EDITORIAL — A “mental health issue”

While our reenactment of the Battle of Mactan last April 27 proceeded with no untoward incident here in Cebu, in Vancouver, Canada, where Filipino-Canadians were celebrating Lapu-Lapu Day, it was anything but untoward.

This after a man drove an SUV into a crowd lining up for food trucks. Eight people between the ages of five and 65 have been confirmed dead while dozens of others were injured.

The videos are hard to watch, with people lying on the ground as others rush to their aid, some of them no longer moving.

Police have arrested the SUV driver, Kai-Ji Adam Lo, 30, a man said to have “frequent interactions” with the police.

Police have also said this didn’t appear to be a terror attack or a racist attack, but added that it appeared to have been a deliberate one and was not an accident. Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim is also quoted as saying the incident seems to have been caused by a “mental health issue”.

This is where it gets confusing, someone with a racist or terrorist agenda would have been easier to understand and his motives clear. You can tell whom they want to send a message to, you can tell whom they want to scare, and you can tell whom they are likely to kill or maim.

But when it comes to someone with mental health issues, you can never tell what can influence their actions or decisions. Lo may not have been driven by any particular reason to drive his SUV into that crowd, he may just have thought it was the right thing to do.

This isn’t to say those who have mental health issues are automatically nuts and most likely to drive an SUV into a crowd of people, there are different degrees of mental health issues and not all of them turn sufferers into murderers.

Our hearts go out to those who were killed or injured in this attack, but to gain something good from this tragedy it should call attention to mental health issues. Of course not to punish and limit those who have them, but to help those who suffer the worst of this condition.