Dr. Phil Kronk: Mass shooters, gun control and mental health

The recent mass murders at the community college in Oregon have saddened us all.

Well before the blood had dried on the college's classrooms' floors, individuals and groups began to tell us what caused this tragedy … and how to prevent another one in the future.

Opinions, based on prior agendas, have been sharpen and honed to take advantage of this tragedy.

One side, a liberal one, called out for gun control.

The other, a more gun traditional side, called out for the better control of mentally ill individuals.

The liberal anti-gun group also called out for dealing with the mentally ill community, but in my cynicism, I always think that this is also a way to use such tragedies to bring attention and moneys to a neglected group.

The more traditional, anti-gun-legislation group also wants better ways to identify potentially violent mentally ill individuals. In my equal opportunity cynicism, I see this as a ploy to distract us from any gun control focus. Even more so, their focus is based on centuries of fear of the severely mentally ill as a deviant social group easily scapegoated.

The focus on the mentally ill as violent is wrong for many reasons.

Mentally ill individuals have not been found to be that much more violent than others.

Yet half of the population views them as being more dangerous and 80 percent blame mental illness for mass shootings.

Jeffrey Swanson, Ph.D., M.A., a Duke University Psychiatry professor with over 200 publications on violence and the mentally ill person, found just the opposite.

Dr. Swanson found that serious (notice, not every day mental health diagnoses) mental illness was a risk factor for violence in only 4 percent of the mentally ill population.

Dr. Swanson found that the only way to increase the percentage of risk for a mentally ill individual to be violent was to add certain additional factors, including not having a job, being poor and living in a disadvantaged neighborhood, abusing alcohol or drugs and being a victim of past violence.

These context factors show how little adding mental illness accounts for overall risk for violence.

In fact, the ‘average' violent perpetrator in the United States is a young, male, white, undereducated individual with a history of past violent behaviors. Being diagnosed with a mental illness adds very little to the risk profile.

Even among individuals without a mental disorder, the risk of violent criminal activity increases sevenfold when alcohol or drugs are used.

Serious mentally ill individuals are at greatest risk of violence — toward themselves — by suicide. An individual suffering from bipolar disorder and depression has a 10 to 20 times greater chance of committing suicide than the average population.

Even more important, speaking as a mental health practitioner with 40 years of evaluating and treating individuals (some in jails and prison), I can honestly state that psychology, psychiatry, nursing and social work cannot identify or predict very well who will commit violent acts in the future. Psychiatrists have been found to do no better than chance with predictions for males … and even less so for females.

I will not address the issue of gun control this week, as I have mixed feelings about that issue, and I have not come to a personal consensus on that issue.

A recent article in the February issue of the American Journal of Public Health brings the psychological literature on mental illness and mass shootings up to date. I will share those findings in the next column.

A chart in this Monday's edition of The Wall Street Journal counted the United States as having 133 mass shootings from 2000 to 2014. In contrast, thirteen other industrialized countries (including Germany, Israel, Canada, Russia, Mexico, China, England and South Africa) had only a total of 33 mass shootings.

I also reviewed another 2015 chart from Mother Jones. There were 29 mass shootings in the United States between 1985 and 2000.

In contrast, in only a span of 12 years, from 2003 to 2015, there were a total of 35 mass shootings.

Those figures show us two things. Mass shootings are not new and they seem to be increasing in rate, (though it is unclear if this is a significant statistical difference.)

Researchers, however, tell us that there is not enough data to truly understand or predict future violent mass shootings. Mass shootings are an aberrant statistical occurrence. We know that there is a greater chance of being killed in an earthquake or drowned in a bathtub than being killed by a mentally ill person in New York City.

Mass shootings horrify us and make us doubt that reality can ever be predicted. The evil side of mankind's nature is revealed with a feeling one writer called "incomprehensible terror."

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Philip Kronk, M.S., Ph.D. is a child and adult clinical psychologist and a child and adult clinical neuropsychologist. Dr. Kronk has a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology and a postdoctoral degree in Clinical Psychopharmacology. He spent his clinical psychology internship year at the University of Colorado Medical School. Dr. Kronk writes a weekly, Friday online column for the Knoxville News Sentinel's website, knoxnews.com. Dr. Kronk can be reached at (865) 330-3633.

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