John Oliver sets the record straight on mental health and mass shootings

Mental illness is "the thing actors pretend to have in order to win Oscars," John Oliver begins on Sunday's Last Week Tonight, and that darkly comic tone carried through the entire hard-hitting segment on mental health. "We don't like to talk about it much," Oliver said of mental health, and "when we do, we don't talk about it well" — he singled out Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil as prime examples.

One sign of just how much Americans don't like to talk about mental health is that one of the only times it comes up is after mass shootings, "as a means of steering the conversation away from gun control," Oliver said, playing clips of several Republican presidential candidates reacting to the latest mass shooting, in Oregon. "It seems like there is nothing like a mass shooting to suddenly spark political interest in mental health," but that's actually the worst time to talk about it, Oliver said, noting research that shows the large majority of mentally ill people aren't violent and only 5 percent of shooting deaths are committed by mentally ill people.

But if America is going to talk about mental health, Oliver said, it might as well do it right. There are about 10 million people with a serious mental illness in the U.S., almost the population of Greece, he noted, "and most of us know a lot more about Greece than we know about our mental health system." So he gave viewers a brief overview of the system, starting with John F. Kennedy's never-funded attempt to shift the mentally ill from asylums to mental health clinic, touching on a terrible practice called "Greyhound therapy," and including the damning statistic that the most common place for America to house the mentally ill is in jail — 10 times more than in state psychiatric facilities. "Our whole system needs a massive overhaul," and it won't be easy, Oliver said. But "if we're going to constantly use mentally ill people to dodge conversations about gun control, then the very least we owe them is a f--king plan." Watch below. Peter Weber

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