Mental Health

4209 readers

13 users here now

Welcome!

This is a safe place to discuss, vent, support, and share information about mental health, illness, and wellness.

Thank you for being here. We appreciate who you are today. Please show respect and empathy when making or replying to posts.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules

1-Posts promoting paid products and services of any kind are not allowed here.

2-All posts and comments must be helpful and supportive. Do not put vulnerable people at risk.

3-Do not DM or ask to speak privately to any of our members unless they specifically request it.

If a person from this community disturbs you in a comment, please report the comment. If you receive a DM you did not request, send a screenshot of the DM in a message to a moderator. This is a bannable offense.

4-Suicide, Self-Harm, Death-- Extended discussions are STRONGLY DISCOURAGED here. First, mods and community members are caring people, but not experts in crisis situations. Second, we want to avoid Lemmy becoming like many commercial social media platforms, where comments can snowball into counterproductive talk.

If you or someone you know needs more help than can be found here, please refer to the pinned resources.

If BRIEF mention of these topics is an important part of your post, please flag your post as NSFW and include a (trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, death, etc.)in the title so that other readers who may feel triggered can avoid it. Please also include a trigger warning on all comments mentioning these topics in a post that was not already tagged as such.

Partner Communities

- Therapy

Neurodegenerative Disease Support

Avoidant Personality Disorder

Friends and Family of People with Addiction

To partner with our community and be included here, you are free to message the current moderators or comment on our pinned post.

Community Moderation

Some moderators are mental health professionals and some are not. All are carefully selected by the moderation team and will be actively monitoring posts and comments. If you are interested in joining the team, you can send a message to ZenGrammy for more information.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Violence and Mental Illness: Disseminating Fact and Dispelling Fiction (thereflectiveequilibrium.blogspot.com)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've gotten so fed up arguing about mental illness and violence, I wrote a blog post setting the record straight.

I have ads turned off and I am not benefitting in any way from my blog. Just want to compile and share information.

TL;DR: Only 3-5% of violent acts can be attributed to those with SMI [20], co-occurring substance use plays the most pivotal role [24], many psychosocial contextual factors influence violent acts [11], and while individuals with SMI are potentially 2.1% more likely than those without a mental illness to be violent [4], they are 10 times more likely to be victims of violence themselves. [20]

There does not exist a strong association between severe mental illness and violent behavior in general. ...the notion that mentally ill individuals are violent is a harmful myth that only serves to further stigmatize an already disadvantaged population.

This behavior is detrimental to the 26% of our (U.S.) population suffering from a diagnosed mental illness. [10] The false claims that individuals with SMI are dangerous and responsible for mass shootings and acts of extremism need to be called out for the harmful lies that they are.

top 2 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

First as someone scrolling through All this is probably one of the highest quality Lemmy posts I've seen. With actual cited source.

But I think there is a common use vs field use disconnect here. When they are attributing mass violence to those with serious mental illnesses they may not be intending on using a term with a specific meaning in the field of mental health.

But instead doing things like including ASPD in with SMIs because they simply view ASPD as a mental illness, and in those cases where it resulted in tragedy it was severe. Because to them anyone in a particularly tumultuous mental space that endangers others has a severe mental illness in a layman's sense of the words.

It would definitely be better if everyone was able to use more thinly defined terms. Overly broad terms aren't very conducive to resolving matters.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

First, thank you for the compliment!

I think there is a common use vs field use disconnect here.

I completely agree and educating about that difference is my goal. It's not hard to imagine why people make that categorical error, but it is harmful to one of the most disadvantaged populations there are.

I wrote that with the intention of sharing it when I see misinformation and stigmatization. I found myself getting into the same arguments on reddit for years (as well as here), so rather than articulate an argument every time, I decided I'd have a loaded gun ready haha.