The Facts on Mental Illness and Mass Shootings
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/10/the-f ... shootings/
But experts say that kind of logic is flawed. “No one who commits a violent act is mentally well,” said McGinty.
But that doesn’t mean that the person meets the criteria for a mental illness or that treatment would have eliminated that person’s violent act. “We have to draw a distinction between mental illness — diagnosable and treatable mental illness — and mental wellness,” she said.
In McGinty’s view, this doesn’t rule out the need for potential interventions such as anger management classes for disturbed individuals without mental illnesses, but she considers that outside the purview of the medical mental health system.
“Improving the mental health system is a really important goal,” she said, but “it’s not going to make a significant dent in mass shootings or interpersonal violence writ large.”
When it comes to policies to prevent gun violence, many experts recommend focusing on concerning behavior rather than a diagnosis per se. Such strategies are likely to be more effective than those that exclusively target people with mental illnesses, and they also avoid stigmatizing large numbers of people.
By itself, having a mental health disorder is a poor predictor of violence, and even trained psychiatrists barely do better than a coin toss at predicting who among those with such illnesses will become violent.
According to data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, in 2018, 47.6 million, or 19.1%, of U.S. adults had some kind of mental illness over the past year. Even the smaller portion of those who qualify as having a serious mental illness — often schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder — is still large, applying to 11.4 million people, or 4.6% of the population.
“The very strongest research evidence shows the best predictor of a person being violent in the future is prior violent behavior,” McGinty said. One evidence-based policy, she says, is an extreme risk protection order, or a so-called “red flag” law, which allows a judge to temporarily remove a person’s firearms if he or she exhibits dangerous behavior.
Appelbaum also backed policies that limit access to guns. “People ultimately pull the trigger, and people are complicated composites of a large number of cognitions, emotions, and motivations,” he said. “But it’s important to remember that if there’s no trigger to pull, it’s much less likely that large numbers of people will die.”
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If I were looking for something that's a strong predictor, you'll find with many of these guys, they often have prior incidents of domestic violence, and other violent behavior. This is what really needs to be looked for, as opposed to (just generically) "mental illness".
The problem with the background check system is if those things don't necessarily lead to a arrest or conviction, they don't always show up in the background check. But it increasingly looks like this is what should be paid attention to. Not just clinical diagnoses or felony records.