Mental illness does not cause violence.
The topic of mental illness and the false belief that it is a source and cause for aggression, violence, murder and mayhem is deeply ingrained in the psyche of the American public due to the mass news and entertainment media's constant pairing of this apparent yet untrue "cause-and-effect" rationale. The truth is, violence and murder are not symptoms of mental illnesses (disorders). Motivating the popular media are the dividends of providing entertainment by means of flaunting ongoing stigma and stereotyping of the mentally ill. The news media compete for headlines to gain readership and viewership, and will almost always connect heinous crime to mental illness to spice up and extend coverage duration in the case of a mass murder, for example.
As Heather Stuart wrote in "Violence and mental illness: an overview" World Psychiatry (Journal), June 2003,
"The public are no less accustomed to 'experiencing' violence among the mentally ill, although these experiences are mostly vicarious, through movie depictions of crazed killers or real life dramas played out with disturbing frequency on the nightly news. Indeed, the global reach of news ensures that the viewing public will have a steady diet of real-life violence linked to mental illness. The public most fear violence that is random, senseless, and unpredictable and they associate this with mental illness. Indeed, they are more reassured to know that someone was stabbed to death in a robbery, than stabbed to death by a psychotic man. In a series of surveys spanning several real-life events in Germany, Angermeyer and Matschinger showed that the public's desire to maintain social distance from the mentally ill increased markedly after each publicized attack, never returning to initial values. Further, these incidents corresponded with increases in public perceptions of the mentally ill as unpredictable and dangerous."
This last observation alone is frightening when one considers the current undertones of potential congressional legislation to "do something" immediately with regard to the mentally ill and violence in the light of the recent spate of gun violence across the country. U.S. Government officials are now extremely motivated to address the problem, yet are faced by the clamor of constituencies who have been force-fed falsehoods by the popular media for more than a half-century. How can they knowledgeably pass laws regarding mental illness when they, too, are likely steeped in the very stereotyping, stigma and ignorance affecting the general public?
The headline "Psychotic killer slays 8 people in their beds" is scary. Why? The media have made it so. According to The New Oxford Dictionary, psychosis is "a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality." Does being out of touch with reality necessarily cause violence or murder? No. Are the media qualified to run headlines branding murder suspects "psychotic killers?" No. Can a murder suspect have psychosis? Yes. Can psychosis cause violence or murder? No. Can a murder suspect have diabetes? Yes. Can diabetes cause violence or murder? No. Media conclusions are based upon false logic. The answers to each of these lines of questioning are equally valid. The American public has been mislead, indoctrinated and brainwashed with regard to the inert nature of mental illness itself. Other dysfunctional or deviant underlying issues may become aggravated through the prism of mental illness, but the illness itself is not a predictor of violent behaviors.
Recent killings of children immediately resulted in pure speculation by the broadcast and cable networks that an alleged shooter was mentally ill. They needed answers now. They attempted with every step from the earliest of the investigation forward to flesh out that notion with further speculative details, making the condition of Asperger's Syndrome sound like a murderous condition within the shooter's brain. That notion was untrue. The headline "Man shoots 8 children in school" is much less lurid than "Psychotic killer slays 8 students."
Carefully chosen psychologists and psychiatrists eager to attest to mental illness causing such evil are pitched softball questions by their interviewers to buttress their unknowingly false reporting. These "experts" are either uninformed, academics, or money-hungry celebrity mental health practitioners who are either removed from the latest psychological journals' findings or those who rarely practice or work with patients in clinical settings, just as they do as hired guns in courtrooms to impress juries for the attorneys who retain them.
These "psych professionals for hire" play on the public's false assumption that perpetrators are all mentally ill. They often use street language to titillate the public instead of accurate clinical terms, once again fueling the glut of false information being disseminated. They utter ambiguous words like "crazy," mirroring those of the reporter or anchor in order to deferentially make the interviewer seem knowledgeable. The fact is, psychiatry has come a long way "since 1970, when clinicians were dramatically found to be consistently wrong more often than right in predicting violent behavior." Monahan & Steadman, 1994). The verdict is now available--mental illness does not cause violence or the act of murder.
The fact that tens of thousands of violent attacks and murders go quietly unreported even when statistically being considered as rooted in mental illness indicates the most fantastic and lurid of violent cases are "cherry-picked" for public consumption.
