Don't Blame Mental Illness For Mass Shootings Nonsense!

Posted: 8/15/2019

I was truly shocked today when I read this lousy editorial (S1) published in the Science journal of the American Association For The Advancement Of Science (AAIS) written by a “former deputy director and acting director of the National Institute of Mental Health at the NIH”, i.e. Alan I. Leshner.

This editorial is full of obvious junk science and highly politicized science coming from the association for the advancement of science! Truly appalling!

It is a well known fact that many of the mass shooters in the U.S. over the last several decades were obviously and severely mentally ill perpetrators at the time of their mass murder. I have blogged here several times about mass shootings and its association with severe mental illness (e.g. here, here, here). Unfortunately, in too many cases, I am afraid, it was never even researched whether the perpetrator was mentally ill or not.

In his editorial “Stop blaming illness”, the author gets it wrong quite a few times (emphasis added):

1. Worst of all he, in his last paragraph, favors a law passed in 2019 by the Dimocratic Party dominated U.S. House of Representatives to allocate more money for “firearm violence”. The usual big red herring! I call that politicized science or junk science!
2. He downplays mental illness as “regrettably, a rather loosely defined and loosely used term, and this contributes to the problem”. This is rather strange coming from a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Seems to be quite symptomatic of the very regrettable state of mental illness research in the U.S. for which he was responsible too!
3. “According to the National Council for Behavioral Health, the best estimates are that individuals with mental illnesses are responsible for less than 4% of all violent crimes in the United States”. What an absurd and misleading quote of statistics. This is very lousy Mr. Leshner. You ought to be ashamed! Mass shootings are not some violent crime!
4. Mr. Leshner blames “Unfortunately, it has been difficult to determine precisely the causes of mass shootings and the appropriate approaches to preventing them, largely because of a dearth of public funding for this line of research.” How much has Mr. Leshner done throughout his professional career to convince legislators that more money was needed?
5. If, to Mr. Leshner’s credit, he was trying to make the point that many mentally ill people are harmless and would never commit a mass shooting in their lifetime, he totally failed with this piece!

Sources (S):

1. Stop blaming mental illness (8/16/19)