Mass Shootings and Mental Illness

/

After a terrible and horrifically tragic event like a mass shooting people instinctively look for answers. Some sort of reasoning, something that makes sense in this seemingly insane and senseless act. News coverage of these events often focuses on either the victims of the shooting and their families or the shooter themselves. When the stories focus on the shooter they almost always try to figure out some sort of reason for why they would do such a terrible thing. In doing so however they almost always attribute mental illness to the shooter, providing a quick and easily digestible reason for why this incident happened. This can be not only false but extremely problematic.

After a mass shooting, the news will portray the shooter as a person who must have been mentally ill when no real evidence for that exists, purely due to the fact that they engaged in an extremely violent act. This is extraordinarily problematic for many reasons. To set the record straight I am not saying that people who have a mental illness are incapable of, or never commit acts of violence. What I am saying is that a person who has a mental illness is astronomically less likely to engage in an extremely violent act than a person who does not have a mental illness. There is so much evidence to support this and in case you were worried about finding some (which I know you were), fear not I have complied several here just for you.

An article posted in the Journal of World Psychiatry by Heather Stuart finds that there is little to no evidence to support that people who have mental illnesses engage in violent behaviors more so than the population of people who do not have mental illnesses. She also found that 3% of violent crimes were attributable to people who had a serious mental illness such as depression or schizophrenia. The more telling factors of whether or not someone is likely to engage in violent activity are socio-demographic and socio-economic factors.

Another article by Metzl and MacLeish in 2015 published by the American Journal of Public Health entitled Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms found that less than 3% to 5% of gun violence is perpetrated by a person who has a serious mental illness. They find that there is absolutely no evidence to link mental illness and firearm violence, and that gun violence is not something that mental illness can describe. This review also indicates that a psychiatric diagnosis has zero bearing on accurately predicting gun violence. 

The stigma that exists and is widely distributed through news coverage is that a person is suffering from a mental illness, and therefore will do irrational things. This is not only an incorrect representation of mental illness, but also is an over-generalization of all of the hundreds of different kinds of mental illnesses. Saying that mental illness is the reason for mass shootings equates people who have schizophrenia with people who have generalized anxiety.  Now I understand that people who suffer from delusions and hallucinations is foreign to a lot of people and can even be seen as scary, especially because of media portrayal, but I've worked with this population of people every day for the past year and they are actually the least violent group of people. People who have schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other more debilitating mental illnesses are in reality more likely to keep to themselves due to depressive or anxious symptoms, and are much more likely to be victims of violence.

This false portrayal of mentally ill people as one intertwined with violence creates a very real and present stigma against people who have a mental illness. This stigma is unbelievably detrimental to the well-being of people who experience mental illness. A 2013 Literature Review from Parcesepe and Cabassa entitled Public Stigma of Mental Illness in the United States: A Systematic Literature Review found that the stigma against people who have a mental illness has substantially increased over time. The review also found that mental illness stigma can result in "[b]eliefs of shame, blame, incompetency, punishment, and criminality of people with mental illness". This means that people who have mental illness are treated with social distance and other damaging behaviors causing them to feel abnormal and worthless.

This stigma creates these terrible feelings of helplessness and social distancing, but also facilitates and gives rise to an increase in bullying. A release by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) finds that people who bully and are victims of bullying are substantially more likely to engage in violence. Let me reiterate that. Not only the people who bully, but also the victims of bullying are substantially more likely to engage in more violent behaviors in childhood and later on in adulthood. This means that the stigma of mental illness as people who are inherently violent gives rise to bullying, which in turn can cause more violent behaviors resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy. A kid who is mentally ill gets bullied in school because his peers understand mental illness as indicative of being crazy and violent. This causes the kid to isolate and continually get bullied potentially because of it, so later on in life they are more likely to engage in violent behaviors, because of the stigma against people who have mental illness. 

Now this a problem in of itself but it gets worse. The stigma causes people who may have mental illness less likely to come forward and get help because of fear of ridicule and backlash from those around them. If you were struggling with depression or anxiety and you came out and said you had a mental illness, people would immediately and categorically portray you as not only different and lesser than that of a "normal" person, but also you would be seen as dangerous and inherently irrationally violent. If it were me, I sure wouldn't want to come forward with that stigma in place, meaning I wouldn't get the diagnosis and treatment that I needed. So I'd be unnecessarily suffering from all of these mental ailments that very much have successful treatments.

So why do we do feed this stigma? Well in the inevitable search for answers we want to separate ourselves from the perpetrator. We want to figure out why this person did such a horrible thing, but we also want to make sure it's not something that we could or would do as well. One of the biggest fears we have in our country is the possibility that we too could be capable of such a heinous act of violence. Slapping a label of mental illness on someone creates a distinction between the person committing the crime and ourselves. The thought process would go, "I personally don't understand why this person did such a terrible thing. Therefore they must be crazy and their craziness is what caused them to do this". This oversimplification of all of the many factors that go into why these sorts of things happen is slightly inevitable because our brains craves simplicity and meaning, but also never solves anything and only creates a worse environment.

Attributing mental illness as the cause of a mass shooter’s motives is misguided and ultimately harmful, as people who suffer from mental illnesses are the least likely population to engage in violence and are actually more likely to be the victims of violence. So what do we do when faced with terrible tragedies like this? For one we can stop covering the shooter as much as covering the victims and their families, as the shooter likely wanted to be memorialized. Mass shootings are one of the most tragic and horrific events that can happen. I can never understand what someone who has experienced loss at the hands of a mass shooting is going through I can only offer my condolences and support. I wrote this post about a problematic misattribution that I thought I could talk about and maybe shed some light on these horrible situations. Regardless of the cause of events like this, whether it’s bullying, socio-economic status, gun laws, or even drugs, we have to come together and support the victims and their families in this unbelievably tragic time in their lives.