“We are making great strides on achieving long sought reforms by removing barriers to care, creating an assistant secretary for mental health and substance use disorders, and transforming how Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) grant dollars are spent”.
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News coverage of causes, consequences and individual depictions of mental illness did not significantly differ between the first and second decade of the study period.
Around 12.8 percent of adults with mental illness are not allowed to purchase firearms due to their conditions, according to a Health Affairs study. The study, by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, examined 400 articles and television programs about mental illness published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN from 1995 to 2014. Please consider sharing the Daily Bulletin with your friends and followers. More than half of the stories on mental illness mentioned some type of violent behavior, including violence against others or violence related to suicide and self-harm. “At the same time, considerable national dialogue has been devoted to the role of mental illness in interpersonal violence, a topic prompted in recent years by a series of high-profile mass shootings in which the perpetrator had a documented or purported serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia”. For the mentally ill population, this ongoing media narrative is setting up a risky environment.
Emma McGinty, the leader of the study and an expert in mental health, stated that mental patients are nearly never violent to others, but this population is now facing a misconception about them considering the intense media coverage.
McGinty said that mental illness does not cause to be violent toward others and if people will rely on media reports only – there is no way of finding that out. Individuals with serious mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can lose touch with reality.
Along with this, the researchers do agree that the ones who commit violence are not mental healthy as hurting someone is not an act to be committed by the one who is mentally stable. I do so not only as a psychiatric physician who specializes in treating patients with mental illnesses but as a person affected by these illnesses in other spheres of life. They may have anger or emotional issues, which can be clinically separate from a diagnosis of mental illness.
“If you save someone’s life from a suicide attempt”, says Georgetown professor Liza Gold, “there’s a very good chance that you really are permanently saving their life”.
“Coverage has continued to emphasize interpersonal violence in a way that is highly disproportionate to actual rates of such violence among the US population with mental illness”, which likely contributes to mental-health stigma, the researchers write, while cutting support for policies that might actually help people with mental illness. They point out, however, that it’s easy to classify a violent criminal, whether the crime was a mass murder or somebody beaten on a street corner, as mentally unstable because most people do not commit such acts.
This figure does not simulate a tangible rates of interpersonal assault where mental illness is involved, according to a study’s authors.
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She concedes, however, that it may be hard for members of the news media not to assume mental illness is in play because of the idea among many that anyone who would commit violence, especially mass shootings, must have mental illness. The fact of the matter is that hardly 5% of the cases of violence are even connected in any way with mental illness. It’s hard to assess whether or not that would have made a difference, McGinty says.
