# Why mental healthcare is not the solution to mass shootings/violent crime **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 15, 2019, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812 "2019-01-15T18:51:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![rat\_avatar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rat_avatar/32/255_2.png) [@rat\_avatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rat_avatar)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/21 "2019-01-15T21:17:00Z")
> [@doorhinge](#): > > (post shortened) > > The monsters Harris and Klebold were bombers. They intended to use firearms to murder any students who fled the school after their bombs had exploded. I don’t disagree nor know enough to agree. The relationship of means vs. incidence is outside of my concerns as my personal main concerns and world view are not pro or anti gun. I am involved because I use mental health services to help with attention issues and don’t like my rights to due process being randomly sacrificed and have friends who didn’t seek help for depression because they were afraid of the social costs and killed themselves. Hopefully someone else will be willing to debate on the merits of gun control. I just want people to feel safe when they need to access medical care. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/22 "2019-01-15T21:26:36Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Here’s a quicker answer. > > They have mental health issues in Japan and South Korea too. But they don’t have mass shootings because those nations have very strict gun control. > > Mental health is just a distraction. Easy access to guns is why this only happens in America. Every other nations has mental health issues too. They also don’t have near the number of murders by non-gun means. Simply put, we have more violence in the US than they do, with or without guns, so I don’t think the correlation and causation are as coupled as you are implying. I agree that the issue isn’t mental health or mental healthcare wrt mass shootings in the US, but I think it’s a deeper issue than that we simply have guns while they have gun control. Take those guns away and we’d STILL outstrip either country in the amount of murders by a huge number (probably at least an order of magnitude…IIRC, the US has something like 6k murders by knives or other non-gun weapons each year). ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/23 "2019-01-15T22:42:53Z")
I would suspect that “mental health” is an issue in the USA because we have created a hyper-competitive, grossly unequal society where health care is prohibitively expensive and your livelihood can be terminated at a moment’s notice with no recourse and little support. We are a country where nearly half the voters elected arguably one of the worst people in America to the most powerful job in the world, who then proceed to pretend that we haven’t been watching this person act this way publicly for the past 30 years. These same people believe that we are “safer” by allowing every lunatic in the country to acquire an arsenal. IOW shootings are a symptom of a selfish, willfully ignorant, gun-obsessed culture that is under constant stress and immerses themselves in fantasy and disinformation. Giving everyone vouchers to see a therapist won’t solve that. > [@rat\_avatar](#): > > No, nor does visiting the doctor after your beloved wife of 50 years dies and you need to deal with the grief. Nor does seeking help for your social anxiety or fear of spider or your obsession with cleaning. > > But in the case of NYC, if you are a gun owner or even a skeet shooter seeking help for those problems would result in you losing your firearms. I’m pretty sure this isn’t true. Unless your grief, anxiety or fear of spiders is so severe the person has been “adjudicated as a mental defective” or "involuntarily committed to a mental institution.” Unless someone can post otherwise, I’m almost 99% sure that simply going to a therapist will not bring the police to take your guns. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/24 "2019-01-15T23:07:38Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > I would suspect that “mental health” is an issue in the USA because we have created a hyper-competitive, grossly unequal society where health care is prohibitively expensive and your livelihood can be terminated at a moment’s notice with no recourse and little support. > > We are a country where nearly half the voters elected arguably one of the worst people in America to the most powerful job in the world, who then proceed to pretend that we haven’t been watching this person act this way publicly for the past 30 years. > > These same people believe that we are “safer” by allowing every lunatic in the country to acquire an arsenal. > IOW shootings are a symptom of a selfish, willfully ignorant, gun-obsessed culture that is under constant stress and immerses themselves in fantasy and disinformation. Giving everyone vouchers to see a therapist won’t solve that. > > I’m pretty sure this isn’t true. Unless your grief, anxiety or fear of spiders is so severe the person has been “adjudicated as a mental defective” or "involuntarily committed to a mental institution.” Unless someone can post otherwise, I’m almost 99% sure that simply going to a therapist will not bring the police to take your guns. One would expect, based on your post, that the US would lead the world in suicide and murders