Healio (8/8, Demko) reports, “The Medical Director Institute of the National Council for Behavioral Health convened an expert panel to examine the extent to which mental illness plays a role in mass violence and offer recommendations from” the perspective of behavioral health. Speaking with Healio, Joe Parks, MD, medical director of the National Council for Behavioral Health, said, “Mental illness is not a major cause of mass violence. Mass violence is caused by the social illnesses of hate and anger, not mental illness.” The panel’s “report [pdf] revealed that people with serious mental illness were responsible for less than 4% of all violence and less than one-third of mass violence,” but “in the wake of mass violence, policymakers and the public often point to mental illness as a key contributing factor.”
Healthcare Leaders Take Exception With Perceived Role Of Mental Illness In Mass Shootings MD Magazine (8/8, Kunzmann) reports that in wake of last weekend’s “successive but unrelated shootings in Dayton, OH, and El Paso, TX,” rhetoric focused “on the popular opinions of what drives the unrivaled rate of mass shooting events in the US: gun policies and regulation, public security measures, or mental health outreach.” This time, however, “healthcare thought leaders took exception with the discussion surrounding the perceived role of mental illness in such shootings.” To wit, “as Jessica Gold, MD, assistant professor of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, and Megan L. Ranney, MD, associate professor of Emergency Medicine at Brown University Alpert Medical School, wrote in a piece this week, the association between gun violence and mental illness has been subjected to the illusory truth effect.” In addition to “clinical evidence showing people with mental health conditions are actually 10 times more likely to become a violent crime victim than perpetrator, there’s reason to believe current assumptions about” people with mental illness “only worsen their state.”
Related Links:
— “Behavioral health experts recommend solutions to address mass violence, “Savannah Demko, Healio, August 08, 2019