As lawmakers across the country continue to pass ill-conceived laws implicating people with mental illness as having a greater penchant for violence (despite the scientific evidence that says otherwise), a new study has come out showing what most mental health advocates have long known. People with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
The study — published in the BMJ and conducted on data derived from the entire population of Sweden (can we say, “Big study!”) — found “After adjustment for sociodemographic confounders, any mental disorder was associated with a 4.9-fold risk of homicidal death, relative to people without mental disorders.”
In plain English — people with mental illness in Sweden were at nearly 5 times the risk of being murdered than citizens without a mental illness diagnosis.
Rather than wasting time passing laws to try and minimize outlier, tragic events (which, by their very definition, cannot be minimized by the passage of new laws), we instead should be putting more resources into protecting and helping treat people with mental illness.