Vaughan Bell of MindHack has written a nice examinataion of the link between violence and mental illness at Slate:
If suspect Jared Lee Loughner has schizophrenia, would that make him more likely to go on a shooting spree in Arizona? – By Vaughan Bell – Slate Magazine: “Seena Fazel is an Oxford University psychiatrist who has led the most extensive scientific studies to date of the links between violence and two of the most serious psychiatric diagnoses—schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, either of which can lead to delusions, hallucinations, or some other loss of contact with reality. Rather than looking at individual cases, or even single studies, Fazel’s team analyzed all the scientific findings they could find. As a result, they can say with confidence that psychiatric diagnoses tell us next to nothing about someone’s propensity or motive for violence.
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It’s important that this be said because the belief in a strong link between psyciatric diseases and violence makes life even harder for those unlucky enough to clinically manifest mental illness.
I took the opportunity to leave a comment at Slate to reflect my own thoughts on how best to think about causation in a case like this:
Vaughn-
While I appreciate your efforts to look at the big picture causation question of violence and mental illness, at the individual level there are at least three strongly interacting factors: the disease, external stressors, and content of thought.
Of the disease, little more need be said as we know this is a complex interaction between genetics and environment. You discussed important stressors like drugs and alcohol which ironically are often also attempts at self medication that go wrong.
Here, many of us are concerned about the content of the abnormal thought. We know that delusions have a strong cultural and social content. To my way of thinking, also a strong metaphorical component because that’s how the mind works.
This was predicted. Political rhetoric using violence metaphors like gun sights, media reports of people bringing guns to political rallies are not in themselves incitements to violence, but perhaps provide content for the disordered mind and lead to a choice of political violence among the other options