on a per capita basis as well as just general mayhem…and that we’d also have a lot more general unrest due to how ‘grossly unequal’ our society is. We have literally millions of gun owners and hundreds of millions of guns, which, based on your post, should translate into 100’s of thousands of gun deaths per year at least…maybe more (hell, if we were even talking 10% of self absorbed gun nuts as you describe going off the deep end we should be seeing 4 million gun incidents a year at least). However, that doesn’t seem to be the case, despite the fact that the US obviously is in the top 1 or 2 wrt guns per capita. How do you reconcile the data? Myself, I see it as a version of the white van is always at the corner, but I’m curious as to your thoughts… ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/25 "2019-01-15T23:21:37Z")
Perhaps if we had better mental hygeine we’d see fewer people “snapping” and thus fewer people turning to violence and other maladaptive coping mechanisms (e.g., drugs and food). Increased access to mental health counseling is just one way to do this. We could also promote more unstructured playtime in grammar school in addition to better art, music, and physical education. Kids need to be learning stress management from day one. And we need to be teaching and encouraging kids to talk about their feelings. If it is obvious that a kid is struggling with this, they need to be flagged for intervention. Being able to put one’s feelings to words is another form of literacy that we should be teaching. This doesn’t require a psychotherapist. Just a teacher equipped with the right teaching materials. A lot of mental health “best practices” could be incorporated in the classroom, but much of it needs to happen in the home. Parents need more and better resources to help with troubled children, but I think lots of parents would benefit from their own psychological interventions. Whenever I see mothers cussing out their kids at the grocery store, I always wonder if they are simply carrying out the abuse they received as kids. Perhaps if they had access to some decent therapy, they would be able to break the “fucked up person” cycle. Or, maybe they are just stressed out by economic woes and inflicting that stress on their kids. Perhaps a society that removed the “woefulness” of economic setbacks would have fewer fucked-up people. We don’t have to wait for people to “snap” to do something. We could prevent “snapping” just by making society more humane. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/26 "2019-01-15T23:22:12Z")
> [@Crafter\_Man](#): > > If someone goes on a shooting spree or commits a violent crime, does it necessarily mean they have a mental disorder? > > I’m not a psychiatrist, but I think it’s probable that many bad people have no mental disorder whatsoever. They’re simply bad. Herein lies a fundamental problem with viewing mental health in the paradigm of a medical pathology; I think we can all agree that someone who goes on an unprovoked shooting rampage against random people, or even a man who decides to murder his wife and children out of some kind of rage/guilt/desire to escape a marriage, as not thinking rationally. And while all people are irrational some of the time (and most are far less rational than they believe themselves to be), an actual, diagnosable “mental illness” pathology from the DSM-V may be difficult to apply, and a plan of treatment essentially impossible to impose. In the end, people who are “bad” (e.g. atavistically violent or disruptive) should be treated or dealt with in the manner that a) protects the public from harm, b) provides some efficacy in reducing dangerous behaviors, and c) gives that person whatever emotional relief or stability that will allow them to be a productive member of society, in that order. In some cases that may well be permanent incarceration because their behavior is uncontrollable or because they have no wish to avoid doing harm to others, and lacking any way to objectively see or experience what is going on inside someone’s head, we can only work from the basis of their behavior, whether we call that a mental disorder or just being a raging asshole. > [@msmith537](#): > > IOW shootings are a symptom of a selfish, willfully ignorant, gun-obsessed culture that is under constant stress and immerses themselves in fantasy and disinformation. Giving everyone vouchers to see a therapist won’t solve that. There is a lot to be said for this. There are other cultures where weapons are readily available and yet experience a tiny fraction of the violent crime and mass shootings that the United States does. And curiously enough, most of the people who engage in mass shootings are not those who actively oppressed; aside from the handful of self-radicalized Muslim would-be terrorists, mass shootings, bombings, and other attacks are largely the domain of young-to-middle-aged white males whose dissatisfaction largely seems to come from social isolation or the adoption of extremist political beliefs and baseless conspiracy theories, and whose adoption of firearms and violence essentially parodies that of the icons of white male hero worship. I’ve been around firearms and people who use them (professionally) all my life and I’ve never been concerned about people who shoot as a hobby, or sport, or to hunt, but the rise of people who seem to believe it is some kind of patriotic mandate to own as many AR-15 pattern rifles with