The Myth Of Mental Illness And Gun Violence

[onehandle]

Random gun violence is a terrifying fact of American life, because of both the violence and the randomness. Terror bred by violence does not really require comment; they are twinned. But terror bred by randomness does, especially when it leads people to accept as true a reasonable story that is false, when a myth functions as an explanation. And that is what is happening with the way we talk about mental illness and random gun violence. Thankfully, a just published report in the Annals of Epidemiology pulls together the facts we need to consider if we really want to adopt evidence-based policies to reduce random gun violence.

The article, “Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy,” is a comprehensive, critical survey of the available data (and it is surprisingly accessible and well-written for an academic treatise). It concludes that “most violent behavior is due to factors other than mental illness.” Adding deep sadness to the terror, it finds that “psychiatric disorders, such as depression, are strongly implicated in suicide, which accounts for more than half of gun fatalities.” It also outlines the behavioral risk factors that are associated with random gun violence. More on those findings in a moment. First I want to note that the article is fighting an uphill battle. Whether it be global warming, vaccinations, health-insurance or basic economics, a respect for data often takes a back seat to ideology in policy debates. Our public discourse is often a fact-free zone.

Also, media images mix with basic psychology so that it is even less likely we will adopt evidence-based policies to reduce random gun violence. Here’s an example of how the media propagates the myth. Benedict Carey, in a recent NY Times, wrote that “(s)hootings in places like Isla Vista, Calif., and Newtown, Conn., have turned a spotlight on the mental health system, and particularly how it handles young, troubled males with an aggressive streak.” He goes on to state, as educated writers now do after first giving voice to the myth, “(m)ost of these young men will never commit a violent crime, much less an atrocity.” OK, but doesn’t that sub-rosa imply that some will? And it only takes one to kill many. Plus, he does not go on to say who just might go on to commit a violent crime. And that uncertainty is intolerable.

The problem is we have a basic need for things to make sense, especially in the face of terror. Our need for a story—any story, as long as it seems reasonable and can make us feel safer—has led to a widespread belief that improperly treated serious mental illness is responsible for random gun violence. In a 2013 Gallup poll 80% of Americans blame the mental health system either “a great deal” or a “fair amount” for mass shootings in the United States. Regardless of fact, people explain random gun violence as the unfortunate consequence of untreated mental illness, of a woefully inadequate mental health delivery system (which is broken and is in dire need of a fix—but that is another story). The myth is that by fixing the mental health care delivery system we can all then breathe a sigh of relief. People will get the treatment they need and gun violence will dissipate. This would be fine if it were true. But it’s not.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2014/06/28/the-myth-of-mental-illness-and-gun-violence

So it seems that guns do really kill people.

[billh58]

1. K&R!

From the linked article:

"Jeffrey W. Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine and lead author of the article in Annals of Epidemiology was quoted in the UCLA Newsroom saying ”but even if schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression were cured, our society’s problem of violence would diminish by only about 4 percent.”

That is not very much. When people with mental illness do act violently it is typically for the same reasons that people without mental illness act violently. If you take comfort from the random terror of Aurora, Newton and Isla Vista, or from Chicago’s skyrocketing murder rates, in the myth we can attenuate gun violence by fixing our broken mental health care delivery system then it is time once again to be afraid."

Easy access to guns is as large a factor in the commission of gun violence as is mental incapacitation. More guns equals more gun violence.

Support a gun control organization of your choice today, and help to reduce gun violence on our streets in any way that you can.

[NYC_SKP]

2. We could prevent 18 suicides per day by Veterans if we'd treat PTSD.

That would be a terrific start.

In fact, nearly 2/3 of gun deaths in the US are suicides. (often there may be mental illness at play, doncha think?)

To suggest that mental illness plays some secondary insignificant role in gun violence is absurd.



The study looks legitimate and provocative.

Your throwaway comment at the end is simply wrong.

Rarely does a gun kill a person without a person mishandling it or using in intentionally to do bodily harm, incite fear, threaten or intimidate.

People do these things.

[pnwmom]

3. Why is this an either/or situation? True, most gun deaths are not caused by mentally ill people.

And we should be doing what we can to reduce them.

Some ARE caused by mentally ill people.

And we should be doing what we can to reduce them.

[billh58]

4. +100

People with diagnosed mental issues are not as dangerous as those who can pass a background check but have an undocumented history of bullying, spousal abuse, alcoholism, and other anti-social behavior.

Most law enforcement officers must undergo a written psychological examination before being allowed to carry a gun in the public venue. Why not this same standard for civilians who have had only a cursory "criminal" background check? No felonies? Here's your gun...

[Puzzledtraveller]

9. I'm with you

and it's BS, as if one side cannot accede a smidgen of the possibility that guns and mental illness can sometimes create a deadly combo, so it is guns and only guns that are the problem. This black/white either/or as you put it mentality is the reason we are spinning our wheels on these issues. The prevalence and suffering due to mental illness is routinely understated when in combination with violence in which guns are present.

[HereSince1628]

10. Agree, that we should do what we can be done...but responsibly and for the right reasons.

Looking at the wake of Aurora and Newtown it is clear that for politicians an opportunity was created to push funding for mental illness and greater regulation of firearms and firearms accessories.

Re mental illness, it's fairly clear that funding -is- needed, especially in teens and young adults who are in a period in life when the rate of onset of many mental illnesses peak; and a period in life when many young people have limited resources and little or no insurance coverage for mental health problems.

But.

There are also quite real downside risks to using irrational fear about news events as an opportunity to achieve what would otherwise be unsupported political action.

