Collier: Too many guns, too few pianos

I spent a few minutes on the phone the other day with a licensed psychotherapist, which I’d recommend for just about anybody, but particularly if you find yourself carrying an assault rifle into a school or a mall, for example.

In our conversation, licensed psychotherapist James Miller, with a quarter-century of experience in the mental health field including years as a forensic analyst in the Washington, D.C., area determining such matters as who was and wasn’t competent to stand trial, and me, nothing so much as a licensed fisherman, agreed just about immediately on one thing.

America would be much better off if everyone in the country played the piano.

“I’m a little biased but yes, you’re absolutely right,” laughed Miller, who in addition to his mental health career is a pianist and composer who has sometimes invoked those skills to good use with listeners of his syndicated radio show. “When people play, using their left and right hands, it actually allows their brains to process things a lot more quickly. So what I always tell people is that even if you don’t play very well, just play anything at all and think about something that you’re working through, and you’ll actually find that you have more introspection about it.”

See? The entire mental health crisis in America solved, right there, except . . . sure, there are challenges. Pianos are expensive, for one thing, and so are lessons. Funny no one ever complains about the price of guns, though. We’ve got more of those than we’ve got people. Pianos? Probably not.

Even when the evidence is robust and in little need of interpretation, we’re awfully hesitant in America to ascribe our quotidian tragedies to mental illness. From the riotous, insurrectionist events of Jan. 6, 2021, to 2022’s fusillade of mass shootings to people who are suddenly willing to kill you for putting too much mayo on their sandwich, the picture of a nation that’s mentally unwell should be more in focus every day.

Why then, does mental health remain mostly marginalized in the context of our national dysfunction?

“The difference now is, pre-pandemic, there was this baseline understanding of how everyone should act, a societal construct had been created on right from wrong,” Miller said. “During the pandemic, there was a lot of information, disinformation, everyone was cloistered for so long that when people weren’t quarantined anymore, you’d find there was a lot more risky behavior. And so that baseline that had been set, pre-pandemic, has been moved so that now people are being much more risky and adverse to rules and norms, and it’s aggravated by political divisiveness — pro-vaccine/anti-vaccine. People are voicing that divisiveness and that voice is coming out in behaviors.

“There’s a lot more a cavalier response to what’s considered socially acceptable.”

Which is why, in an admittedly roundabout way, four people getting shot at an Indiana mall on a quiet Sunday can’t sustain even one full news cycle of indignation anymore.

If anything remains certain in this hellscape summer of 2022, it’s that if you’ve got a piano, you had better sit down and play it. With both hands.