Lost in translation
6th December 2022
A few days ago, the New York Times had an opinion piece by Huw Green, a clinical psychologist, which said “A clear causal link between psychiatric illness and gun violence has not been established…” I followed the link, which was an interview with Ragy Girgis, a professsor of psychiatry at Columbia University. That story had a caption saying “Findings from the Columbia database help dispel the myth that having a severe psychiatric illness is predictive of who will perpetrate mass murder.” It also contained a link to an article by Dr Girgis and others using the database (an attempt to compile a comprehensive list of mass murders since 1900), which said “the prevalence of psychotic symptoms among mass murderers is much higher than that in the general population (11% v. approximately 0.3-1%).” That is, people with psychotic symptoms were between 10 and 30 times more likely to commit mass murder than people without psychotic symptoms.
How did we go from 10 to 30 times more likely to “dispel the myth”? The interviewer asked “Are people with mental health disorders more likely to commit mass shootings or mass murder?” The answer started “The public tends to link serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia or psychotic disorders, with violence and mass shootings. But serious mental illness—specifically psychosis—is not a key factor in most mass shootings or other types of mass murder..” That is, it didn’t answer the question that had been asked, but a different question: whether most mass murders are committed by people with severe mental health disorders. The answer to this second question is no, according to the information in the database. But the answer to the question that the interviewer had asked was yes (at least for one kind of mental disorder, psychosis). Apparently the interviewer didn’t notice the difference, and followed up by asking “why does the public erroneously link mental illness with mass shootings and with violence in general?”
December 19th, 2022 at 20:42
Probably the reason the New York Times published this article, with that particular spin, was in support of the narrative that guns fire themselves whilst being held in the hands of innocent individuals.