bumpstocks as possible and who look forward to some kind of apocalyptic collapse of society so they can declare the entire world as a free fire kill box is a sign of a distinct lack of connection with reality. And as much as the notion of “we need mental health, not gun control” follows every single mass shooting event, none of the people voicing this sentiment seem to put any energy following through with actually making mental health services more readily available once the incident falls out of the public consciousness. Which tells you everything about their actual interest in agenda in forestalling any discussion about rational methods to reduce or prevent such shootings if they would in any way implicate the ready availability of firearms or the responsibility of the gun industry in not taking any effort to limit access of firearms to unstable or ill-intentioned people. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/27 "2019-01-15T23:44:53Z")
I know the conversation is focused on the pathological mass-shooter, but I’d like folks to consider that pathology can manifest differently in different cultures and environments. There is no good reason to think that the suburban white kid who shoots up his school has “snapped” any more the urban black kid who shoots up a busy street via drive-by has. Maybe neither have “snapped”, a term that implies a mental breakdown of some type. Maybe it’s just that both have unhealthy coping strategies. Equip them with better coping strategies early on and perhaps neither would feel compelled to shoot anyone. [CBT used in gang prevention](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18425976) ---
**Author:** ![Omar\_Little](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/omar_little/32/269_2.png) [@Omar\_Little](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omar_Little)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/28 "2019-01-15T23:55:13Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > I’ve been around firearms and people who use them (professionally) all my life and I’ve never been concerned about people who shoot as a hobby, or sport, or to hunt, but the rise of people who seem to believe it is some kind of patriotic mandate to own as many AR-15 pattern rifles with bumpstocks as possible and who look forward to some kind of apocalyptic collapse of society so they can declare the entire world as a free fire kill box is a sign of a distinct lack of connection with reality. I too have been around people who use and own firearms for work, hobby, sport, hunting, etc. all of my life. These are the same people in my circle that buy AR-15’s. They aren’t waiting on the apocalypse, and all of my friends have a good grasp on reality. They own those types of guns because they believe they look cool, replicas of military grade weapons, etc. But primarily to shoot stuff at the range. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/29 "2019-01-15T23:56:01Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > I would suspect that “mental health” is an issue in the USA because we have created a hyper-competitive, grossly unequal society where health care is prohibitively expensive and your livelihood can be terminated at a moment’s notice with no recourse and little support. > > We are a country where nearly half the voters elected arguably one of the worst people in America to the most powerful job in the world, who then proceed to pretend that we haven’t been watching this person act this way publicly for the past 30 years. > > These same people believe that we are “safer” by allowing every lunatic in the country to acquire an arsenal. > > IOW shootings are a symptom of a selfish, willfully ignorant, gun-obsessed culture that is under constant stress and immerses themselves in fantasy and disinformation. Giving everyone vouchers to see a therapist won’t solve that. > > . Possibly, but places like Japan also have a hyper competitive, highly materialistic culture and their murder rate is far lower. > [@XT](#): > > They also don’t have near the number of murders by non-gun means. Simply put, we have more violence in the US than they do, with or without guns, so I don’t think the correlation and causation are as coupled as you are implying. > > I agree that the issue isn’t mental health or mental healthcare wrt mass shootings in the US, but I think it’s a deeper issue than that we simply have guns while they have gun control. Take those guns away and we’d STILL outstrip either country in the amount of murders by a huge number (probably at least an order of magnitude…IIRC, the US has something like 6k murders by knives or other non-gun weapons each year). > **[Homicides by murder weapon in the U.S. 2022 | Statista](https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-weapon-used/)** > > Handguns are by far the most common murder weapon used in the United States, accounting for 7,936 homicides in 2022. It seems to be a little over 4000 murders from items other than firearms, but I see your point. Who knows how many of those 10,000 firearm murders would still happen, and the US murder rate is about 4x that of France or Germany. ---
**Author:** ![Littleman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ccd318/32.png) [@Littleman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Littleman)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/30 "2019-01-16T00:22:19Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > Was going to write