Mental illness account for a very small proportion of mass shootings in the US
Findings from the Columbia database help dispel the myth that having a severe psychiatric illness is predictive of who will perpetrate mass murder.
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I hope no one takes this to mean that I am trying to stigmatize mental illness or people with mental illnesses, but it seems to me that if there are people who want to be famous or notorious so badly that they kill large numbers of people, that doesn't seem to be the result of a healthy or well ordered mind. Am I misunderstanding how the phrase "mental illness" is being used here? I recognize that the headline is referring specifically to disorders involving psychosis, but they even state that only 25% of mass shooters are associated with non-psychotic mental illnesses. Are emotional/behavioral disorders not being considered here? Or is the mass shooting database they are using one of those that includes any shooting with more than a certain number of people involved, even if that includes events that the typical person would not consider part of the phenomenon of the types of shootings that most people are thinking of when they talk about mass shootings?
Seriously, I hope I am not stepping on anyone's toes or saying something that will be taken as hurtful, because that's genuinely not how I mean it. But I really feel like if someone is in a state that they decide the best course of action for them is to kill a bunch of people they don't know, how could that be the result of a healthy mental and emotional state?
They call it out a little further down.
Half of all mass shootings are associated with no red flags—no diagnosed mental illness, no substance use, no history of criminality, nothing. They’re generally committed by middle-aged men who are responding to a severe and acute stressor, so they're not planned, which makes them very difficult to prevent.
So they are not necessarily in a good emotional state, but they do not have a mental illness.
That seems silly to me. Just because someone that has chickenpox hasn't been formally diagnosed as having chickenpox, that doesn't mean they don't actually have chickenpox.
Maybe none of these folks are truly suffering from mental illness, but what would that mean? That they're untreatable? That can't be right. So then what are they afflicted with?
It seems like they're trying to draw a line between clinical "serious" mental illness like schizophrenia and what's happening with mass shooters ... but I don't think folks that are saying "mass shooters are mentally ill" mean things like schizophrenia.
Thanks, I definitely skimmed the article, so missing that is on me.
It's interesting that the profile they mention doesn't really fit what I have in my mind for mass shooters, which would be younger men, not middle-aged. I guess the ones that really stick out to me, like the Columbine, Christchurch, and Uvalde shooters all fit this stereotype that I have, but apparently that doesn't map to reality.
There are several different subtypes of mass shootings, and school shooters and planned hate-crime shootings each have their own distinct characteristics. They get the most media coverage, for sure, and tend to trend younger than other types, but they're the least common type of mass shooting.
The mass shootings the article is talking about, which are the most common, are often workplace or family shootings, and are usually by middle aged men.
The definition of mass shooting used most commonly now is any shooting with 4 or more casualties, which includes a lot of shootings that most people wouldn't really think of as mass shootings, which are generally thought of as being like the ones like you named.
Right, and I was already aware of several lists of mass shooting using that or similar criteria to determine what fits. It's just a little strange to me to group so many disparate types of events into a list, and then do a study to say "most of these things don't involve mental illness" when most of those events are wildly different from each other.
Definitely agree with you there. The FBI had traditionally treated different types of shootings as each being unrelated. It was US media that pushed the term mass shooting in its current definition (so they could run big-number stories), and the consolidation of very different profiles under one label has done more harm than good, imo.
If you actually break them apart into distinct groups, there is a much stronger correlation with mental illness among especially e.g. school shooters.
the Columbine, Christchurch, and Uvalde shooters all fit this stereotype that I have, but apparently that doesn’t map to reality.
I think people don't realize how many mass shootings happen in the US. Mostly because they don't typically make the news outside the place they occur.
