US: 'Most mass shootings not committed by mentally ill'
by Kiran Alvi
11 Nov 2017
After Devin Patrick Kelley allegedly entered a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas last Sunday and shot dead 26 people, the conversation, prompted by politicians, immediately turned to mental health. The "horrific shooting" represents a "mental health problem at the highest level", US President Donald Trump declared on Twitter, adding in a press conference that the attack "isn't a gun situation". Trump's argument was bolstered when it was revealed that Kelley, 25, had "suffered from mental disorders" and had escaped a psychiatric hospital more than five years ago. He was sent to the facility after being charged in a military court with assaulting his wife and fracturing his infant stepson's skull, according to documents obtained by local news channel KPRC.
Despite the revelations about Kelley's mental health, and the fact that the majority of Americans (63%) believe mass shootings in the US have more to do with mental health problems than gun control laws, health professionals warn that people should not draw a connection between mass shootings and mental illness. "This is all a red herring," Liza Gold, a forensic psychiatrist at Georgetown University of Medicine and editor of the book, Gun Violence and Mental Illness said. "The vast majority of mass shootings are not committed by the diagnosable mentally ill, no matter what politicians try to suggest," Gold said.
"Our country is in a state of denial about the real nature of gun violence and what we can do to decrease mortality." Only about three to five percent of violent acts in the US are committed by individuals who have been diagnosed with a mental illness, and the percentage of crimes they commit with a gun "are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness," according to findings published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2015. Studies have also found that the mentally ill are no more likely to become violent than a person without an illness, and that only one percent of violent acts committed by psychiatric patients involved killing a "target".
"If we were able to magically cure schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, that would be wonderful, but overall violence would go down by only about four percent," according to Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, told ProPublica in 2014. The National Rifle Association (NRA), the most powerful gun lobby in the US, has capitalised on the public perception of the mentally ill. Following a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada in early October that left 58 dead and more than 500 injured, NRA Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre also pointed to mental health. "I mean, the outrage they're trying to stir against the NRA, they ought to be stirring against the mental health system, which has completely collapsed," he told CBS at the time.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/mass-shootings-committed-mentally-ill-171111162521074.html
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