a longer post but decided to rein my keyboard-splurging in: > > 1. Mental healthcare in America is costly, often cliche or useless, and takes too long. There is no equivalent of “911” for mental healthcare (other than 911 itself, which isn’t helpful). If someone is on the verge of snapping \*right this moment, \*there’s no psychiatric service that fixes the problem right then and there. Furthermore, a lot of mental counseling is just the counselor reading out one cliche out loud after another, or going through the motions, or spouting cheap and meaningless platitudes (take deep breaths and think happy thoughts! That’ll be $120!) …and, of course, is unreasonably expensive. And often takes weeks to wait for an appointment, not to mention much driving and travel and all that time taken out for…what exactly? It’s like waiting three weeks for a $100 Band-Aid when you have a severed femoral artery that needs immediate attention. (No, I’m not some violent psychopath; I’ve been in counseling for OCD and stress/panic and anxiety issues - however, I can’t imagine it’s any different for an Elliot Rodger or Stephen Paddock type.) There needs to be something cheap, impactful, and readily available. Instead, it’s costly, cliche/platitude/trite stuff, and takes a long time to get an appointment for. > > 2. …speaking of people like Elliott Rodger, Stephen Paddock, school shooters, or serial killer/psychopath types, there is another issue that isn’t addressed - namely, that someone who would be likely to go on some killing spree \*probably doesn’t think he is the problem. \* If a white supremacist wants to kill blacks, he probably isn’t going to think, “Oh, I have these violent ideas about blacks, this means I need to check myself into therapy ASAP” - no, he’ll probably think, “Yes, I am waging a righteous and just war against these blacks that I hate.” You might as well expect a fox to turn itself in to a farmer when it is outside a chicken coop, rather than go into the chicken coop. \*\*The kind of person who needs mental healthcare the most, is precisely the kind of person who is unlikely to voluntarily seek out mental healthcare. \*\* You can’t rely on would-be killers to identify themselves as the problem and turn themselves in; that’s utterly unreliable. They don’t see themselves as the problem, they see society and their victims as the problem. Actually you can basically get anyone locked up in a mental health facility for a minimum of 3 days by simply calling 911 and telling them you think they may hurt themselves or someone else because of their mental state. There the Drs are to determine whether they need to go to court and try to keep the person locked up longer. Though this is more often simply used as a means of otherwise illegal detainment, it’s a favorite trick of police to remove someone from what they think may be a potential domestic violence scenario where no crime has occurred. It’s also commonly taken advantage of by kids/parents,. Boyfriend’s/girlfriends who simply want to punish each other for one reason or another since it requires no evidence to do other than someone saying the right words. ---
**Author:** ![Isamu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/7c8e57/32.png) [@Isamu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isamu)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/31 "2019-01-16T01:02:39Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Not true: > [https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-despite-gun-control-advocates-claims-u-s-isnt-the-worst-country-for-mass-shootings/](https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-despite-gun-control-advocates-claims-u-s-isnt-the-worst-country-for-mass-shootings/) > \*But a study of global mass-shooting incidents from 2009 to 2015 by the Crime Prevention Research Center, headed by economist John Lott, shows the U.S. doesn’t lead the world in mass shootings. In fact, it doesn’t even make the top 10, when measured by death rate per million population from mass public shootings. > > So who’s tops? Surprisingly, Norway is, with an outlier mass shooting death rate of 1.888 per million (high no doubt because of the rifle assault by political extremist Anders Brevik that claimed 77 lives in 2011). No. 2 is Serbia, at just 0.381, followed by France at 0.347, Macedonia at 0.337, and Albania at 0.206. Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, and Czech Republic all follow. Then comes the U.S., at No. 11, with a death rate of 0.089. > > That’s not all. There were also 27% more casualties from 2009 to 2015 per mass shooting incident in the European Union than in the U.S. > > “There were 16 cases where at least 15 people were killed,” the study said. “Out of those cases, four were in the United States, two in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.” > > “But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany’s and five times the U.K.'s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher.” > > Yes, the U.S. rate is still high, and nothing to be proud of. But it’s not the highest in the developed world. Not by a long shot.\* > > And that’s just mass shootings. Mass killings with bombs, machetes and such are common. I haven’t even looked into how wrong this study is yet, but first tell me why he chose the dates 2009 to 2015? What is special about that specific time period and why is he ingoring other dates? ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/32 "2019-01-16T02:09:47Z")
> [@Isamu](#): > > I haven’t even looked into how wrong this study is yet, but first tell me why he chose the dates 2009 to 2015? What is special about that specific time period and why is he ingoring other dates? You could, I dunno, read the study? > **[UPDATED: Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public...](https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from-mass-public-shootings-in-the-us-and-europe/)** > > Update Post: For our latest work comparing mass public shootings across countries, please click here and here. For those interested, Snopes.com has given this research below a “mixed” r… \*We cover the period from the beginning of the Obama administration to the current date, from 2009 to the Charleston massacre (this matches the starting period for another recent study we did on US shootings and we chose that because that was the starting point that Bloomberg’s group had picked). The cases were complied doing a news search. The starting year was picked simply because Obama was making this claim and 2009 was the beginning of the Obama administration. It also matched the time frame of a recent Bloomberg report (a report that we evaluated here). \* ---
**Author:** ![Eonwe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eonwe/32/240_2.png) [@Eonwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eonwe)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/33 "2019-01-16T02:42:07Z")
As is often the case, I get to the end of a thread to see tgat **monstro** already said what I wanted to add. Mental health is a consequence of culture as well as biology. The issue is less about treatment for accute disorders and more about stressful/harmful environments that invoke/encourage violent responses. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/34 "2019-01-16T18:16:25Z")
The type of help that the paranoid and the psychotic get is not bromide ridden talk therapy. It is hospitalization and powerful anti-psychotic medication.The can be hospitalized without their consent for a three day period if they are thought to be a danger to themselves or others so they can get the help quick. The second point is the more important one in that lack of insight is one of the symptoms of some mental conditions. This means people are unlikely to get the help they need and are likely to reject the help offered. This is one reason the homeless problem is so bad. Laws need to be changed to make it easier to treat people against their will. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/35 "2019-01-16T18:34:25Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > The other nations aren’t developed nations. So what? Does that mean the people there are benighted savages who cannot be held responsible for their atrocities? This whole “developed nations” thing is just a form of bigotry. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/36 "2019-01-16T19:04:48Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > The type of help that the paranoid and the psychotic get is not bromide ridden talk therapy. It is hospitalization and powerful anti-psychotic medication.The can be hospitalized without their consent for a three day period if they are thought to be a danger to themselves or others so they can get the help quick. > > The second point is the more important one in that lack of insight is one of the symptoms of some mental conditions. This means people are unlikely to get the help they need and are likely to reject the help offered. This is one reason the homeless problem is so bad. Laws need to be changed to make it easier to treat people against their will. Being psychotic is not associated with criminal activity. It is associated with being the victims of crime. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2019, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/37 "2019-01-17T17:40:55Z")
> [@thelurkinghorror](#): > > Being psychotic is not associated with criminal activity. It is associated with being the victims of crime. This is true for almost all crime but mass shootings are an exception. Estimates range from 20% to 50% all mass shooters have some form of serious mental illness, whereas the population only has about 2%. ---
**Author:** ![Tee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/73ab20/32.png) [@Tee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tee)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2019, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/38 "2019-01-17T19:38:28Z")
The FBI has extensively studied shooters and mass killers, and there’s one important finding that can sum up the collected wisdom on the subject, which is: no one just “snaps” and goes to shoot up a school. It requires planning and foresight. There are warning signs. People now act on those signs, and that is a big step in the right direction, but this takes it out of the mental health field to a degree and into law enforcement…a medico-legal gray area. Individual threat assessment is ideally performed by a crisis team according to FBI guidelines. Elliot Rodger is one who had extensive mental health issues (with psychosis) but he also had extensive mental health care, and thus he can serve as a good example of how patient care alone may not fix angry asshole disease, especially when it depends on patients self-reporting. I believe we’re in the early stages of building a system to accommodate such threats, a kind of mashup of mental health, police, community, and emergency services. