on them is that the public doesn’t feel safe anymore with what some would consider to be the mentally ill unrestrained. This should not be the case. These services exist to improve day-to-day lives, not to reduce any ounce of violence they have building inside of them.

While the federal government and local organizations like the Champaign schools PTA are now making efforts to focus on mental health, we need to keep sight of the real utility of mental health services. Improvement and availability of mental health services should come from wanting to improve the quality of life for the mentally ill, not to solve the problem of mass murders. Mental health services are meant to bolster the lives of those who require their services, not to imprison the next mass murderer in a mental institution.