Violence and Mental Illness by Lia Ahonen

Author:Lia Ahonen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030187507
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

According to the literature, the attributable risk of mental health problems for violence is low. In practice, this means that if mental illness as a risk factor was completely removed, this strategy would only have a minimal effect on violence rates, and perhaps even a smaller effect on violence that includes gun use. This is not true only for the USA, where gun access is easy, but also other nations where gun regulations are very strict. Public officials are searching for strategies both to reduce violence and to reduce costs. If more gun regulations were imposed on people with mental health problems, not only would overall violence stay much the same, but it is also unlikely to be a cost-beneficial approach, and thus, it would have very little payoff (Ahonen, Loeber, & Brent, 2017).

To further complicate this topic, there is an assumption that the mental disorder “becomes” the individual, or the other way around. The individual’s problems and concerns are most often attributed to the diagnosis that they have been given. In most cases, this is not the correct way to evaluate an individual. Environmental factors that are commonly associated with violence tend to be ignored. For example, an individual living under circumstances such as poverty, exposure to violence in the community, domestic disturbances, and other factors known to contribute to interpersonal violence is still exposed to those factors independently of the diagnosis given. Swanson and colleagues put this well; …the social-environmental influences on violence are stronger than the effects of psychopathology and “wash” out psychopathology effects at the population level … (Swanson et al., 2015, p. 3).

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