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2019, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/39 "2019-01-18T17:37:49Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Not true: > [https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-despite-gun-control-advocates-claims-u-s-isnt-the-worst-country-for-mass-shootings/](https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-despite-gun-control-advocates-claims-u-s-isnt-the-worst-country-for-mass-shootings/) > \*But a study of global mass-shooting incidents from 2009 to 2015 by the Crime Prevention Research Center, headed by economist John Lott, shows the U.S. doesn’t lead the world in mass shootings. In fact, it doesn’t even make the top 10, when measured by death rate per million population from mass public shootings. > > So who’s tops? Surprisingly, Norway is, with an outlier mass shooting death rate of 1.888 per million (high no doubt because of the rifle assault by political extremist Anders Brevik that claimed 77 lives in 2011). No. 2 is Serbia, at just 0.381, followed by France at 0.347, Macedonia at 0.337, and Albania at 0.206. Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, and Czech Republic all follow. Then comes the U.S., at No. 11, with a death rate of 0.089. > > That’s not all. There were also 27% more casualties from 2009 to 2015 per mass shooting incident in the European Union than in the U.S. > > “There were 16 cases where at least 15 people were killed,” the study said. “Out of those cases, four were in the United States, two in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.” > > “But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany’s and five times the U.K.'s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher.” > > Yes, the U.S. rate is still high, and nothing to be proud of. But it’s not the highest in the developed world. Not by a long shot.\* > > And that’s just mass shootings. Mass killings with bombs, machetes and such are common. > [@Isamu](#): > > I haven’t even looked into how wrong this study is yet, but first tell me why he chose the dates 2009 to 2015? What is special about that specific time period and why is he ingoring other dates? > [@DrDeth](#): > > You could, I dunno, read the study? > > [UPDATED: Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Europe](https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from-mass-public-shootings-in-the-us-and-europe/) > > \*We cover the period from the beginning of the Obama administration to the current date, from 2009 to the Charleston massacre (this matches the starting period for another recent study we did on US shootings and we chose that because that was the starting point that Bloomberg’s group had picked). The cases were complied doing a news search. The starting year was picked simply because Obama was making this claim and 2009 was the beginning of the Obama administration. It also matched the time frame of a recent Bloomberg report (a report that we evaluated here). \* Heh. Don’t bother to read the “study,” as the “Crime Prevention Research Center” is merely a gun advocacy site: > **[Crime Prevention Research Center - Bias and Credibility](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/crime-prevention-research-center/)** > > RIGHT BIAS These media sources are moderate to strongly biased toward conservative causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may > [@](#): > > The Crime Prevention Research Center is a nonprofit founded in 2013 by John Lott, author of the book “More Guns, Less Crime.” He is best known as an advocate in the gun rights debate, particularly his arguments against restrictions on owning and carrying guns. Lott’s work has been called “junk science” as he has been accused of accepting funding from the National Rifle Association. Lott denies this claim. Any claims made on this website need to be fact checked with credible sources. ---
**Author:** ![filmore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@filmore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmore)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2019, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812/40 "2019-01-18T17:51:32Z")
Netflix has a series called [“Don’t Call Me Crazy”](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6974836/), which documents teens in an in-patient mental health hospital in the UK. It’s astonishing how good and supportive the level of care is, especially when compared to what we have in the US. Kids with issues like schizophrenia are surrounded by supportive doctors to help them deal with their issues and come up with coping mechanisms. Kids stay in the hospital for months until they are well enough to leave. That’s the kind of mental health environment you would need to reduce mass shootings. Well before the person snaps, they would have likely been put in such a hospital when the issues were just starting and much more easily addressed. But with the way insurance works in the US, it is virtually impossible or cost prohibitive to get kids into that level of care unless the problem is very severe. A kid in the US who is just starting to hear voices will not get inpatient and dedicated care until the problem is so severe that they are a danger to society (and then it will probably be from a prison doctor). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-the-solution-to-mass-shootings-violent-crime/827812.md?page=3)