Livewire said:
I'm not saying that if you happen to be mentally ill then you're automatically a sociopath just waiting for a chance to kill people. But many times these killers have deep rooted mental issues and/or disorders that contribute to their behavior. Jared Lee Loughner, the shooter of Gabby Giffords in 2011, was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.
I don't know about this particular case, but just because a person has a mental illness doesn't mean that said illness definitely contributed to their behaviour. You can be schizophrenic without your schizophrenia contributing to your behaviour - either by receiving proper medication and support or by simply not being a violent schizophrenic, something which is probably far rarer than you realise.
I feel like people are really quick to link violence with mental illness, which I really doubt is helped by news and media; you hear often of people with mental illnesses murdering people or being violent or whatever, but when was the last time you saw "Person diagnosed with schizophrenia - does absolutely nothing" as a headline? I imagine it was never, because no-one really cares about that. If it's not controversial it's not interesting so when given an opportunity to link something like mental illness to violence people will absolutely love that.
Livewire said:
So aside from two big ones, undiagnosed mental illnesses don't contribute to any crimes? Funny how most of these big killings involve some mentally unstable and/or 'manic-depressive-off-their meds' type who finally snaps or decides to act on their dark tendencies.
In general I... really feel like mental illness is used as a bit of a scapegoat here and it's actually pretty damaging to mentally ill people. I personally find it pretty offensive that it's a) assumed that mental illness is the underlying cause of violence and for that reason, treating it rather than the real underlying cause (whatever that may be) will solve the problem when in reality I feel like mental illness accounts for a very small proportion of violent crime which is blown up by media and b) it's assumed that people 'off-the-meds' are automatically unstable and dangerous. A lot of people with mental illnesses are totally fine without medication and are able to handle their condition by themselves using their own techniques which they've developed over time. It's very possible in many cases. People also have a good number of reasons why they might decide not to take medication; they might not have access to medication for financial reasons, they don't want to feel reliant on medication, they may feel like medication makes them worse, whatever. Usually it's actually quite a legitimate reason and usually people who don't take medication will have other resources to help them cope. I'm also not at all fond of these 'dark tendencies', mentioned in this thread and in others iirc, which it's assumed that mentally ill people have. Generally because they, uh, don't have them. There's a difference between dark thoughts and dark tendencies - many mentally ill people have dark thoughts, sure, but very few act on them. But once again, you only hear of the ones that do.
I'll also throw this out there - I can say with a fair degree of certainty that many of you guys know people with mental illnesses which you don't know about and, because of the huge numbers of misconceptions and negative stereotypes surrounding mental illnesses, which they've likely chosen not to share with you for fear of judgement or whatever despite being absolutely normal, outwardly healthy people who can handle themselves just fine and don't turn into mass murderers at the drop of a hat. I wish this was an issue which more people would talk about to help clear up misconceptions about it but it's a bit of a vicious cycle; as long as these misconceptions continue, mentally ill people won't want to come clean about their conditions and as long as they don't come clean about them, the misconceptions won't be resolved. It's an awkward situation but honestly I feel like the assumption, implied whether or not deliberately, that the mentally ill are dangerous is just about as valid as the old assumptions that all black people were thieves or that all homosexuals were paedophiles. We shouldn't be dealing with stuff like that in this day and age.