CW: List of mass shootings in the US for 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2024
TL;DR: There have been 372 this year alone. That is 372 in 218 days, so more than one a day on average
Yeah, I addressed that briefly in my first comment. This definition of "mass shooting" is much, much broader and very different from what most people are thinking of when people talk about mass shootings. Like, I'm fully aware of how serious the gun violence problem in the US is, but I'm not thinking of a domestic violence situation where multiple people got injured, or a gang related shooting at a club where some bystanders are killed when I hear the term "mass shooting". Don't get me wrong, those situations are tragic, and the availability of guns in the US makes them so much worse, but I understand the psychology of them pretty well, I think. It's not a mystery to me why they are happening. But the kind of situation where a person goes to a place and just starts indiscriminately shooting people is what I don't understand, and it's what I tend to think of when people talk about "mass shootings". Maybe this is just me being wrong, or maybe it's a problem of imprecise terminology.
Oh totally. The definition is strictly numbers based. I don't think that is useful when you are trying to dig deep into the cause.
While I think this is a reasonable sort of surface-level interpretation, I think it misses a bit of what typifies mental illness versus just being destructive, malicious, desperate, or extremely entitled.
Mental illness is something your brain is doing to you. It's not just a thought that you have and roll with, it's a persistent pattern that you struggle against. Just deciding that the thoughts and feelings being produced are inaccurate or unhelpful doesn't make it go away. It's not just extreme emotion, it's emotion that's being switched on in a way that isn't tied into the continuity of your more volitional patterns of thought and feeling. It's not just that the thoughts and behaviors playing out are unhealthy.
To put it into metaphor, think of your life and your interactions with the world like a video game, with your brain being essentially your character controller, interpreting your actions and bringing them into the world. You can decide to do healthy or unhealthy things with your character, but those things are under your own volition. Mental illness, then, is like a poorly coded character controller throwing errors and causing unforeseen bugs. Like, for example, if I push the down button there's a 30% chance that I randomly move to the left first, rather than moving in the appropriate direction.
That 30% chance might send me careening into a pit, but chances are that once I'm used to having this bug, I'll be aware enough of it to try to compensate. It might not always work, and I might drift a little left occasionally, but if I give myself a bit wider berth for any obstacles on my left, I'll probably be okay. This is distinct from someone who uses their volition to throw themselves into a pit on purpose.
Are both potentially bad for the character's health? Yes. But only one is caused by a character controller error, and because my goal isn't 'throw myself into pit', I'll probably do a much better job avoiding pits than someone who's jumping into them intentionally. These two problems are fundamentally different in that one is a product of a person's volition, while the other is a problem with the means by which they interact with the rest of the world.
That's not to say that people with mental illness are going to accidentally assassinate someone because they pressed down and went a bit left, but it illustrates the fundamental difference in making a bad decision versus struggling with errors in your brain.
That someone jumps into a pit on purpose does not imply that their character controller is bugged, especially if they smoothly beeline it while showing all signs of acting with intention.
I feel like the conversation is getting pretty far out of my depth, so again if I say something hurtful please let me know. If it helps, I've been diagnosed with a mild to moderate anxiety disorder, but I'm pretty functional and CBT has been enough for me to get through most of my rough patches. I also have a loved one who suffers from OCD (actual OCD, not the kind where you like things to be neat). I also know how unbelievably frustrating and hurtful it is to be told that you should just "think better" or somehow fix your own "bad thoughts" or "wrong feelings", so if I somehow unintentionally communicated that in my earlier comment I apologize, it's not what I intended.
My conception of mental illness has usually been that the problem is happening before volition really comes into the picture. So in your example of the videogame, it's not necessarily that there's a bug with the controller, but maybe there's a bug with the display. What you're seeing in the "game" isn't accurate in some way, so you wind up in the pit because you didn't see it, or because it seemed like it was somewhere else on the screen, or because something was indicating that the pit was the correct direction to go. The way I've always pictured mental illness is that the inputs on your controller might make perfect sense to another person if they could see what's on your display, but because the display is bugged they lead to the "wrong" outcome. To exit the metaphor a little, I might be feeling intense anxiety about something (or nothing in particular, thanks brain) and avoid it, because anxiety is our brain's signal that something is dangerous and should be avoided. But when that thing is an assignment for school, there's a problem with the input or the perception of that thing. Now, my brain causing me to feel amounts of anxiety that are wildly disproportionate with the thing itself is not really something I can control, but once I understand that my "display" is fucked up in a certain way, I can work around it to a certain degree and remain pretty functional.
