Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Gun Violence?

Are you suggesting that if someone commits a violent crime they must have some kind of mental illness? And that we just haven't defined "prepared to commit an act of violence" as a mental illness.

I don't know that violent crime per se is a symptom of mental illness. But if a young man walks into a school cafeteria and shoots five people and then himself for no discernible reason, I think that qualifies as a symptom of mental illness. I think the author of this study relies too much on a clinical diagnosis or some prior evidence of serious mental illness. Imagine if a similar study explored the link between hearing voices and mental illness, and concluded that there must be no link because most of the people hearing voices for the first time had no previous clinical diagnoses or any other previous symptoms. The difference is that someone hearing voices for the first time can then go on hearing them for years, while someone who commits gun violence is generally not free to continue committing more. I am also curious why drug and alcohol abuse is not regarded by the author as a form of mental illness.

Did you read the article?

> When Swanson first analyzed the ostensible connection between violence and mental illness, looking at more than ten thousand individuals (both mentally ill and healthy) during the course of one year, he found that serious mental illness alone was a risk factor for violence—from minor incidents, like shoving, to armed assault—in only four per cent of cases. That is, if you took all of the incidents of violence reported among the people in the survey, mental illness alone could explain only four per cent of the incidents. When Swanson broke the samples down by demographics, he found that the occurrence of violence was more closely associated with whether someone was male, poor, and abusing either alcohol or drugs—and that those three factors alone could predict violent behavior with or without any sign of mental illness. If someone fit all three of those categories, the likelihood of them committing a violent act was high, even if they weren’t also mentally ill. If someone fit none, then mental illness was highly unlikely to be predictive of violence. “That study debunked two myths,” Swanson said. “One: people with mental illness are all dangerous. Well, the vast majority are not. And the other myth: that there’s no connection at all. There is one. It’s quite small, but it’s not completely nonexistent.”

> But if you look at people like Jaylen Fryberg, Mason Campbell, or Karl Pierson, you see no formal diagnosis of mental illness, and often, no actual signs of instability, either.

From the article.

> Doe we need a scientific study?

Uh, yes?