What Research Shows About the Alleged Link Between Mental Illness and Gun Violence

In the aftermath of high-profile incidents of gun violence, many elected officials—especially those with a vested interest in America's gun lobby—are quick to blame such tragedies on mental illness. On Monday, following a weekend of two separate mass shootings killing 31 people, President Donald Trump once again invoked this trope. "We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence, and make sure those people not only get treatment but—when necessary—involuntary confinement," he said in a White House address. "Mental illness and hate pulls the trigger, not the gun."

In the same speech, Trump also proposed stricter federal controls on first-person shooter video games, another oft-cited contributing factor to gun violence. That despite the fact that the popularity of video games does not correlate with any attendant spike in gun deaths in countries like Japan, which heavily regulates firearms. Still, the president mostly focused on mental illness, calling for the expansion of red-flag laws, which prevent individuals who pose a "grave risk" to others from buying firearms, and allow law enforcement to take guns away from such people using, as Trump put it, "rapid due process."

This association likely stems from the fact that some mass murderers did suffer from mental illness at the time they committed their crimes. Jared Lee Loughner, for example, who killed six people in a 2011 shooting targeting U.S. congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was initially found incompetent to stand trial due to a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. But the causal link between these two phenomena is far less clear than the president and his allies suggest. "Routinely blaming mass shootings on mental illness is unfounded and stigmatizing," warned American Psychological Association president Rosie Phillips Davis in a statement released on Sunday. "The rates of mental illness are roughly the same around the world, yet other countries are not experiencing these traumatic events as often as we face them." And another "critical factor" in America's gun violence epidemic, Davis wrote, "is access to, and the lethality of, the weapons that are being used in these crimes. Adding racism, intolerance and bigotry to the mix is a recipe for disaster."

In a 2015 literature review published in the American Journal of Public Health, Vanderbilt University professors Jonathan Metzl and Kenneth MacLeish note research indicating that less than five percent of gun violence deaths between 2001 and 2010 were caused by people diagnosed with a mental illness. When it comes to mass murderers, the likelihood of severe mental illness is higher: Around 20 percent, Columbia University psychiatrist Michael Stone told the New York Times in 2017, compared to 1 percent of the overall population. But according to his research, 65 percent of recent spree killers exhibited no signs of psychosis or similar condition prior to their crimes; instead, Dr. Stone said, mass shooters are likelier to act in response to perceived slights and insults, quietly accumulated over time, until such grievances manifest themselves in violence.

For politicians interested in effective policy interventions, factors such as substance abuse, childhood abuse, antisocial behavior, and firearm ownership are more predictive of incidents of gun violence, and worthy of further study. A 2012 study concluded that alcohol and drug use, in particular, can increase the risk of violent crime by as much as a factor of seven. Yet, with mass shootings, the myopic focus on "mental illness" can pull meaningful scrutiny away from these evidence-based circumstances. When "[i]nsanity becomes the only politically sane place to discuss gun control," Metzl and MacLeish write,"a host of other narratives, such as displaced male anxiety about demographic change, the mass psychology of needing so many guns in the first place, or the symptoms created by being surrounded by them, remain unspoken."

For all of the GOP's professed concerns about mental illness, theirs is the same party that has been working for nearly a decade to roll back affordable health care coverage for those who would not otherwise have it. The White House's most recent budget proposal, meanwhile, suggested slashing $200 billion from Medicaid, which remains the single largest provider of mental health care in the country. If Republicans really believe mental illness is responsible for gun violence, they don't seem very interested in doing anything to treat it.

Originally Appeared on GQ