Mass shootings have emerged in the Contemporary American society as an implication of profound political and cultural significance. In fact, the first issues is that the news media have often characterised them as the label of crisis. Secondly, they have incessantly been relating this massive shooting incident with mental illness as they are witnessing repeated mass shooting one after the other. They have a single status on the modern psychology of collective consciousness that is not occupied with other types of violence.
Thirdly, mass shootings have precisely gained the states of being related to mental illness. It can be argued that just because their violence transcends into an immediate action in itself, it is necessary to note the three-fold states of violence, acts of violence that are being done on the bodies of the victim and on the minds of the witness along with the collective society.
However, as seen from the Sarah Moyer’s review on the mass shooting, it is a familiar theme. In the existing years, national conversation about shooting violence has burned down the narrative that is being amplified by the media that essentially points towards mental illness as the significant cause for shooting and mass shootings.
Mental illness has turned highly politicizes in the gun control argument as seen in Moyer’s review, yet the connection between psychological issues and violence is not found to be straightforward enough. Along with it mental addresses to say with an over-simplistic narrative that signifies millions of American people who have a psychological problem with falsified notions of being dangerous.
Chen et al., (2015) stated that societies use to perceive the religious fact of evil in order to understand terrible crimes associated with violence. However, in the modern scenario, the earliest alternative illustration of the fact is that a killer must be suffering from mental illness. In support of this, Swanson et al., (2015) commented that it is just an assumption that most of the common people readily get in to. There is indeed some truth attached to the thinking. Rozel and Mulvey (2017) argued that in certain high profile public massive violent act, such as in Tuscon, Arizona and Colorado, it has been clarified enough that psychotic indication related to delusions, hallucination resulting from schizophrenia, forced the shooters action. However, the major problem of the public is that they irrationally over judge the issue in terms of all massive shootings.
Apart from these issues, McGinty et al., (2014) contradicted extensive news media coverage related mass shooting incident typically includes discussion over violent behaviour in line with mental illness. These, type of equation is usually not correct, as people suffering from mental illness are more likely to be the victims of severe crime other than being the aggressors where most of them do not get involved with violence.
In this context, Baumann and Teasdale (2018) stated that in a more recent survey, it has been that almost 71% of the people admitted that they are unwilling to work with people suffering from severe mental problems and 46% amongst them viewed those individual comparatively more harmful than normal people. According to McGinty et al., (2016) research in this regards, suggest that it is the media coverage that feeds that individuals suffering from severe mental health issue are disproportionately focused on violent attitude.
Similar to the statement of Moyer in her review, this issue of relating mental problem with shooting is more of racial discourse discriminating people based on their socioeconomic status. It has been found that people with severe illness often face discrimination that events hurt their confidence to find a suitable place for rent, advancement in a career (Chen et al., 2018).
In some research and media stories, it has been found that almost 60% of the perpetrators among 185 public mass shootings had been either diagnosed with exhibited mental issues or suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Duwe and Rocque (2018) stated that these researches have expressed mere scepticism regarding the sorts of assumptions. This is because a valid diagnosis would require expertise medical examination of each of the perpetrators during or after the time of the shooting.
Conclusion
Therefore, from the above study, it is clear that all these issues are just outcomes of media coverage and rumour. Media and press need to act more methodical and rational while ushering in such issues. It would rather be fairly easy for any individual journalist to simply research on the issue before speculating any issue without having any sort of assurance. Therefore, drawing a conclusion from high profile crimes is not possible due to the small size of the sample.
It can be completely agreed from Moyer’s review “the conversation we shouldn’t be having following another mass shooting”. In this aspect, it can be said that people rather needs to take a step to reduce the impact of this activity other than making false assumptions on the subject. To be specific countries in order to eliminate the most severe issues needs to be careful about their words they use as well needs to stop the media from making false and illogical assumptions.
Reference list
Baumann, M.L. & Teasdale, B., (2018). Severe mental illness and firearm access: Is violence really the danger?. International journal of law and psychiatry, 56, pp.44-49.
Chen, C. Y., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Phelan, J. C., Yu, G., & Yang, L. H. (2015). Racial and mental illness stereotypes and discrimination: An identity-based analysis of the Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 21(2), 279.
Chen, I., Hsu, J., Schipani, V., & Raeburn, P. (2018). Mass Shootings and Mental Illness: How Can the Media Avoid Fanning the Flames of Stigma?. Retrieved from https://undark.org/article/mass-shootings-mental-illness/
Duwe, G., & Rocque, M. (2018). Los Angeles Times – We are currently unavailable in your region. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-one-Duwe-Rocque-mass-shootings-mental-illness-20180223-story.html
McGinty, E. E., Webster, D. W., Jarlenski, M., & Barry, C. L. (2014). News media framing of serious mental illness and gun violence in the United States, 1997-2012. American Journal of Public Health, 104(3), 406-413.
McGinty, E.E., Kennedy-Hendricks, A., Choksy, S. and Barry, C.L., 2016. Trends in news media coverage of mental illness in the United States: 1995–2014. Health Affairs, 35(6), pp.1121-1129.
Rozel, J. S., & Mulvey, E. P. (2017). The link between mental illness and firearm violence: implications for social policy and clinical practice. Annual review of clinical psychology, 13, 445-469.
Swanson, J. W., McGinty, E. E., Fazel, S., & Mays, V. M. (2015). Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy. Annals of epidemiology, 25(5), 366-376.
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