Ninety percent of suicides result from the mental disorders of either bipolar depression or clinical depression and represent an individual's anger turned inward only. He is destructive only toward himself-not toward others. A mass murder suspect who commits suicide is not always depressed. However, the two may co-exist. Oppositely, such outward anger and lashing out at some perceived or actual slight, committing homicide and taking his own life to avoid the certain fate that would accompany his terrible deed is predictable, but not an automatic indicator of mental illness. He may happen to suffer one or more mental disorders, but they are not causal for the heinous act. It is just another happenstance finding uncovered during the investigation.
When a killer is shown to be mentally ill, why is it assumed that the illness causes the crime? Even though there is no statistical correlation for this assumption, or any substantiated history of theory or truth to support that idea, it has been indelibly tattooed into the minds of the American people through sheer repetition by news and entertainment media and the ignorant parrotting of it around "the water cooler" by innocent yet duped believers.
Socioeconomic factors most assuredly come into play when discussing violent tendencies in individuals. Bullying, discrimination, poverty, violent entertainment, favoritism, copycat behavior and all manner of physical, mental and emotional abuse can seethe in an individual until the litany of pain must emerge in one form or another-often as violence. That such an individual happens to manifest a mental disorder cannot take away the underlying pain, suffering and predictable acting out of one suffering from such issues.
Just why are the claims of mental illness causing violence and murder erroneous?
1) First, they are patently untrue.
2) Any competent psychologist or psychiatrist knows that violence is not a symptom of mental illness and is willing to admit it. This is true even for a medical student who does her homework. Violence seen in the mentally ill is due to external factors, real or perceived threats, situations or related physical health factors. "[... ] patients discharged from psychiatric facilities who did not abuse alcohol and illegal drugs had a rate of violence no different than that of their neighbors in the community. Significantly, this contradicts one of central perceptions of mental illness within society today. Unless drugs or alcohol are involved, people with mental disorders do not pose any more threat to the community than anyone else. This finding cannot be emphasized enough." -Psych Central, Dispelling the Myth of Violence and Mental Illness, John M. Grohol, Psy. D., 2004. Mental illness does not provoke or cause violence or the act of murder.
3) The preponderance of applicable mental health research, journals and statistics do not establish a mental disorder-to-violence link. Some statistical studies demonstrate the rate of violence is higher among those having serious or psychotic mental disorders than that of the general population and the rest of the mentally ill population. Once again, this singular, isolated statistic, in and of itself, does not establish psychosis as a necessary cause, or link, only a statistical correlation, not a logical determination of anything, that can be evaluated in many different ways with an equal number of other conclusions. That a person has a mental disorder is not a predictor of his or her violent tendencies.
4) The "Psychiatrist's Bible," DSM-IV, (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), indicates no link between mental illness and violence within its pages. A look through its detailed index fails to turn up the words "aggression," "violence," "murder," or "homicide." Neither are these terms found in the handbook's "Diagnostic Index." Violence and murder are neither symptoms of mental illness nor a result of mental illness.
5) The media's deceptive pairing of words like "psychotic" and "killer" are either misleading or untrue in the absence of mental health professionals' determinations following full examination of suspects.
6) The mass media's eager search for why violence occurs seeks quick, simplistic explanations to gain audience shares and raise revenues at the expense of the truth surrounding both suspects' and victims' lives. And they almost always get it wrong. Mental illness causes neither violence nor the act of murder.
7) One-in-four Americans now manifests some degree of mental illness, as told by actress Glen Close, founder and chair for BringChange2Mind, an organization devoted to ending the stigma aimed at the mentally ill. If this statistic is accurate, then conservatively speaking, if even 10% of Americans are seriously mentally ill, then wouldn't violent crime be rampant? Where are the one-in-four violent mentally ill Americans out there? Do the math. A single newspaper could not contain the stories of havoc they would wreak upon society. More than 5.7 million Americans are known to suffer from manic-depression (bipolar disorder); 83% of them are diagnosed as "severe." Where is all of the crime that "should" evolve from those numbers? Mental illness does not cause violence or the act of murder.
8) Mental disorders are biological in origin, as are cancer and diabetes. The only difference is that symptoms are external behaviors rather than the internal evidence of laboratory test results, surgery and imaging. That the individual's behaviors are odd and quirky does not in itself indicate anything violent or dangerous. Mental illness is not a character flaw, moral weakness, or a result of sinful living, weak-mindedness or self-pity. Again, mental illness causes neither violence nor the act of murder.
