Trump Suggests That Soldiers Who Suffer From PTSD Aren’t “Strong”

[HereSince1628]

57. If you look at gun violence the mental health status of about 95% isn't even known.

Because of that nothing should be trusted about such statistics

If you look at mental health and violence issues you have to be VERY careful about excluding violence in institutions.

Most of the institutionalized mentally ill sleep in prisons. Prisons, those places where the staff regularly create confrontations by enforcing rules and regulations that essentially criminalize non-compliant behaviors that are typical of mental illness.

When you look at social violence, aka -violence against others outside of institutions- it turns out that the -any types of aggression- by the mentally ill per year is about 6.8%. That's less than 2% greater than -any types of aggression- by the general public not identified as having a mental illness. The difference in odds ratios is really not behaviorally, or politically significant enough to drive legislation (and institutional policy) that stigmatizes the mentally ill as violent-actors-in-waiting.

The significant health related multiplier of social violence is drug abuse which pushes the likelihood of -any types of aggression- up to around 17% per year.

The first problem with all these studies is that the criminal justice system dominates reporting of aggression as reports of such events are required and reports are written by staff to protect themselves from charges of abuse.

So 'aggression' they report can't be trusted to be precise and even if it is accepted for the sake of argument as roughly correct it's really a tally of negative interactions between untrained staff who in their ignorance frequently provoke paranoia and defense with their impatience and insistence on rules

Sometimes these things are just outlandish...just last summer a jail was reported to have starved a mentally ill prisoner to death for non-compliance to hygiene codes.

The few careful studies that have been done, have been done in the UK and Sweden, mostly in Sweden. Those studies suggest that the primary cause of violence by institutionalized mentally ill persons is the mentally ill prisoner's perception of a threat of harm or actual harm by staff.