Mental Breakdown
“You gotta be crazy to shoot a bunch of strangers dead!”
Yes. Crazy and untreated. A deeper dig into the mass public shooting (MPS) database with the most detailed mental health insights reveals that the American mental health system is ailing.
High Level Takeaways
- 68% of MPS perpetrators have mental illness.
- Of those, 65% of them never received treatment.
- Of perpetrators who were previously suicidal, only half received treatment.
- Mood disorder medications have an outsized influence.
The Violence Project Database
A product of government funding and greater access to medical records, the Violence Project database of MPS has the most complete accounting of the mental health status of MPS perpetrators. Their database starts in 1966 with the legendary University of Texas tower shooting and goes on through early 2020.
They also have nearly complete records of the perp’s mental health history, including rarified data such as the perp’s suicidality, their intention to die during the attack, prior mental health hospitalization, prior counseling, voluntary or mandatory counseling, if they were prescribed psychiatric medications, and if they are on the Autism spectrum (which we have noted before is a leading indicator for both MPSs and serial killers).
The basic question herein is how big of a hole exists in the American mental health system as it relates to MPSs. Go steal a Mac truck and you can drive through it.
Untreated and Mentally Ill Shooters
Mass public shooters are typically mentally ill and are unlikely to have received treatment.
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The Violence Project database agrees with the other major MPS databases on the mental health scorecard. Their more accurate tally is that a full 68% of MPS perpetrators were diagnosed with or showed signs of mental illness, and about half of those were suicidal to boot.
This big divide between mentally ill mass public shooters and treatment
Our first alarming insight: though 68% of MPS perpetrators are mentally unsound, only 31% of MPS perps ever received treatment.
Digging a little deeper, we looked at just the records of MPS perps who were listed as mentally ill. A whopping 65% of them never received treatment.
This is the core of the debate for MPSs. If a large majority (68%) of MPS perps are mentally fragile but only 35% of them get help, then the American mental health system is letting the lion’s share of MPS perps slip through the cracks.
There is medication to their madness – the role of psychotropics in mass shootings
Interestingly, and somewhat predictably, a full 34% of MPS perpetrators who had any sign of mental illness had been prescribed psychotropic medications. As we discovered in some original Gun Facts research, there is a positive (albeit bivariate) correlation between adverse reactions to psychotropic medications and MPS.
Let’s do a quick recap:
- 68% of shooters had mental illness. Of those:
- 31% received treatment.
- 34% had been prescribed psychotropic medications.
Those last two points are not an anomaly. Your family doctor can (but shouldn’t) prescribe psychotropics. But it does happen. Hence, there are a few entries in the database where someone (a) had signs of mental illness, but (b) never received counseling for their mental illness, and yet (c) someone prescribed mind-altering drugs to them.
[ED: I had a girlfriend who had amazingly bad PMS. Her family doctor prescribed her Prozac. Thankfully, she was a smart lass, and after taking exactly one pill said “No, this is stupid” and flushed the rest.]
Degrees of derangement
We thought it may be helpful to understand what varieties of mental illness are associated with MPS perpetrators, but the data is not all that helpful.
First, the classification scheme used by the Violence Project is narrow. In our study of psychotropic medications and mass murders, we identified 25 different but specific types of FDA-defined mental maladies. The Violence Project identified mood and thought disorders, as well as the two grab-bag classifications of “other” and “signs but no diagnosis.”
This leads to us seeing a nearly even mix of mood, thought and “signs” disorders (16–21% range). Hence, no greatly discernable pattern.
Now, here is where it gets a little scary. When we look at just the perpetrators who (a) had mental health issues and (b) were prescribed psychotropic medications, we see that drugs treating mood disorders are disproportionately associated with MPSs. Mood disorder medications have some well-known names and side-effects. In the SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) class we find Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, Luvox (the Columbine shooter’s meds), Lexapro and Celexa. In the MAOI (monoamine oxidase inhibitors) we see Parnate and Nardil. The list under tricyclics is too long to transcribe.
Bringing Mental Health Home
The point is, we see a descending but statistically observable chain with MPS perpetrators:
- 68% have some form of mental illness.
- 32–73% (depending on how you account) are suicidal.
- Only 35% get treatment.
- Of those treated, 34% were on medications.
- And for mood disorders, 48–80% were on medications.
Psychiatric hospitals were often not nice places. But since the 1970s, we disposed of 64% of all psych beds, and instead put at-risk people on the streets with pockets full of pills—which they may be too unreliable to take, regularly or at all, or do cold turkey withdraws from.
Incidentally, since the 1999 Columbine massacre, we jettisoned 23% of those psychiatric beds.
Many mass shootings involve AR15s, but it is not a high percentage of total AR15s. Similarly it would be interesting to see data about what percentage of patients taking SSRIs end up being shooters.
We ran the numbers on AR-15s and mass shooting a while back. It stats were underwhelming.
http://www.gunfacts.info/blog/ar-15s-mostly-harmless/
Anther response (directly from GunFacts) refutes this assertion.
I’m really interested in knowing where it came from. Do you have a source, or remember where you heard it?
Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico
What do you all think of this study with claims
the expiration of the FAWB in 2004 “led to immediate violence increases within areas of Mexico located close to American states where sales of assault weapons became legal. The estimated effects are sizable… the additional homicides stemming from the FAWB expiration represent 21% of all homicides in these municipalities during 2005 and 2006.”
We’d have to receive a copy of the study and read it in detail to form a rational opinion. If you can buy us a copy of the study, we’ll have a look.
That being said:
1) We did have this observation about Mexico, cartels, revolutionaires and guns – http://www.gunfacts.info/blog/aks-and-ars-real-assault-rifles-vs-mythical-assault-weapons/
“Drug cartels like AK-47s … a lot. South America is awash in Soviet made AK-47s left over from when the former communist block was exporting their ideology one bullet at a time. I suspect they are as cheap is elsewhere in the world, such as Afghanistan where reports had claimed a functioning military AK-47 can be had for as little as $100.”
2) This 21st century saw a product shift within the Mexican cartels, focusing less on marijuana and more on opiates. This while various cartels were maneuvering to own the lion’s share of the new trade. Any discussion of violence south of the border needs to take that into account.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M18-0503
Thanks, but the Oz paper provided is somewhat defective.
1) They included the Port Author year as part of the “before” data set. Any proper analysis would have isolated that year as a pivot and excluded it from before and after segments.
2) They did not compensate for the legislative lag.
3) They studied only firearm mass homicide, ignoring the substitution of means variable.
4) Their “model” was inappropriate for such exceedingly rare events.
There is this study aswell which says the lack of mass shootings in absense of gun reform in Australia has 1 in 200,000 odds of happening
This is a copy of the paper on Mexico btw
http://odube.net/papers/Cross_border_spillover.pdf
Thanks. Longish paper, so it will be a while before we get to it.
Q: What are your summaries of the data quality and methodologies in the paper?
I’m not too well versed in statistics, so I’m not sure.
Q: why was the model of the Aussie study inappropriate?
Data points are too infrequent for most any model. They said they were using the model for that purpose, but the data is so sparse as to make most models unreliable in terms of variation measurements.