Americans tend to think about mental illness and gun violence after all-too-frequent mass shootings at schools, workplaces, or concert events, he continued. “A mass shooting at a public place is so terrifying, and destructing and irrational,” he said. “It’s everything we don’t want our ordinary lives to be. We want our lives to be safe and to make sense. A mass shooting is none of those things. The act of going out and shooting a bunch of strangers is not the act of a healthy mind.
“But that person is very atypical in two ways: atypical of people with serious mental illnesses, most of whom are not violent and never will be, and atypical of the perpetrators of gun violence, the vast majority of whom do not have serious mental illnesses. But talking about both of these problems together in the aftermath of a mass shooting is too often the conversation that we’re stuck with.”
Doug Brunk/Frontline Medical News
Dr. Jeffrey W. Swanson
In 2015, there were 36,252 gun-related deaths in the United States. Of these, 61% were suicides, 36% were homicides, 2% were police-related, and 1% were unintentional. “We hear prominent voices in the public square today telling us that this is a problem related to mental health, and that the logical solution is to fix the mental health care system,” Dr. Swanson said. “As a mental health services researcher who has spent my career trying to build evidence for better policies to improve outcomes for people with serious mental illnesses, and knowing that the mental health care system we have is fragmented and overburdened – that the treatments we have don’t work very well for some people – I firmly believe we need to invest in and improve the mental health care system. But the idea that this alone is going to solve our problem of gun violence is misguided, in my opinion.”
Homicide data from the International Crime Victim Survey, conducted by Gallup Europe in 2000, found that in the United States, assaults are three more times likely to involve guns than in 14 other industrialized countries, including France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Belgium, and Australia. Moreover, there is an average of 97 guns for every 100 people in the United States, compared with an average of 17 guns per 100 people in all other industrialized countries. The violent crime rate in the United States is close to the average in 15 other industrialized countries in Western Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Japan: 5.5%, compared with 6.3%.