Mental Ilness

Among all the ridiculous deflections, excuses, and illogic Republicans use to repel any suggestion that there should be gun safety legislation, one of the most plausible sounding is that a causal factor in firearm violence is mental illness. Of course, they don ' t actually support increasing funding for behavioral health care or addressing social determinants of mental illness, so it ' s just hypocrisy. However, it is also not so plausible after all.A common estimate is that about 20% of the population has a diagnosable mental illness,and it is also estimated that the prevalence in mass shooters is similar. But the concept of mental illness is pretty muddled anyway. Officially, a " mental illness " is an entity described in a book called the DSM-5, which originally stood for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual but it doesn ' t really have statistics and nobody calls it that any more. For the vast majority of these entities, however, determining whether somebody has THE DISEASE is purely a matter of judgment, based on subjective criteria. Two diagnosticians confronted with the same subject will often make different diagnoses, and the same person may have changing diagnoses over time. It is entirely possible for two people to have the same diagnosis who have no symptoms in common, and in fact who have opposite symptoms -- e.g. insomnia/excessive sleep, hyperactivity/lethargy. The dirty secret is that psychiatrists have no idea what specifically is going on in the brain that migh...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs