What percent of gun violence is attributable to mental illness? The answer may surprise you.

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The news often portrays people with psychiatric disorders as a danger to others, when suicide is the much greater risk.

After a shooting, once the dust has settled, and the initial shock and panic has abated somewhat, fearful minds begin to cast about for explanations. Given the frequency with which gun deaths occur in the United States, “Why did this happen?” and “Who could do something like this?” are questions the country faces with grim regularity.

Unfortunately, a consistent and dangerous narrative has emerged—an explanation all-too-readily at hand when a mass shooting or other violent tragedy occurs: The perpetrator must have been mentally ill.

“We have a strong responsibility as researchers who study mental illness to try to debunk that myth,” says Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University. “I say as loudly and as strongly and as frequently as I can, that mental illness is not a very big part of the problem of gun violence in the United States.”

The overwhelming majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent, just like the overwhelming majority of all people are not violent. Only 4 percent of the violence—not just gun violence, but any kind—in the United States is attributable to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression (the three most-cited mental illnesses in conjunction with violence). In other words, 96 percent of the violence in America has nothing to do with mental illness.

Continue to Full Story at The Atlantic

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