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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Expert Debunks Gun Violence, Mental Illness Tie

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Wednesday, November 29, 2017   

FRANKFORT, Ky. – The latest mass shootings have led to calls for enhanced reporting of mental health records, but mental health experts say that would have little if any impact.

News coverage of the mid-November shootings at a school in Rancho Tehama, Calif., focused on the shooter's mental history.

And President Donald Trump called the church shootings in Sutherland Springs, Texas, the week before "a mental health problem."

But according to Larry Davidson, a psychology professor at Yale University Medical School, people with a serious mental illness commit only 2 percent of gun violence.

"The vast majority of people who commit such acts are very much in touch with reality,” he asserts. “It's just a very painful reality that they're in touch with. It's not that they've lost their grounding in reality."

Advocates in the mental health treatment community fear that statements linking mass shootings to mental health only serve to further stigmatize people with mental illness.

A 2016 report by the American Psychiatric Association suggests that focusing on behavior, coping skills and conflict resolution would be more effective.

Davidson points out that people with serious mental illness are more "in danger" than dangerous.

"People with psychosis are much less likely to commit violence and are, in fact, much more likely to be victimized than to be perpetrators," he stresses.

Davidson says studies have shown that people with mental illness are 14 times more likely to be victims of violence than the average person.

Davidson notes that the incidence of mental illness is consistent from country to country, but there are far more mass shootings in the U.S. than any other developed nation.

"It's not that there are 40 times as many people with mental illness in the U.S. as in the U.K.,” he states. “It's just that there's that much more easy access not just to guns, but to military style guns."

Following a mass shooting in 1996, Australia enacted strict gun control laws. There hasn't been a single mass shooting in that country in 21 years.




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