I tend to believe that if we were able to get inside people's minds and understand all of the "inputs" they're getting, from their emotions, stray thoughts, traumas, memories, etc that for the vast majority of people, we'd be able to understand why they've made the choices that they make and they would make sense, in light of the information their brain is giving them. That's why the assertion that mass shooters don't have any mental illness is surprising to me. I can't understand why someone would make that choice if their display hasn't gotten fucked up in some major way. Now, maybe it is, but it's entirely environmental or social, or something along those lines. If that's true, then I guess I could make some sense of it, although it's hard for me to understand what experiences would lead to this kind of destructive decision.
Anyway, at this point I'm basically rambling about a bunch of stuff that I really have no expertise or deep understanding of, so I apologize for that, and I apologize again if I've said anything out of line.
Sure. Something like a poorly configured sprite sheet could be an appropriate metaphor too. Personally, I have PTSD. For me it tends to manifest as getting wrapped up in memories and in grappling with thought patterns that make it hard for me to process them or that leave me struggling with how I feel as a result. A lot of my own stuff is very internal, and often comes in response to my trying to process trauma. I feel less like I'm tinting the world than struggling with buggy internal processes. Not to say that interpretation of outside stimuli (social stimuli in particular) isn't also a factor, but it's not the main thing for me.
Where you put the error, whether in interpretation or in execution, is largely beside the point, though, to my thinking. The main thing is that you're looking at an error versus a choice.
I do think that a lot of these destructive and malicious behaviors could certainly be seen as being the result of toxic thought patterns and compartmentalization, but I don't think that's quite the same thing as a buggy, error-prone brain.
Like, somebody who drives around in a massive pickup truck ignoring traffic laws and bullying their way around knowing that people will fear being hurt by their vehicle and will avoid them is just an abusive, dangerous asshole. There may be some underlying insecurity or discomfort that leads them to react that way, but it's the reaction they've chosen and habituated to. We can discuss free will all day, but there's a big difference between the guy who runs stop signs in a 2 ton vehicle and someone whose depression keeps them stuck in bed. One of those things is a pattern of choice-related behavior, while the other is someone struggling to have the energy to exist.
The fact that many of us seem to have a hard time conceiving of anyone making these kinds of choices on purpose, to me, is simply illustrative of it being related to volition. They make different choices because they're a different person, who sees things very differently. When the behaviors are taken to their extreme and other people are hurt, it can be harder to see the volitional difference, but at a simpler level I think it's a little more obvious.
Does knowingly blasting everyone with your high-beams indicate mental illness? Does being rude to service workers? Littering?
The volition aspect here is pretty obviously different in someone who, for example, dumps their trash in a river rather than paying to have it removed. We may not know exactly what's going on in their heads, but we can at least sort out that they probably don't really care about nature or pollution or the people swimming down-river. I think it becomes a little harder to see in those more extreme behaviors because it's so extreme, but I don't think the fundamental nature is all that different.
Someone carrying out a murder is not, in type, fundamentally different from someone who merely doesn't care if anyone gets killed by their 8ft tall truck. They're different in degree.
This has definitely given me some things to think about, and really I appreciate you being patient with me.
I was never under the impression that most mass shooters do it for fame or notoriety, but rather as revenge for some perceived injustice from society at large or by the particular community they attack.
Even still, it's very far from a healthy mindset.
There's some research that indicates that there's a "contagion" effect with mass shootings that increases the more they are publicized, and that at least some types of mass killers seem to be motivated by a desire for notoriety. The FBI has backed a campaign for media to minimize coverage of mass killers' names and faces and to focus more on stories about victims in an effort to reduce these particular types of mass killings.
One of the key features of scientific studies is that they only go as far as the data and the experimental design can support. Because of this it is not unusual for a study to give results that may be surprising or counterintuitive, but not be able to explain why. This is especially true for complex issues. I'm not trying to dismiss your question, and I think several good ideas and observations have been made in the ensuing comments, but in the end I don't think this study which describes the correlation between two factors, can give you the answer you are looking for.