Chuck Ruby, Ph.D.

In these early hours after Chris Mercer’s mass shooting at the Oregon community college, it would be easy to blame the rampage on “mental illness”. As has happened all too often in the past, news reports zero in on whether the shooter suffered from this fictitious disease (for example, see http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mass-shootings-and-the-mental-health-connection/). Such unjustified analyses and reactions to these terrible events serves as nothing more than a distraction from the actual factors associated with violent behavior and prevents the development of viable policies to make our society safer (See ISEPP Public Statement: The Role of Mental Illness in Violent Behavior). But perhaps more problematic, it also sets up a false dichotomy that certain kinds of people commit these acts and the rest of us are not prone to such violence. It sends us on a crusade to find these defective souls, to brand them with mental illness diagnoses, and then to provide them with “treatment” to rid them of their infection. Screening tools used to identify these people are notoriously in error and result in huge false alarm predictions, meaning that the great majority of those identified would never have committed a violent act. So, thousands and thousands of people, including children, would be subjected to this flawed assessment and then herded into the traditional psychiatric corral and subjected to all its demeaning, dehumanizing, and debilitating harms. Ironically, it is this very process that can actually increase the chances that violent behavior will occur (See ISEPP White Paper: Psychiatric Drugs and Violence). In short, we continue to look for the demon within, rather than the actual causes of violence.