(Mar. 16, 2016) My name is Brock Miller. I am a 24-year-old white male, who grew up in a two-parent household in Colorado. I am currently a student at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
I know most, if not all, of you reading this do not know who I am, but if things had gone differently for me over this past year, it is very possible you would know my name, for all the wrong reasons.
I started law school in August 2013 and I quickly got sucked into the trap of thinking that in order to be successful I needed to focus exclusively on school, and cut out all other parts of my life. By January 2015 my unbalanced lifestyle caught up to me and my mental health began to deteriorate. By March 2015, things had still gotten to the point I could no longer make it through a class or any other social situation without violently weeping. Additionally, I had begun to have unpredictable mood swings, and was hearing voices on occasion.
This is the part of my story where I want to pause and recognize that my life could have gone one of two ways. One possibility was I could have not received the care I needed, which could have led to: relationships around me falling apart, me taking my own life, or me becoming violent towards others. The other possibility was I could receive the care I needed in order to get control of my mental illness and I could go along living my life as I had before.
Fortunately for me, I was blessed with the resources, connections, and support system I needed to get into see a psychiatrist who prescribed the correct medications, and a psychologist who gave me the right strategies to recover. I had a wife who stuck by me every step of the way. I had an insurance plan that included mental health services, and I had money in the bank to pay co-pays and deductibles. But, what if my mental illness got to the point that I began having more extensive delusions and the voices began to speak to me more frequently?
These questions send a shiver down my spine and force me to acknowledge a frightening reality, which is that, if just a few things would have been different, I could have been James Holmes. When I have expressed this thought to some of my friends and family, they reply, “He was a monster, you aren’t. You wouldn’t have let it get to that point!” The thing that these people do not understand is there were times when I felt that I was not in control of my thoughts or actions. I suppose the best way to describe it is that I was not myself anymore. In short, it is my belief that if things had been slightly different, there is no way to predict what I would have done.
I am not attempting to downplay what happened to the victims in the theater that night, and I am certainly not advocating that those who have a mental health illness should be given some sort of immunity. I’m suggesting that universal access to quality mental health care would save lives.
We as a country need to remove the stigma associated with mental illness and start looking deeper into the amount of access those with mental illnesses have to quality mental health providers.
BROCK MILLER
DENVER, COLORADO
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