The recent mass shooting in Las Vegas brings up an issue that I refer to from time to time, and that is the casual – even reflexive – linking of violent crime and mental illness.
The facts of the case have been comprehensively reported in the media. And that same media has objectively reported statements (mostly from law enforcement spokesmen/women) like this: “There is no indication yet that mental illness played a role in this tragedy.”
This leads many media consumers to ask themselves if all mass murderers are mentally ill; the barbarity of the act of mass murder makes this question somewhat understandable.
Is murder a crazy thing to do? Yes, of course it is. They are acts we can safely call crazy. But it is a conceptual mistake to retro-fit people with illnesses based on our judgment of the sanity of their acts.
Now, this not a diatribe against the media. Reporters duly – and quite properly – report on what is said at press conferences following incidents of violent crime, but it is up to media consumers to blend in what is said with what is known – and indeed to seek out what is known.
This is because to passively accept an unproven correlation between violent crime and mental illness does a disservice to those who live with an illness by creating a stigma.
There is not a lot of available data in the mainstream media about possible links between violent behaviour and mental illness, likely because mental health issues rarely make the airwaves or the pages of our newspapers. But it can be found if one looks hard enough. And when one does, the evidence tends to refute the conventional assumptions.
“Most individuals with psychiatric disorders are not violent,” a Harvard Medical School mental health letter from 2011 said. “Although a subset of people with psychiatric disorders commit assaults and violent crimes, findings have been inconsistent about how much mental illness contributes to this behaviour and how much substance abuse and other factors do.”
Then there is the unsurprising link between upbringing and later violent behaviour. It has been shown that domestic violence and abuse in childhood are strongly correlated with anti-social – and sometimes violent – behaviour in adulthood.
If there is any upside to the unwarranted linking of mental illness to crime, it is that it should cause us to focus our attention on a system that has been bled dry of funding and is hard-pressed to care for its clients. This, in turn, should cause each of us to do two things:
First, we owe it to ourselves and our community to educate ourselves about the reality of mental illness. There are many resources available. A good place to start would be the Canadian Mental Health Association website, at www.cmha.ca.
The second thing we can do is lobby our provincial representatives to increase funding and support for folks living with a mental illness.
A little knowledge and political action can go a long way.
