Gun Violence and Mental Illness

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer, the New York Times

• https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html

Untangling Mental Illness from Gun Violence, Julie Beck in the Atlantic

• https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/untangling-gun-violence-from-mental-illness/485906/

"The overwhelming majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent, just like the overwhelming majority of all people are not violent. Only 4 percent of the violence—not just gun violence, but any kind—in the United States is attributable to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression (the three most-cited mental illnesses in conjunction with violence). In other words, 96 percent of the violence in America has nothing to do with mental illness."

Is Mental Illness Really Behind Most Gun Violence?, University of California Berkeley's Wellness Program

• http://www.berkeleywellness.com/healthy-community/health-care-policy/article/mental-illness-really-behind-most-gun-violence

"Improve mental health care, the argument goes—or even just keep mentally ill people away from guns—and our country’s epidemic of gun violence will decline.

"But there’s a big problem with blaming this country’s epidemic of gun violence on mental illness: The evidence overwhelmingly doesn’t support it."

Don’t Blame Mental Illness for Gun Violence, the Editorial Board of the NY Times

• https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/opinion/dont-blame-mental-illness-for-gun-violence.html

"But mass shootings represent a small percentage of all gun violence, and mental illness is not a factor in most violent acts. According to one epidemiological estimate, entirely eliminating the effects of mental illness would reduce all violence by only 4 percent. Over all, less than 5 percent of gun homicides between 2001 and 2010 were committed by people with diagnoses of mental illness, according to a public health study published this year.

"Blaming mental health problems for gun violence in America gives the public the false impression that most people with mental illness are dangerous, when in fact a vast majority will never commit violence...

"And, of course, effectively diagnosing and treating mental illness is a worthy goal in itself. But addressing mental health, on its own, will not solve the country’s gun violence problem."

Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy

Jeffrey W. Swanson, PhD, E. Elizabeth McGinty, PhD, MS, Seena Fazel, MBChB, MD, FRCPsych, Vickie M. Mays, PhD, MSPH

in the May 2015 Annals of Epidemiology

• http://www.annalsofepidemiology.org/article/S1047-2797%2814%2900147-1/fulltext

"Results

"Media accounts of mass shootings by disturbed individuals galvanize public attention and reinforce popular belief that mental illness often results in violence. Epidemiologic studies show that the large majority of people with serious mental illnesses are never violent. However, mental illness is strongly associated with increased risk of suicide, which accounts for over half of US firearms–related fatalities.

"Conclusions

"Policymaking at the interface of gun violence prevention and mental illness should be based on epidemiologic data concerning risk to improve the effectiveness, feasibility, and fairness of policy initiatives."

Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms

Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Kenneth T. MacLeish, PhD, in the February 2015 American Journal of Public Health

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/

‘Yet surprisingly little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. According to Appelbaum,25 less than 3% to 5% of US crimes involve people with mental illness, and the percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness. Databases that track gun homicides, such as the National Center for Health Statistics, similarly show that fewer than 5% of the 120 000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.26

‘Meanwhile, a growing body of research suggests that mass shootings represent anecdotal distortions of, rather than representations of, the actions of “mentally ill” people as an aggregate group…

‘Gun crime narratives that attribute causality to mental illness also invert the material realities of serious mental illness in the United States. Commentators such as Coulter blame “the mentally ill” for violence, and even psychiatric journals are more likely to publish articles about mentally ill aggression than about victimhood.5 But, in the real world, these persons are far more likely to be assaulted by others or shot by the police than to commit violent crime themselves. In this sense, persons with mental illness might well have more to fear from “us” than we do from “them.” And blaming persons with mental disorders for gun crime overlooks the threats posed to society by a much larger population—the sane.’

The Harvard Injury Control Research Center

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/

Suicide: Means Matter

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/

Suicide

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-ownership-and-use/

Homicide

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/

How this affects women and other gender minorities

Women: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/misperceptions/

Batterers: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/editorials-encyclopedia-comments-book-reviews/