USA Today on Thursday published an editorial hopeful entitled, Editorial: Fix broken mental health system. Which would be fine as a stand-alone piece advocating more money, focus and resources for our nation’s patchwork system of mental health and recovery care.
Instead, they — like many well-meaning but apparently brain-dead newspapers — tie the need to fix our mental health care system — something others have been advocating for for decades — to recent headline-news grabbing acts of atrocious violence.
Only buried in this hypocritical, two-faced gutter-piece editorial do you find the truth — “Only the tiniest fraction of the mentally ill ever become violent, and then, usually when they fail to get treatment.” It’s even worse than that — statistically speaking, mental illness is a horrible predictor of violence, and nobody who’s read the research would ever suggest otherwise.
I have no problem with you advocating to help people with mental health concerns. I have a big problem if you’re doing so because of violence in America. The two have little to no connection with one another.
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Aren’t you guilty of the same thing by mentioning the 12,000 annual murders with guns? If we assume the estimates of 300 million guns in private hands in America, then each year only 0.004% are used to commit murder. Now that’s a tiny fraction.
Umm, no. Since most murders are committed by a gun. You can’t say the same thing about most people with mental illness committing acts of violence, can you?
By the same logic. Mentally ill people are the only ones who are mostly commiting mass killings for little to no motive.
John, most mass murders are committed by people with recognized and in most cases mental problems already diagnosed by mental or health professionals.
You can’t argue that all mentally ill patients should not be condemned because a relatively rare number actually commit mass murders.
Then turn around and suggest legal gun owners should be denied their right to own guns because a relatively few number of guns are used by criminals.
Well you can argue that point, but then that would be the definition of someone who is a hypocrite.
Gun owners agree with you John.
No one should condemn mentally ill people and force them onto public government registries simply because a rare few commit horrific crimes, just as no one should condemn legal gun owners and force law-abiding gun owners into public gun registries and bans because a very rare few commit awful crimes with guns.
But that is exactly what the legislators did in New York.
RIGHT ON!!!
Right on Jon. These people have no idea what they’re talking about. These massacres are RARE! The killers sometimes happen to have an illness.
Violence incidences happen, and they are many times done by someone with a psychotic disorder. They grab headlines, always have and alway will.
Better to turn that press to treatment or fight against it? As much as our mental health system is underfunded and resourced, I’ll take getting help for people who need it.
I appreciate this post. I have been so disgusted by the media coverage. NPR broadcast, “What do we do about these people with serious mental illness?” “These people.” Are they talking about me? I have one of those diagnoses. I work full time and don’t go around hurting people.
one of the things they can do is stop discussing mental illness every time someone does something heinous. I am not Adam Lanza and on meds or not I never will be.
All this just makes me want to hide. Not sure who is worse on this issue – the right or the left. They both want to take away rights away from innocent people who happen to have a mental illness.
And they want to take away the rights of legal gun owners.
On average, about 3 in 400 criminal defendants are found guilty after using an insanity defense. That means the other 397 are presumed to be sane at the point in time that the crime was committed. Of those 397, about 90%, or 359, will be found guilty.
So, 359/3~120 sane convicts for every insane convict
In other words, legally sane people are 120 times more likely to be convicted of a crime than legally insane people. One could argue that the criminal justice system doesn’t address the issue in a way that sorts the classes properly but it would still be difficult to convince most that legally mentally healthy people are, on average, and for all practical purposes, infinitely more dangerous than their legally mentally-ill counterparts.
I think the mentally ill should be on guard for unwarranted attacks by mentally healthy individuals. Legally mentally-healthy individuals seem to be predisposed towards criminal activity at a grossly disproportionate rate which conceivably places some of the more defenseless mentally-ill at a much higher risk for injury due to crime or criminally-negligent false accusation.
Well done, John–a necessary corrective to the “Let’s all focus on crazy gunmen” mentality of most in the general media. It is rarely noted that those with mental illness are more often the victims of violence than the perpetrators. Of course, it is well-known to all of us in the mental health field that care for those with serious psychiatric illnesses is woefully inadequate.
Meanwhile, rare events like the Newtown killings continue to distract us from the daily gun-related carnage on our streets–a slow-motion tragedy that the media rarely covers.
As psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman recently observed in the NY Times, shortly after the Newtown shootings:
“All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.”
Regards,
Ron Pies MD
Um, as long as the DSM continues to list Antisocial Personality Disorder and give the illusion it is amenable to treatment, my bet is there will be forensic psychiatrists who, if paid well enough, will try to use it as a defense of their client’s actions.
How do you really know who is impaired, and who is just unmoved by people’s right to life? I side with what the DSM4TR case study impression said at the end of the ASPD vignette: (per the lack of options to treat ASPD) if this sounds pessimistic, it was meant to be.
Again, politicians will dump criminals on psychiatrists to treat. Not acceptable.
John,
You write: “statistically speaking, mental illness is a horrible predictor of violence, and nobody who’s read the research would ever suggest otherwise.”
The same thing can be said about gun owners. Gun ownership is not a predictor of gun violence. So called “Asault Rifles are used in less than 15 of all gun violence. Large capacity magazines are used in 6% of all gun violence.
Yet the first thing to ban are assault rifles and large capacity magazines.
Mental Health professionals and legal gun owners are both arguing the same points, punishing legal gun owners and therapists will do nothing to stem gun violence.
Dang, it was posted before I could edit it. This is the correct data.
Gun ownership is not a predictor of gun violence. So called “Assault Rifles” are used in less than 1% of all gun violence. Large capacity magazines are used in less than 6% of all gun violence.
Do you realize how rare these mass shootings are?!?! People posting on this are nothing but fans of the story because the media has plastered this everywhere because it’s “what sells.” However, the author of this has a credible point. Sure, these kids shoot up a place for no reason and happen to have a mental illness but massacres are rare! That’s all there is to it. Usually the untreated mentally ill kill themselves. We can all admit the media is stereotyping the mentally ill and gun owners because of dumb individuals who refuse to get treatment or care. Bravo for this editorial and this is coming from someone who has bipolar disorder and was arrested for threats when I was in college. Thank god someone took my stupid threats seriously so I could get court-ordered care.