Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Mass Shootings?
https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/news ... al-illness
Are people with mental health disorders more likely to commit mass shootings or mass murder?
The public tends to link serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia or psychotic disorders, with violence and mass shootings. But serious mental illness—specifically psychosis—is not a key factor in most mass shootings or other types of mass murder. Approximately 5% of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness. And although a much larger number of mass shootings (about 25%) are associated with non-psychotic psychiatric or neurological illnesses, including depression, and an estimated 23% with substance use, in most cases these conditions are incidental.
Additionally, as we demonstrated in our paper, the contribution of mental illness to mass shootings has decreased over time. The data suggest that while it is critical that we continue to identify those individuals with mental illness and substance use disorders at high risk for violence and prevent the perpetration of violence, other risk factors, such as a history of legal problems, challenges coping with severe and acute life stressors, and the epidemic of the combination of nihilism, emptiness, anger, and a desire for notoriety among young men, seem a more useful focus for prevention and policy than an emphasis on serious mental illness, which leads to public fear and stigmatization.
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I certainly support a more extensive mental health care support system in this country, and mental health background checks for firearms purchases, but I'd be cautious on which conditions are considered prohibitive. Do I think everybody who had a bout of depression years ago should not be able to get a handgun? No.
At the end of the day, we have to wonder why it is mentally ill people in other countries don't commit mass shootings at the rate they do in the U.S., and it's not because we have more (as a percentage) mentally ill people here.