The use of shock doctrine to move the public to accept solutions they would otherwise reject about mental illness, simultaneously endorses negative myths, promotes broad misunderstanding and potentially expands and more deeply entrains discrimination against persons with mental illness. Application of shock doctrine depends upon both exploitation and endorsement of existing irrational fear.

Mental health care doesn't need the equivalent of the government campaign that was "Lies to war in Iraq" to whip up more fear. Rather there is need for rationality.

At the front end of the process that will address mental health needs there must be evidenced based risk assessment. If there isn't there will be no hope of meaningfully effective targeted application of publicly funded efforts that address demonstrable risks. Unfortunately, the NRA and others have precluded public funding of research on the problem for almost a generation.

Breaking myths is an essential part of moving forward because the myths of mental illness are used, by all sides, to obfuscate and achieve alternate purposes.

[xfundy]

5. Mental illness has gotten short shrift in the USA

The brain is an organ, like the heart, lungs, etc., and like them is subject to physical or chemical damage. To blame victims of mental illness is as smart as blaming demons.

[Jenoch]

6. People in the U.S. seem to react

much more loudly to the mass shootings that occur infrequently than they do to the large number of shootings that happen every week, say, in Chicago.

It seems to me that mental health issues were a primary factor in the shootings at Columbine, Aurora, Tucson, VA Tech, and Newtown.

It seems absurd to cry out for something to be done about those shootings and at the same time to dismiss mental health as a factor in gun deaths.

[Peace Patriot]

7. The U.S. government slaughtered 2 million people in Southeast Asia

including over 55,000 U.S. soldiers, for no good reason at all. Then it went on to slaughter 100,000 people with the "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad alone--plus tens of thousands killed in other ways and millions displaced--also for no good reason, with all kinds of lesser slaughters and horrifying displacements (such as the 5 million brutally displaced peasant farmers in the U.S./Colombia 'war on drugs') in between, and, of course, not to mention the endless war on Afghanistan and the CURRENT drone bombings by anonymous bombers, often with "collateral damage," and the U.S. arms trade worldwide, wherein every conflict in which U.S. corporate profits are concerned, is made worse by U.S. armaments.

In addition to all of this horror--mountains and mountains of bodies, killed by our "best and brightest"--by the most privileged and honored people among us, with complete impunity--our society has suffered militarization of police forces and prisons, and militarization of society itself, with no place safe from deadly violence, including kindergartens, and paranoia everywhere, along with a suffusion of high-powered weapons.

Is it any wonder that our young men erupt in random violence? Their role models at the top of our society are killers. I think it is irrelevant to ask whether someone who shoots up kindergartners, or any group of random victims, is suffering mental illness, without ALSO asking that question of our country, as a society with a shoot-em-up government. Are we as a people suffering mental illness? Or--to be more precise, since most of our people have opposed U.S. wars and other horrors--is our government mentally ill? Is it a condition of power in the U.S. to be mentally ill?

And, if our government leaders are NOT mentally ill, why aren't they in prison for mass murder?

That fact--that even our best leaders say that "we need to look forward not backward" on the crimes of the powerful--is the seminal fact of our age, and it is the defining fact of our country. We are a country of mass killers--or, in any case, we are a country that is led by mass killers. Is it any wonder that some of our young men think that mass killing is an option? It has been demonstrated to them, time and again, that mass killing for no good reason IS an option for the powerful.

It is VERY difficult to apply mental health analysis to a society as a whole. But I think it's time we tried to do it, given the symptoms of an extremely disordered society in the U.S., and one that is furthermore getting worse, not better. Societies do go insane. The multi-national insanity that spawned WW I, Nazi Germany and the Hutu-Tutsi Rwanda genocide, are three examples. Is that what is happening to our own society? Are we slipping over the edge into lethal craziness?

I think that most of us feel like the parents of the young Isla Vista mass murderer. They did everything they could to understand and help their son, even to crying the alarm about him. They tried so hard, and failed so utterly to prevent that disaster. What can we do? What in the hell can we do, not only to stop the currently building NEXT war, but some more of our youth going bonkers and shooting us up randomly, and all the other gun tragedies, some of which at least have reasons and many that don't?

Our mental health professionals need to think bigger. Can society itself be "put on the couch"? Can we find a way to analyze such a complex organism as U.S. society itself, and find a way to heal it? To heal us, as a whole?

On a personal note, I lost a loved one to the Texas Tower Sniper in 1966. So I have been thinking about the growing phenomenon of mass random killings in the U.S. for a very long time. I am quite certain, in my own mind, that this phenomenon is related to violence at the top--to all this often random slaughter perpetrated by our government leaders. I also think that there is one event, above all others, that is somehow the key to understanding the violence at the top and at the bottom of our society, and is perhaps the key to healing our country. That event was the assassination of JFK in 1963 (and possibly the assassinations of MLK and RFK five years later). In this regard, I highly recommend James Douglass' book "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters." Douglass nails the CIA for JFK's assassination--very convincingly--and furthermore believes that we need to ACKNOWLEDGE who did it--our own people--and WHY. We, as a society, have been "in denial" about this for fifty years. Do we have enough of a democracy left to face it, acknowledge it, expose it openly and REMEDY what led to it (the U.S. war machine)? Can we diagnose ourselves as having been mentally ill, as a society, lo these many decades, and heal the mental illness that makes killing an option--killing for power, killing for greed, killing randomly out of alienation, confusion and lack of decency among our leaders?

[inanna]

8. Outstanding Post!

Appreciate your perspective.