there is an -undeniable- need for an increase in access to mental health care to help mitigate against gun suicides.
Unfortunately, when republicans and democrats talk about homicides and mental illness they are talking past each other.
Republicans want to 'blame the crazy evil doers', while Democrats tend to overlook the connection between mental disorders and suicide in favor of moving the narrative to psycho-social stressors of existing inequity that produce criminally unacceptable behaviors.
There have been studies done on this topic. Swedish journals have tended to lead on the publication of studies in that area over the past 30 years. Study cohorts composed of people with even the most serious mental disorders associated with violence have a rate of violence only 2-3 percent higher when compared to Americans at large which is only about 6 and a half percent of the seriously mentally ill in the study period. Which is really surprising considering how dominant angst against 'the evil crazies' is in America.
And often overlooked is a dirty little secret, most violent acts by mentally disordered persons (mostly men) occur in prisons, under the care of people who aren't trained or politically oriented to see them as something more than evil crazies, corrections staff who out of fear or privilege act in threatening and violent ways toward inmates with serious mental disorders (something of a circular feedback loop, if you ask me).
Publications on mentally ill in prison is where the term 'psychopath' and sociopath dominate. Psychologists have mostly purged the diagnoses of psychopath or sociopath in their lexicon. But you still find it in books used to train corrections officers.
But sad as it is to say, it is prison, with it's very limited skill set to deal with mental disorders where most men with mental disorders find an institution that will try to care for them. Gender bias is still a huge problem in mental illness. Women with very similarly unacceptable symptoms are placed in institutional care, while men are placed in prison, mostly because men are scarier in the perception of 'the system'.
I believe there are many types of mass shooting based on the motivations and solutions that the shooters expect: consider that
shooting up a post-office and the employees of a martinet supervisor and accomplice bullying co-workers who mistreated a shooter is different than
a gun-powered skirmish over gang territory which is different than
a shooting of Amish children in a one-room Pennsylvania school house
which is different than a radicalized doctor shooting up a group of soldiers at an Army clinic at a fort in Texas.
How bad is our understanding of the problem?? The FBI doesn't even have a standard definition for mass killings. Media outlets and advocacy groups are the sources for competing definitions.
And when we go into the published record of mass shootings, it often ends in a dead shooter, less than 40% of gun homicides have a known hooter. If you don't know the shooter, you can't know the mental status of that shooter. So as a reporter, you lean on relatives and shallow associates to the shooter and press questions about loners, and unusual social behavioer, drug use etc. And what you get is answers from people who are EMBARRASSED by their association with shooter and looking to clear their own reputations. Very useful, not. Though, that never seems to shut the mouths of the mass who JUST KNOW(!) it must be an 'evil crazy person.'
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