Currently in America, there have been a
variety of issues that have taken place involving our schools and our
children. Situations such as the Sandy
Hook shooting in Connecticut or the incident that took place on a bus in
Alabama have brought a number of issues to the forefront of all of our minds. We
all want there to be a means through which an individual can be stopped before
committing atrocities like these. However,
the research shows, "Although it is possible to make a general assessment
of relative risk, it is impossible to predict an individual, specific act of
violence. . ." (Harvard Medical School Mental Health Letter, Mental Illness and Violence, January 2011). The article reports, “Most individuals with
psychiatric disorders are not violent” and there are multiple interacting
factors contributing to violent behavior, which includes a person’s past
history of violence, substance use, the nature of the person’s symptoms, age
and gender.
There are a
multitude of factors that can fit into these categories. Young people are more likely than older adults
to act violently and men are more likely than women to act violently. Personal stress, crisis, or loss of
employment, divorce, or separation in the past year increases a person’s risk
of violence. Early exposure to violence can create risk factors for violent
tendencies. The risk of violence rises with
exposure to aggressive family fights during childhood, physical abuse by a
parent, or having a parent with a criminal record.
If you are
reading this and saying, “I know people who experienced these type of things,
either now or in the past, and they have never been a risk to anyone,” you have
just identified the difficulty, and the present impossibility, of making an
accurate prediction with complete certainty about who will commit a violent act
at any given point beyond the imminent future.
H.L. Mencken, American journalist and
essayist, said, “There is always an
easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong." As a country, state, and community, we must
commit to developing strategies that will reduce violence in America, strategies
that are evidence based when possible, thoughtful enough to avoid “neat,
plausible, and wrong,” effective, and that simultaneously insure that all
citizens’ civil rights are fully protected.
This current state of predictive inability
does not leave us without recourse. The
article cited above also calls out, “Adequate treatment of mental illness and
substance abuse may help reduce rates of violence.” A fully and adequately funded behavioral
health care system can be, and is part of,
the solution to violence in America. The
renewed focus on this issue by President Obama, and in Kansas by Gov.
Brownback, is attention I hope we all will welcome and embrace.
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