9) The search for truth has always been an uphill battle. Nowhere is that a stronger challenge than is the battle for understanding the fallacy of mental health disorders being causative in violence and murder. It is shameful that in such an "enlightened" society with all of its unprecedented amount of information available 24/7 from multitudes of verifiable sources, that such a basic issue is still being debated. When a mentally ill person is violent, he or she is responding just like anyone else does when it comes to the human actions stemming from drug or alcohol abuse, or any of life's goads that ordinarily foment anger and violence. Could pure evil residing in a person's heart cause violence and murder, whether he or she be mentally ill or not? This is likely now a rare belief in a society blinded by moral relativity and situational ethics. Regardless, mental illness does not cause violence or the act of murder.
10) Twice as many women as men suffer clinical depression. Overall, men and women suffer other mental disorders in equal numbers. Therefore, there are more mentally ill women than men. Why are mass murderers and serial killers mostly young males? Why aren't mentally ill females committing heinous violence and murders? Once again, mental illness does not cause violence.
11) My first-hand experience with co-patients and that of many others told to me second-hand support my observation that, just as there are happy and mean drunks, there are also happy and mean mood disorder patients. As with drunkenness, episodes of mental disorders may magnify these underlying tendencies in an individual. However, "mean" doesn't necessarily translate into violence. Mental illness itself has not brought about the violence.
12) Empirically, having resided within several mental health facilities, all of them were notably as serene as public libraries. My co-patients were not drugged to make them more manageable. The peaceful environment was maintained to achieve the needed healing and progress in patient cognition and emotions. Despite the various crises suffered by co-patients within a facility, the only violent behaviors may be caused by illegal substance withdrawals, severe reactions to medications and such. No armed officers or other armed employees work on these units. Psych techs and aides are there to intervene in the event an argument occurs, as might happen among any other group of confined strangers. Again, the media has created a false image of both standard mental hospital and general hospital behavioral unit atmospheres as being disruptive, mean-spirited and violent.
May truth prevail: Mental illness is not to blame for violence; neither is it a predictor of violence; it simply does not cause violence.
The topic of mental illness and the false belief that it is a source and cause for aggression, violence, murder and mayhem is deeply ingrained in the psyche of the American public due to the mass news and entertainment media's constant pairing of this apparent yet untrue "cause-and-effect" rationale. The truth is, violence and murder are not symptoms of mental illnesses (disorders). Motivating the popular media are the dividends of providing entertainment by means of flaunting ongoing stigma and stereotyping of the mentally ill. The news media compete for headlines to gain readership and viewership, and will almost always connect heinous crime to mental illness to spice up and extend coverage duration in the case of a mass murder, for example.
As Heather Stuart wrote in "Violence and mental illness: an overview" World Psychiatry (Journal), June 2003,
"The public are no less accustomed to 'experiencing' violence among the mentally ill, although these experiences are mostly vicarious, through movie depictions of crazed killers or real life dramas played out with disturbing frequency on the nightly news. Indeed, the global reach of news ensures that the viewing public will have a steady diet of real-life violence linked to mental illness. The public most fear violence that is random, senseless, and unpredictable and they associate this with mental illness. Indeed, they are more reassured to know that someone was stabbed to death in a robbery, than stabbed to death by a psychotic man. In a series of surveys spanning several real-life events in Germany, Angermeyer and Matschinger showed that the public's desire to maintain social distance from the mentally ill increased markedly after each publicized attack, never returning to initial values. Further, these incidents corresponded with increases in public perceptions of the mentally ill as unpredictable and dangerous."
This last observation alone is frightening when one considers the current undertones of potential congressional legislation to "do something" immediately with regard to the mentally ill and violence in the light of the recent spate of gun violence across the country. U.S. Government officials are now extremely motivated to address the problem, yet are faced by the clamor of constituencies who have been force-fed falsehoods by the popular media for more than a half-century. How can they knowledgeably pass laws regarding mental illness when they, too, are likely steeped in the very stereotyping, stigma and ignorance affecting the general public?
The headline "Psychotic killer slays 8 people in their beds" is scary. Why? The media have made it so. According to The New Oxford Dictionary, psychosis is "a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality." Does being out of touch with reality necessarily cause violence or murder? No. Are the media qualified to run headlines branding murder suspects "psychotic killers?" No. Can a murder suspect have psychosis? Yes. Can psychosis cause violence or murder? No. Can a murder suspect have diabetes? Yes. Can diabetes cause violence or murder? No. Media conclusions are based upon false logic. The answers to each of these lines of questioning are equally valid. The American public has been mislead, indoctrinated and brainwashed with regard to the inert nature of mental illness itself. Other dysfunctional or deviant underlying issues may become aggravated through the prism of mental illness, but the illness itself is not a predictor of violent behaviors.
