People with mental illness are more likely to be VICTIMS than PERPETRATORS.

[lightningandsnow]

More than one-fourth of persons with severe mental illness are victims of violent crime in the course of a year, a rate 11 times higher than that of the general population, according to a study by researchers at Northwestern University.

They estimated that nearly 3 million severely mentally ill people are crime victims each year in the United States.

This is the first such study to include a large, random sample of community-living, mentally ill persons and to use the same measures of victimization used by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, said lead author Linda Teplin, Ph.D., Owen L. Coon Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University, in the August Archives of General Psychiatry.

Victimization rates vary with the type of violent crime, said the researchers. People with mental illness were eight times more likely to be robbed, 15 times more likely to be assaulted, and 23 times more likely to be raped than was the general population. Theft of property from persons, rare in the general population at 0.2 percent, happens to 21 percent of mentally ill persons, or 140 times as often. Even theft of minor items from victims can increase their anxiety and worsen psychiatric symptoms, the researchers said.

http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/40/17/16.full

[elocs]

1. Having a loved one with mental illness I am happy to give this thread Rec #5.

Mental illness is a tragedy and those who suffer from it are often not only victims of their disease, but of society and its treatment of them.

[chill_wind]

3. Can more than validate that with a family experience of our own.

We lost a loved one a year with chronic mental illness to a sudden respiratory illness, but he was more than once a victim of assault and robbery. Our greatest fear was the possibility he could be the victim of even worse.

[debbierlus]

2. Kick & recommend

[uppityperson]

4. k&r with thanks

[Shandris]

5. I'm sorry, but isn't this...

...pretty much obvious? Or is there some movement claiming otherwise? It seems to me that this would be one of those things thats just...SO apparent that to think otherwise is just asinine.

Although looking at the article, the rates are higher than even I would have thought. Ick, those are horrendous. :-(

[Posteritatis]

7. A lot of people here are trapped a few generations in the past in their attitudes

Lots of treating mental illnesses as a monolith; lots of assuming they're all intrinsically violent or criminal; lots and lots of considering it primarily a political thing than a matter of health. The trend from a year or so ago where there were plenty of people explicitly calling for reduced personal or civic rights has abated, thank goodness, but when mental illness comes up here a lot of very ugly attitudes will still show up.

(Also, welcome aboard!)

[EFerrari]

8. Welcome to DU, Shandris.

[Caliman73]

15. It is not obvious at all...

Except to people who have life experiences such as having a relative or friend, or who have worked with people who have psychiatric conditions. The portrayal of people with psychiatric conditions, in our media leans heavily towards painting them as dangerous people who should be feared and avoided. You hear labels like "Psycho" or "Psychotic Killer" frequently in reference to people. I used to work in community mental health and even some of the administrators would tell us workers to make sure that people on our caseload weren't creating a scene in public. It wasn't so much that they were telling us to make sure that people were getting all the assistance they needed, just to keep them out of sight. Compared to working with Developmentally Disabled people, where I work now, the atmosphere was disturbing.

[undergroundpanther]

6. I Am so tired of mentally ill

people being lumped in with psychopaths.Psychopathy or sociopathy is NOT a mental illness or a psychiatric injury.
Psychopaths do not suffer the way mentally ill ,injured,or 'normal people' do. They are not ill,psychopaths do not get better with therapy or medicines or any other help. The real problem of psychopathy/sociopathy is the harm they cause to everyone else stuck existing around a psychopath.

[laughingliberal]

9. ++1 nt

[yodermon]

10. The problem is that ~99.999% of violent criminals are either mentally ill or were victims

themselves of some form of abuse at some point in their lives.

Pop-culture & non-logical thinking take the narrative and flip it (falsely) i.e.

"(almost) all violent criminals are mentally ill"
becomes
"all of the mentally ill are (will become) criminals"

[Juche]

13. Where did you get that most violent criminals are mentally ill?

Violent criminals may be prone to conditions sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder (which damage empathy), however people with depression, bipolar, autism, schizophrenia, etc. are not more prone to violent crimes than anyone else as far as I know. The severely mentally ill are over represented in prisons, but they are usually not there for violent crimes.

I've had a severe psychotic disorder. And my experience was that people were scared of me because of how different I was. And what sucks is I would sometimes feel so isolated because of it that'd I'd try to reach out to people, but because I was weird and different they'd become abusive (either they'd ridicule, or verbally abuse, or become afraid I was violent). It is a horrible cycle. Being mentally ill makes people reject and fear you, which makes you attempt to reach out for help due to feeling isolated, which makes people reject and fear you.

My point is I'm not trying to be a dick. However with both abuse and mental illness people become more prone to crime and being victimized by crime. Sexual abuse victims become more prone to re victimization. The severely mentally ill are overrepresented in the justice system and prisons, however their crimes are usually not violent.

[lightningandsnow]

14. Wrong. Read the article.

Generally, mentally ill folks are no more likely to commit a crime than anyone else.

[Echo In Light]

11. Yet, according to numerous DUers, the mentally ill are easy targets for their verbiage sadism

[LWolf]

12. Yes.

My maternal grandmother was one.