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Mental Illness And Violence Essay

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Over time it seems that mental illness and violence have been linked together. Whenever there is a traumatic shooting or an act of terror, people usually go to mental illness. Most use the phrase, “he was mentally ill” or “she had this disorder so it wasn’t her fault.” By doing this it creates the idea that people who have a mental disorder are violent and can’t control themselves. The thing is, people are not their disorders. You can’t predict if someone will cause harm to someone else based on if they have a mental disorder. Examples of disorders used in the media in a way that scare the pubic are Schizophrenia, Borderline Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality disorder, ect. However, many people who end up committing crimes have none …show more content…

According to the Times article called, “Most Violent Crimes Are Wrongly Linked to Mental Illness” only about 4% of interpersonal violence in the United States can be linked to mental health. Which is why it’s surprising that about 40% of news stories related to mental illness are related to violence. (Sifferlin, 2016) Of case this shouldn’t be the case, but for some reason the stigma seems to stick around. It may be because people like a simple answer to things. Society likes to have an answer to why bad things happen. If a mass shooting happened then people can say it was because the gunman was mentally ill because it’s a conclusion for them. It’s a way to make sense of what has happened. This idea keeps getting reinforced in news stories because 40% of them said mental illness can increase violence while only 8% of the stories said that most people who do have a mental illness are not violent. (Sifferlin, 2016) I always thought that Schizophrenia would be everyone’s go to for a violence mental illness. According to the Times article, I was right. I think it’s because Schizophrenia is losing contact with reality sometimes and someone doing things because they thought an object told them to do it. I can see how people can make the correlation because someone may do something violent without being aware of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s right to link one and two

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