Recent killings of children immediately resulted in pure speculation by the broadcast and cable networks that an alleged shooter was mentally ill. They needed answers now. They attempted with every step from the earliest of the investigation forward to flesh out that notion with further speculative details, making the condition of Asperger's Syndrome sound like a murderous condition within the shooter's brain. That notion was untrue. The headline "Man shoots 8 children in school" is much less lurid than "Psychotic killer slays 8 students."
Carefully chosen psychologists and psychiatrists eager to attest to mental illness causing such evil are pitched softball questions by their interviewers to buttress their unknowingly false reporting. These "experts" are either uninformed, academics, or money-hungry celebrity mental health practitioners who are either removed from the latest psychological journals' findings or those who rarely practice or work with patients in clinical settings, just as they do as hired guns in courtrooms to impress juries for the attorneys who retain them.
These "psych professionals for hire" play on the public's false assumption that perpetrators are all mentally ill. They often use street language to titillate the public instead of accurate clinical terms, once again fueling the glut of false information being disseminated. They utter ambiguous words like "crazy," mirroring those of the reporter or anchor in order to deferentially make the interviewer seem knowledgeable. The fact is, psychiatry has come a long way "since 1970, when clinicians were dramatically found to be consistently wrong more often than right in predicting violent behavior." Monahan & Steadman, 1994). The verdict is now available--mental illness does not cause violence or the act of murder.
The fact that tens of thousands of violent attacks and murders go quietly unreported even when statistically being considered as rooted in mental illness indicates the most fantastic and lurid of violent cases are "cherry-picked" for public consumption.
Ninety percent of suicides result from the mental disorders of either bipolar depression or clinical depression and represent an individual's anger turned inward only. He is destructive only toward himself-not toward others. A mass murder suspect who commits suicide is not always depressed. However, the two may co-exist. Oppositely, such outward anger and lashing out at some perceived or actual slight, committing homicide and taking his own life to avoid the certain fate that would accompany his terrible deed is predictable, but not an automatic indicator of mental illness. He may happen to suffer one or more mental disorders, but they are not causal for the heinous act. It is just another happenstance finding uncovered during the investigation.
When a killer is shown to be mentally ill, why is it assumed that the illness causes the crime? Even though there is no statistical correlation for this assumption, or any substantiated history of theory or truth to support that idea, it has been indelibly tattooed into the minds of the American people through sheer repetition by news and entertainment media and the ignorant parrotting of it around "the water cooler" by innocent yet duped believers.
Socioeconomic factors most assuredly come into play when discussing violent tendencies in individuals. Bullying, discrimination, poverty, violent entertainment, favoritism, copycat behavior and all manner of physical, mental and emotional abuse can seethe in an individual until the litany of pain must emerge in one form or another-often as violence. That such an individual happens to manifest a mental disorder cannot take away the underlying pain, suffering and predictable acting out of one suffering from such issues.
Just why are the claims of mental illness causing violence and murder erroneous?
1) First, they are patently untrue.
2) Any competent psychologist or psychiatrist knows that violence is not a symptom of mental illness and is willing to admit it. This is true even for a medical student who does her homework. Violence seen in the mentally ill is due to external factors, real or perceived threats, situations or related physical health factors. "[... ] patients discharged from psychiatric facilities who did not abuse alcohol and illegal drugs had a rate of violence no different than that of their neighbors in the community. Significantly, this contradicts one of central perceptions of mental illness within society today. Unless drugs or alcohol are involved, people with mental disorders do not pose any more threat to the community than anyone else. This finding cannot be emphasized enough." -Psych Central, Dispelling the Myth of Violence and Mental Illness, John M. Grohol, Psy. D., 2004. Mental illness does not provoke or cause violence or the act of murder.
3) The preponderance of applicable mental health research, journals and statistics do not establish a mental disorder-to-violence link. Some statistical studies demonstrate the rate of violence is higher among those having serious or psychotic mental disorders than that of the general population and the rest of the mentally ill population. Once again, this singular, isolated statistic, in and of itself, does not establish psychosis as a necessary cause, or link, only a statistical correlation, not a logical determination of anything, that can be evaluated in many different ways with an equal number of other conclusions. That a person has a mental disorder is not a predictor of his or her violent tendencies.
