While the popular press and Hollywood are busy painting the mentally ill as violence-prone dangers to society, the reality of mental illness and violence is being analyzed by science.
With all of the attention that murders receive and the assumption that mental illness was the reason for the attacks, an unlikely new study is showing a more disturbing trend in mental illness: The mentally ill are at increased risk of being murder victims themselves.
This, coupled with other research showing that the mentally ill are at higher risk of being victims of violence, shows that the myth that the mentally ill are somehow all dangerous is unfounded. Although some types of mental illness may mean violent behavior, this is the exception rather than the norm in mental illness as a whole.
Assessing mental disorders and homicides
The latest study, conducted by researchers in Sweden and the U.S., assessed mental disorders and homicides between 2001 and 2008. Several categories of mental illness were grouped, including substance use disorder, schizophrenia, mood disorders (including bipolar), anxiety disorders and personality disorders.
The study included more than 7.25 million Swedish adults in the time period. In all, 615 homicidal deaths had enough data to be included in the study. Of those, 141 (22 percent) were among people with mental disorders.
Stats and risk factors
This bore out statistics showing that mental illness (as a general term) puts someone with a diagnosis at a five-fold risk of being a murder victim. But when the numbers were broken down by illness group, most of the death risk increase was born by those with substance use disorder (nine-fold more likely). Yet the other groups also showed higher risks, including 3.2-fold for personality disorders and 2.6-fold for depression.
The study's authors say that several environmental factors come into play here and being mentally ill is not the actual risk factor. The surrounding issues that the mentally ill often face, such as economic deprivation (itself a leading factor in homicide risk), are the risks.
The study was published in the British Medical Journal.
