Every time a mass shooting occurs, someone wants to have the gun control debate, and someone else wants to avoid that discussion and talk about the “real” problem — mental illness — instead. In any given year, one in every four adults will suffer from mental illness, which makes it a fairly common problem.
Despite that, it’s one of the most frequently misunderstood issues in the media and in politics. Many people’s ideas of what “mentally ill” means are understandably wrong-footed — not having experienced it, it’s difficult to grasp the incredibly wide range of what it means. The fact that the media loves to play up the mental illness angle every time a tragedy like the Oregon, Texas or Arizona shootings occurs doesn’t help — we’re used to having the phrases “mentally ill” and “mass shooting” connected.
However, it’s largely pointless to try to blame a flawed mental health system — or the mentally ill — for violence. Perpetrators of mass shootings are more connected by their race and gender than by their mental health status, but no one is blaming white men for gun massacres. Some spree killers have antisocial personality disorder. Some suffer from depression — a condition that 6.7 percent of adults live with. Some have narcissistic personalities. Some escape any diagnosis at all, lending credence to the idea that it isn’t mental illness that drives them to kill, but some other unknown combination of factors. There are some traits that could be similar between spree killers, but they aren’t indicative of any diagnosis by themselves. Until some unifying condition is found to explain mass murder, pinning responsibility for violent acts on mental illness only hurts the hundreds of thousands of other sufferers who have to face the stigma.
Even if research were to find some common illness between the killers of the past through psychological autopsy — a process which is frankly unreliable — the information would be next to useless. Mental illnesses are difficult to diagnose because they can present themselves differently in each sufferer. Not to mention that a diagnosis would be no guarantee of violence, but only a risk factor, possibly a negligible one. Additionally, nearly half of people with even the most severe mental illnesses never even try to seek treatment. Even assuming a common condition and a sufferer seeking help, treatment would present a problem. In fact, there are few to no mental illnesses that can be cured entirely — the most many sufferers can hope for is control of the symptoms. Some people’s symptoms elude treatment entirely. That isn’t a reason not to seek therapy, but it does mean that it’s difficult to say that identifying mental illness as a cause of mass shootings would do anything to prevent them.
Psychologists will continue to study the pathology of killers — and they should. But that’s a scientific discussion, not a political one. Legislation can’t affect mental illness, but it can affect the availability of guns. So let’s get back to the only debate politics has any place in.