4) The "Psychiatrist's Bible," DSM-IV, (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), indicates no link between mental illness and violence within its pages. A look through its detailed index fails to turn up the words "aggression," "violence," "murder," or "homicide." Neither are these terms found in the handbook's "Diagnostic Index." Violence and murder are neither symptoms of mental illness nor a result of mental illness.
5) The media's deceptive pairing of words like "psychotic" and "killer" are either misleading or untrue in the absence of mental health professionals' determinations following full examination of suspects.
6) The mass media's eager search for why violence occurs seeks quick, simplistic explanations to gain audience shares and raise revenues at the expense of the truth surrounding both suspects' and victims' lives. And they almost always get it wrong. Mental illness causes neither violence nor the act of murder.
7) One-in-four Americans now manifests some degree of mental illness, as told by actress Glen Close, founder and chair for BringChange2Mind, an organization devoted to ending the stigma aimed at the mentally ill. If this statistic is accurate, then conservatively speaking, if even 10% of Americans are seriously mentally ill, then wouldn't violent crime be rampant? Where are the one-in-four violent mentally ill Americans out there? Do the math. A single newspaper could not contain the stories of havoc they would wreak upon society. More than 5.7 million Americans are known to suffer from manic-depression (bipolar disorder); 83% of them are diagnosed as "severe." Where is all of the crime that "should" evolve from those numbers? Mental illness does not cause violence or the act of murder.
8) Mental disorders are biological in origin, as are cancer and diabetes. The only difference is that symptoms are external behaviors rather than the internal evidence of laboratory test results, surgery and imaging. That the individual's behaviors are odd and quirky does not in itself indicate anything violent or dangerous. Mental illness is not a character flaw, moral weakness, or a result of sinful living, weak-mindedness or self-pity. Again, mental illness causes neither violence nor the act of murder.
9) The search for truth has always been an uphill battle. Nowhere is that a stronger challenge than is the battle for understanding the fallacy of mental health disorders being causative in violence and murder. It is shameful that in such an "enlightened" society with all of its unprecedented amount of information available 24/7 from multitudes of verifiable sources, that such a basic issue is still being debated. When a mentally ill person is violent, he or she is responding just like anyone else does when it comes to the human actions stemming from drug or alcohol abuse, or any of life's goads that ordinarily foment anger and violence. Could pure evil residing in a person's heart cause violence and murder, whether he or she be mentally ill or not? This is likely now a rare belief in a society blinded by moral relativity and situational ethics. Regardless, mental illness does not cause violence or the act of murder.
10) Twice as many women as men suffer clinical depression. Overall, men and women suffer other mental disorders in equal numbers. Therefore, there are more mentally ill women than men. Why are mass murderers and serial killers mostly young males? Why aren't mentally ill females committing heinous violence and murders? Once again, mental illness does not cause violence.
11) My first-hand experience with co-patients and that of many others told to me second-hand support my observation that, just as there are happy and mean drunks, there are also happy and mean mood disorder patients. As with drunkenness, episodes of mental disorders may magnify these underlying tendencies in an individual. However, "mean" doesn't necessarily translate into violence. Mental illness itself has not brought about the violence.
12) Empirically, having resided within several mental health facilities, all of them were notably as serene as public libraries. My co-patients were not drugged to make them more manageable. The peaceful environment was maintained to achieve the needed healing and progress in patient cognition and emotions. Despite the various crises suffered by co-patients within a facility, the only violent behaviors may be caused by illegal substance withdrawals, severe reactions to medications and such. No armed officers or other armed employees work on these units. Psych techs and aides are there to intervene in the event an argument occurs, as might happen among any other group of confined strangers. Again, the media has created a false image of both standard mental hospital and general hospital behavioral unit atmospheres as being disruptive, mean-spirited and violent.
May truth prevail: Mental illness is not to blame for violence; neither is it a predictor of violence; it simply does not cause violence.
Jeff C. Baker has suffered bipolar disorder since 1966. He was
properly diagnosed in 1996 but was improperly medicated until 2010. His
plans, goals, career, dreams and even a few hobbies all fell by the
wayside as a result of his affliction. Jeff shares his dramatic story in
his autobiography, BOY, INTERRUPTED:My Magical Misery Tour, available
in either softcover or Kindle versions from http://www.amazon.com/dp/1475136935 where you can peek inside the book, and read its description and reader reviews.
You can reach Jeff at BipolarAid@gmail.com
Visit Jeff's informative website at http://www.BipolarAid.org
You can reach Jeff at BipolarAid@gmail.com
Visit Jeff's informative website at http://www.BipolarAid.org
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