Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Mass Shootings?
www.columbiapsychiatry.org
Findings from the Columbia database help dispel the myth that having a severe psychiatric illness is predictive of who will perpetrate mass murder.
  • TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
    0·
    4 months ago

    I hope no one takes this to mean that I am trying to stigmatize mental illness or people with mental illnesses, but it seems to me that if there are people who want to be famous or notorious so badly that they kill large numbers of people, that doesn’t seem to be the result of a healthy or well ordered mind. Am I misunderstanding how the phrase “mental illness” is being used here? I recognize that the headline is referring specifically to disorders involving psychosis, but they even state that only 25% of mass shooters are associated with non-psychotic mental illnesses. Are emotional/behavioral disorders not being considered here? Or is the mass shooting database they are using one of those that includes any shooting with more than a certain number of people involved, even if that includes events that the typical person would not consider part of the phenomenon of the types of shootings that most people are thinking of when they talk about mass shootings?

    Seriously, I hope I am not stepping on anyone’s toes or saying something that will be taken as hurtful, because that’s genuinely not how I mean it. But I really feel like if someone is in a state that they decide the best course of action for them is to kill a bunch of people they don’t know, how could that be the result of a healthy mental and emotional state?

    • Vodulas [they/them]@beehaw.org
      1·
      4 months ago

      They call it out a little further down.

      Half of all mass shootings are associated with no red flags—no diagnosed mental illness, no substance use, no history of criminality, nothing. They’re generally committed by middle-aged men who are responding to a severe and acute stressor, so they’re not planned, which makes them very difficult to prevent.

      So they are not necessarily in a good emotional state, but they do not have a mental illness.

      • TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
        0·
        4 months ago

        Thanks, I definitely skimmed the article, so missing that is on me.

        It’s interesting that the profile they mention doesn’t really fit what I have in my mind for mass shooters, which would be younger men, not middle-aged. I guess the ones that really stick out to me, like the Columbine, Christchurch, and Uvalde shooters all fit this stereotype that I have, but apparently that doesn’t map to reality.