Title: The Facts on Mental Illness and Mass Shootings - FactCheck.org
Headings: The Facts on Mental Illness and Mass Shootings
The Facts on Mental Illness and Mass Shootings
Q: Do people with serious mental health disorders pose a greater risk of becoming mass shooters?
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Mental Illness and Violence
Mental Illness and Mass Murder
Mental Illness vs. Mental Wellness
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Content: Mental Illness and Violence
Relatively little is known about mental illness and mass shootings or other acts of mass violence because their infrequency makes them hard to study in a rigorous way. “While they happen far too often, mass shootings are statistically rare events,” said Beth McGinty, a mental health and substance abuse policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, in a phone interview. “ When you don’t have many shootings, it’s very difficult to disentangle patterns in what the individual cause of those shootings are.” This has meant that most of the research on the relationship between mental illness and violence against others, or what’s called interpersonal violence, is for violence in general. One of the first — and still most prominent — studies to investigate the link used responses from people in three American cities in the early 1980s to the National Institute of Mental Health’s Epidemiological Catchment Area survey. The ECA survey asked about violent behavior and also included information on whether a person met the criteria for one or more diagnosable mental illnesses, as defined by the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Violent behavior included things such as hitting a spouse, spanking a child hard enough to leave a bruise or starting a fight. The initial study, which was published in 1990, followed by second analysis in 1994, revealed that most people with mental illnesses are not violent, but those with psychiatric disorders are more likely to be violent than those without them. Over a year, about 12% of all people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression were violent, compared with 2% of people without a mental disorder or a substance abuse problem. The rate of violence fell to 7% when only considering people with those mental illnesses who did not have a substance abuse problem.