Once Again: Mental Illness Doesn't Predict Future Violence

​The joys of living with mental illness in America circa 2015: One half of the ideological spectrum ​thinks you're a psychiatry dupe and really just need to chill out and brighten up (and spend more money at Whole Foods), while the other half thinks your name should be on a bunch of lists because, clearly, you the mental illness sufferer are a threat to aviation, schools, and whatever else because just look. Fuck.

Well, a study out Friday from Northwestern University again confirms what shouldn't need confirming: mental disorders do not predict violence. ​The NIH-funded report is published in the current Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and is based on interviews with 1,659 youth who were at one time incarcerated at Chicago's Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. Subjects were interviewed up to four times at intervals of three and five years post-incarceration.

"We examined the following: the prevalence of violence 3 and 5 years after detention; the contemporaneous relationships between psychiatric disorders and violence as youth age; and whether the presence of a psychiatric disorder predicts subsequent violence," the study explains. The one clear exception was in cases of substance abuse: "Males with other drug use disorder and females with marijuana use disorder 3 years after detention had greater odds of any violence 2 years later."

A less clear potential exception was in cases of males experiencing manic episodes, a category that did correlate to higher incidences of violence. As the authors note, however, it was impossible in these cases to separate mental illness-related risk from other risk factors, such as living in violent and impoverished environments. The muddiness mostly points to the need to treat psychiatric illness holistically, e.g. with respect to not just a diagnosis but the whole conditions of a patient's life.

"Our findings are relevant to the recent tragic plane crash in the French Alps," offers study co-author Linda Teplin. "Our findings show that no one could have predicted that the pilot—who apparently suffered from depression—would perpetrate this violent act. It is not merely a suicide, but an act of mass homicide."