While I applaud any politician who wants to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of new funding into our mental health care system (even though nobody has said exactly what amount would help), we need to take a step back from a lie that politicians constantly trot out after a mass shooting or act of extreme violence.
The lie is this: that mental illness is a part of the problem and one of the causes of mass shootings.
According to the scientific research, this is not true. If you believe in science, you cannot believe politicians who spout this nonsense. Full stop.
The United States has once again had to deal with the tragic aftermath of back-to-back mass shootings that took dozens of lives in two ordinary cities. These mass shootings weren’t carried out by illegal immigrants or women. Instead, they were carried out by the person who is usually the perpetrator of a mass shooting: a white American citizen male with no obvious signs of mental illness.
It’s hard to ignore the facts when politicians trot out blame for mass shootings on things that, with just an ounce of analysis, show they don’t make sense. Violent video games? Then why does no other country — some who have just as many or more players of them per capita than the U.S. — suffer from the same number of mass murders? The count isn’t even close.
Mental Illness is Not Connected to Violence Nor Mass Shootings
I’ve written previously on this topic, quite extensively, examining much of the scientific research that has examined this question. The answer hasn’t changed since any of these previous analyses:
- Violence and Mental Illness: Victims, Not Perpetrators
- Myth Busting: Are Violence & Mental Illness Significantly Related?
- Violence and Mental Illness: Simplifying Complex Data Relationships
The data is clear. Outside of people who grapple with substance abuse, people with mental illness are not more violent. Period. (Even for people with substance abuse, the relationship is a weak one.)
A person with mental illness, according to the research, is far more likely to be the victim of violence against them because of prejudice and discrimination for their mental illness.
No amount of unsubstantiated claims by politicians (who, I guess I need to make clear, aren’t scientists or researchers) can change this data.
While I’m a huge proponent of properly funding our mental health care system in the U.S., we shouldn’t do so in the hope that it will have one iota of impact on the frequency of mass shootings. Because it won’t. It’s a band-aid solution for a problem that it has no connection with.
So the next time your favorite politician trots out the scapegoats of mental illness or violent video games to make the claim that addressing these things will help with mass shootings, please remind them that the data does not show that whatsoever.
We must hold people who constantly repeat this lie accountable for remaining ignorant and perpetrating discrimination and prejudice against people with mental illness.
