Dragged through the mud!

It seems to me that whenever anything distasteful or horrific happens everyone jumps on the mental illness wagon and pronounces that mental illness is the cause.

 ‘They must have been mad!’

And much as I won’t deny there is a link I am less than happy that it always seems to be put out in way that implies that it is a causal link and therefore the real problem is getting those with mental illness locked up or treated and all the problems will go away.(See this article in the guardian)

Really! It drives me nuts, particularly when it’s Americans as they seem to defend their way of life by curtailing someone else’s right to choose. Okay so I’m jaundiced but still I’ve had enough bad experiences of people implying I should comply with medication because they believe they are right despite leaving me with horrific side effects that make it impossible to live my life that I feel a little jaundice is understandable.

So the recent spate of, 'Treat the mental ill and then there won’t be a problem,' has finally got to me and I’ve gone looking for the statistics. In this data blog some figures for gun ownership and crime are quoted and I would like to draw your attention to a few of them.

1.    Average firearms per 100 people UK 6.2 USA 88.8

2.    Homicide by firearm rate per 100,000 of population UK 0.07 USA 2.97

3.    From this collection the USA has the highest rate of firearms per 100 people (of 176 countries).

4.    From this collection Honduras has the highest rate of homicide by firearm at 68.43 (of 116 countries)

Now clearly guns per head of population is a somewhat ambiguous statistic to use as the military and police forces in the USA have guns however in the UK this is not the case but then this statistic is equally ambiguous

Average total all civilian firearms UK 3400,000 USA 270,000,000 as clearly the USA is a much bigger country

However to scale I’ve assumed UK to be 1/5 the population of the USA so the number for the UK would then be equivalent to 16,635,867. However there is far more to firearms crimes than just homicides and basic ownership figures. It does however show that despite the number of guns the UK has a much lower firearms homicide rate than would be expected compared to the USA.

I would also like to draw your attention to this article that quotes

Many mass shooters suffer from psychological demons. Yet surprisingly little evidence supports the notion that aggregate groups of persons with “mental illnesses” are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. Databases that track US gun homicides find that only 3–5% of American gun crimes involve “mentally ill shooters” – a prevalence lower than in the general population

I would also recommend this article

 

And since I doubt very much that there is a greater proportion of people mental ill in the USA compared to the UK I kind of feel this preponderance to blame poor treatment/ adherence to treatment for mental health quite offensive. This article also says this about gun crime within the USA

By comparison, gender, geographic region, and race are all better predictors of gun violence than mental health. Knowing someone is male or from a particular state gives us more information about their likelihood to perpetrate gun violence than knowing that they have a diagnosed mental illness

So please all you who feel it is those untreated mental health problems that are causing these violent crimes the evidence is far from convincing. And for all us with such problems who are having a hard time of convincing the world that actually we are not such a great risk we would like you to stop dragging our good names through the mud.

This is not to say that improved treatment of mental health problems would not help the situation but really this distorted picture may well scare a great many into thinking the worst of people who may well end up being treated to more radical and severe treatment regimes than they require as a consequence.

 If the evidence supported it I would be all for it however from what I can see it really doesn’t and people are so scared of people with mental health problems already it really doesn’t need to be done just so that you can maintain a way of life involving dangerous weapons being kept in the home.

And really if you want to reduce gun crime why not make it harder to get, keep, and carry weapons seems a very simple answer to me.