the author appears to be really upset about the current debate in the US about mental illness. and I don't see why. the article goes on a long rant about how we

the author appears to be really upset about the current debate in the US about mental illness. and I don't see why. the article goes on a long rant about how we should separate mental illness and violence, yet no half-way knowledgeable person would assume a mentally illness person to be automatically violent. why is the author so strongly trying to prove a moot point? you can't argue away the fact that most (if not all) mass shooting in recent history have been conducted by mentally ill people and mental illness is a major factor when individuals commit such crimes. the author just messes around with statistics and appears to forget about causation and correlation - it's obvious that the majority of mentally ill people doesn't exercise violence - yet the ones who did were in most cases mentally ill. we're trying to find a way to prevent these shootings. and we need to ask ourselves how we, as a society, treat mentally people - not because 50% of them might be violent, but because 0.0001% are. what we really need to do is starting to make a more distinctive diagnosis of what the actual mental illness was and don't just conflate all forms of schizophrenia with psychosis, bi-polar mood and depression disorder, etc. under mental illness. and a last remark on statistics (and sampling bias), and I believe we can all agree that: P(violent|person is mentally ill) ~ P(violent|person is not mentally ill) however (and I believe this is the source of the discussion, correct me if I'm wrong): P(person is mentally ill|violent) >> P(person is not mentally ill|violent)