Mental Illness Plays Only "Limited" Role in Mass Violence: Paper

"Mental illness plays an 'important but limited role' in mass violence, according to a paper prepared for the National Council for Behavioral Health by the Medical Director Institute (MDI).

'While there is a modest link between mental illness and violence, there is no basis for the public’s generalized fear of people with mental illness,' said the paper, which summed up a recent panel of experts on mass violence convened by the MDI.

'Having a psychiatric diagnosis is neither necessary nor sufficient as a risk factor for committing an act of mass violence.'

The paper noted that mass violence is 'rare,' and has accounted for less than two-tenths of one percent of homicides in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016, even though the U.S. stands out among other advanced countries because of the frequent use of guns by violence perpetrators.

Efforts to tie such incidents to mental illness are understandable but misleading, the paper said."

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Link to Full Report 

Related article: Violence and the Mentally Trouble: Reaching Them Before They "Explode"
 

Rate Of Mental Illness Exceeds Gang Membership In Texas’ Juvenile Detention

In Texas juvenile detention facilities, the rate of mental illness now exceeds the rates of those affiliated with a gang, according to an Associated Press analysis. Substance abuse and dependency are particularly rampant, affecting almost 1,100 of the current 1,411 inmates. The Texas Juvenile Justice Department’s director said last month that the percentage of mentally ill incarcerated youths spiked from 39 percent in 2007 to 56 percent in 2013, demonstrating that the problem of criminalizing mental health problems is not isolated to adult jails and prisons.

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13 Men Condemned to Die Despite Severe Mental Illness

If juveniles and intellectually disabled people are ineligible for execution, why not paranoid schizophrenics? 

Just how crazy must a person be to be ruled incompetent for execution in the United States? Being profoundly mentally ill is not enough. You have to be deemed legally "insane."

At trial, the insanity defense generally hinges on a person's inability to distinguish right from wrong or understand the "nature and quality" of his act. In the context of an impending execution, insanity means you cannot rationally comprehend that you are being put to death as a consequence of the crime you committed.

In 2005, a Texas jury found that Andre Thomas, the subject of my in-depth companion piece (see box below), was not insane at the time of his crime.

To put this in context, consider that Thomas was then, and still is, a delusional paranoid schizophrenic who hears voices—from God, he believes—telling him to do things. He carved out the organs of his four-year-old son, his estranged wife, and her 13-month-old daughter, and took them home in his pockets, believing that this would kill the demons inside them. In the days following his arrest, he insisted to a jailhouse nurse that his victims were still alive.

And that's not even the weirdest part of the story.

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Can You Fake Mental Illness?

How forensic psychologists can tell whether someone is malingering.

When someone commits a horrific, inexplicable crime, we naturally wonder whether he’s mentally ill: Who but a crazy person could do such a thing? But when a killer acts crazy after his arrest, we also might wonder whether he’s preparing for his trial. That’s the speculation around Colorado shooter James Holmes, whose psychiatric treatment and bizarre behavior in court and prison make people wonder whether he’s truly insane or building a case for an insanity defense. It leads to the question: Can a criminal get away with faking insanity?

Experts have been debating that question since the creation of the insanity defense in the mid-19th century. To avoid the noose or the guillotine, criminals of the era would fake symptoms from the then-emerging field of psychology. It soon became a cat-and-mouse game: Criminals would act out their understanding of insane behaviors, and alienists (the era’s term for psychologists) would write studies on how to detect those “malingerers.” Most techniques relied on the investigators’ experience and powers of observation—looking for inconsistencies in symptoms, waiting until the suspect tired of the game, or simply catching a telltale look in his eye. As the Austrian criminologist Hans Gross wrote: “The shammer, when he thinks no one is looking, casts a swift and scrutinizing glance on the Investigating Officer to see whether or not he believes him.”

Today, less than 1 percent of felony defendants raise an insanity defense, and a tiny fraction of those succeed. Yet in a state like Colorado, where proving insanity can avert a death sentence, the temptation to appear mentally ill must be strong. And so modern forensic psychologists, just like their forebears, watch for malingering with a sharp clinical eye. They determine whether the symptoms match those of well-studied pathologies and whether the signs remain consistent over time. They also can apply a battery of tests that essentially fake-out the faker.

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Mentally ill female prisoners treated cruelly, inhumanly, report finds

Canada’s treatment of mentally ill female prisoners amounts to “cruel and inhuman” punishment, a new report finds.
“It is shocking to see the extent of human rights abuses against women at home,” said Renu Mandhane, director of the International Human Rights Program at University of Toronto, which published the report.
“I think, with the Ashley Smith story and the ongoing inquest, everyone assumed that no one is currently in that situation,” said Mandhane, who co-chairs the Advocacy Committee of Human Rights Watch Canada.
“The fact is there are still women imprisoned who are subject to long periods of segregation and uses of force despite their mental health status. That is quite disturbing.”


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Here is the report.  Tom

Prisons given funding, but no clear plan

Correctional Investigator of Canada and Federal Ombudsman for Prisons, Howard Sapers, holds a news conference to release their final assessment of the Correctional Service of Canada's response to deaths in custody at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa on Sept. 8, 2010.

Diana Zlomislic Staff Reporter

The federal government poured $50 million into Canada’s prison system to deal with mentally ill offenders without a comprehensive plan to make sure it was properly spent, a watchdog report has found.

“Significant funds were advanced to the Correctional Service of Canada on the basis of much less detailed planning and reporting accountability than that generally demanded of the public,” according to the report by the Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada.

The result: a hodgepodge of poorly planned and unfinished programs scattered over a prison system strained by a growing number of inmates with mental disorders.

“We know that there’s a growing demand for mental health interventions,” correctional investigator Howard Sapers told the Star. “And we know if that demand is unmet, there will be a less safe environment in Canadian penitentiaries.”

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Here is the press release. Tom

Shelf Life: A Criminally Insane System

Forget the sensational headlines about the mentally ill. The truth is in the alternative media.

by Danielle Maestretti

Based on what the mainstream media and an ever-growing spate of TV crime shows have to say about mental illness, one could easily sketch a sinister profile of the average specimen: He's a murder convict, schizophrenic or perhaps bipolar, who snapped after he went off his meds and brutally killed someone with a baseball bat or an apple corer. Oh, and don't forget the takeaway lesson: Why was he roaming the streets in the first place? He should have been in a hospital somewhere.

"The fact is that the mentally ill are rarely violent and contribute very little to overall violence in the United States," writes psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman in "The Politics of Mental Illness," an outstanding 24-page special report in the July-August issue of the American Prospect. But it's easy to see why this myth needs dispelling: Friedman points to a 2005 study of 70 major newspapers that found that 39 percent of stories about mentally ill people "focused on dangerousness."

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