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Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Gun Violence?
- 001sky 12y agoDoe we need a scientific study? Guns don't kill people. People kill people. Knives seem to be doing a good job lately.
- lomnakkus 12y ago> Doe we need a scientific study? Uh, yes?
- 001sky 12y agoDo you have any empirical experience with either? It turns out crazy tend not to follow rules. Spoiler alert, I know.
- lomnakkus 12y ago> It turns out crazy tend not to follow rules. Maybe they do, statistically speaking. Knowing that could be helpful. Maybe it could even lead to new treatments. Are you just being an ass on purpose?
- 001sky 12y agoIt amuses me how smug people who lack any experience tend to be.
- lomnakkus 12y agoObviously, I'm not getting what you're trying to say... and you tell me that I'm smug, so obviously I'm interested in finding out what I'm supposedly smug about. Could you be a little more explicit about what you're actually trying to say? Otherwise, I'm done.
- 001sky 12y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8642538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8642538
- lomnakkus 12y agoViolent crime !== Gun violence. EDIT: Oh, and what DanBC said as well. EDIT#2: I hope I'm not remiss in pointing out the irony of you posting links to studies when your OP started out by saying "do we need studies?".
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- DanBC 12y agoI have met people in low secure and medium secure mental health units in England. (Low and medium secure is a specifict technical term for mental health hospitals that have interaction with the legal system). I have met very many people in the acute phase of a psychotic illness -- sometimes in hospital and sometimes in the community. I have met very many people with a wode variety of mental health diagnoses. I feel less safe walking through town on a busy Friday night than I ever do in mental health hospitals.
- 001sky 12y agoAccording to the United States Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey conducted from 1993 to 1999, the annual rate of nonfatal, job-related violent crime was 12.6 per 1,000 workers in all occupations. Among physicians, the rate was 16.2 per 1,000, and among nurses, 21.9 per 1,000. However, for psychiatrists and mental healthcare professionals, the rate was 68.2 per 1,000, and for mental health custodial workers, 69 per 1,000.1 And it appears that these events may happen early in one's career, as the literature suggests that 40 to 50 percent of psychiatry residents will be physically attacked by a patient during their four-year training program. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074201/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074201/ There is plenty more data on this. But lets repeat: 40 to 50 percent of psychiatry residents will be physically attacked by a patient during their four-year training program
- DanBC 12y agoDo you know how flawed your statistics are? "Mental health workers" includes "drug and alcohol rehab workers" and, as the submitted article shows, drug or alcohol addiction do increase likelyhood of violence. By including people with addiction problems you've skewed the stats. EDIT: I mean, even the paper you cite says: > Because serious mental illness is quite rare, it actually contributes very little to the overall rate of violence in the general population; the attributable risk has been estimated to be 3 to 5 percent, much lower than that associated with substance abuse, for example. (People with no mental disorder who abuse alcohol or drugs are nearly seven times as likely as those without substance abuse to report violent behavior).
- ctdonath 12y agoThat's like asking if there's a link between IQ and computer usage. The answer is unsurprising, a study establishing it is appropriate insofar as proving the objective basis for the answer, but the interesting question is why someone would actually fund such a project.
- DanBC 12y agoDid you read the article? > When Swanson first analyzed the ostensible connection between violence and mental illness, looking at more than ten thousand individuals (both mentally ill and healthy) during the course of one year, he found that serious mental illness alone was a risk factor for violence—from minor incidents, like shoving, to armed assault—in only four per cent of cases. That is, if you took all of the incidents of violence reported among the people in the survey, mental illness alone could explain only four per cent of the incidents. When Swanson broke the samples down by demographics, he found that the occurrence of violence was more closely associated with whether someone was male, poor, and abusing either alcohol or drugs—and that those three factors alone could predict violent behavior with or without any sign of mental illness. If someone fit all three of those categories, the likelihood of them committing a violent act was high, even if they weren’t also mentally ill. If someone fit none, then mental illness was highly unlikely to be predictive of violence. “That study debunked two myths,” Swanson said. “One: people with mental illness are all dangerous. Well, the vast majority are not. And the other myth: that there’s no connection at all. There is one. It’s quite small, but it’s not completely nonexistent.”
- runamok 12y agoThank you so much for the synopsis and illustrating one of the points of scientific studies: Even if answers are a foregone conclusion surprising results do occur. Even confirming the foregone conclusion has value.
- theVirginian 12y agoHow many mentally healthy people have been perpetrators of school shootings? My guess would be not many...
- DanBC 12y ago> But if you look at people like Jaylen Fryberg, Mason Campbell, or Karl Pierson, you see no formal diagnosis of mental illness, and often, no actual signs of instability, either. From the article.
- dasmithii 12y agoViolent crime is, to some degree, a defining characteristic of mental instability. Is it not? Should it be?
- DanBC 12y agoAre you suggesting that if someone commits a violent crime they must have some kind of mental illness? And that we just haven't defined "prepared to commit an act of violence" as a mental illness.
- dasmithii 12y agoI'm suggesting that these are commonly held beliefs, not that I hold them personally. More so, I was looking for input on the subject, as my personal experience in this area is virtually nonexistent.
- vannevar 12y agoI don't know that violent crime per se is a symptom of mental illness. But if a young man walks into a school cafeteria and shoots five people and then himself for no discernible reason, I think that qualifies as a symptom of mental illness. I think the author of this study relies too much on a clinical diagnosis or some prior evidence of serious mental illness. Imagine if a similar study explored the link between hearing voices and mental illness, and concluded that there must be no link because most of the people hearing voices for the first time had no previous clinical diagnoses or any other previous symptoms. The difference is that someone hearing voices for the first time can then go on hearing them for years, while someone who commits gun violence is generally not free to continue committing more. I am also curious why drug and alcohol abuse is not regarded by the author as a form of mental illness.