Is the media encouraging discrimination against mentally ill people? Should that be censored?

[teo123]

So, a few days ago, there was a mass stabbing in an elementary school called Prečko in Zagreb. And the perpatraitor was diagnozed with schizophrenia. And, of course, the media is full of articles blaming the mass stabbing on his mental illness, most of the articles not even mentioning the fact that the vast majority of people with schizophrenia are not violent. Do you think that's encouraging readers to discriminate against the mentally ill?

If you ask me if mental illness is responsible for mass shootings and mass stabbings, I'd say "Very likely no.". I don't know how it is with mass stabbings, but with mass shootings... Look, around 80% of mass shooters have no diagnozed mental illness. And the 20% that do tend to have illnesses such as mild anxiety disorder. Yes, mass shooters are more likely to be mentally ill than the rest of the population (the general population has a rate of mental illness of around 8%). But, once you consider which mental illnesses they actually have, the mere suggestion that the relationship is causal appears absurd: how can a mild anxiety disorder cause somebody to become a mass shooter? What's worse is that the stereotype that mass shooters hear voices telling them what to do is totally false: mass shooters are less likely to be diagnozed with paranoid schizophrenia than the rest of the population is.
And any attempt to solve the problem of mass stabbings and mass shootings as if it was a mental health problem is basically doomed to fail.
Even if mass shootings are caused by mental illness, an attempt to solve them by preventing mentally ill people from having access to firearms is doomed to backfire, because... Imagine you own a firearm in such a society. And you think you are suffering from mental illness. Aren't you less likely to seek help because you know the government might take your firearm away because of that?

I think that blaming mass shootings and similar tragedies on mental health issues is so unlikely to be productive that it should be censored. It's obvious how that form of speech could do harm (by making people be afraid to interact with mentally ill) and it's not at all obvious how it could do any good.

[aroneous]

And the perpatraitor was diagnozed with schizophrenia. And, of course, the media is full of articles blaming the mass stabbing on his mental illness, most of the articles not even mentioning the fact that the vast majority of people with schizophrenia are not violent. Do you think that's encouraging readers to discriminate against the mentally ill?

I do find this quite unproductive, but it's quite easy to scapegoat schizophrenia in instances like this, because most people are probably imagining that it was the voices that told him to do it and how to carry out the attack. But even if schizophrenic symptoms were involved, I don't think that means that the outcome would have been much different if that wasn't the case. The reason for why someone's psychology might develop in a way that they are able to find sufficient motivation to kill children is probably a lot more complex than them simply being schizophrenic.

However, I don't really have a problem with people generically attributing random acts of violence to "psychological issues" or "mental illness". Personally I would opt for saying that a person is "socially deranged", but still I don't think most people would take this as a reason to point to a depressed person and say "watch out for them, they might kill someone on account of their depression". As long as they don't get into blaming it solely on specifically diagnosable mental disorders, there's probably not too much of an issue with this.

[aroneous]

The reason for why someone's psychology might develop in a way that they are able to find sufficient motivation to kill children is probably a lot more complex than them simply being schizophrenic.

Though having said that, I fear I may be giving them a bit too much credit. I suspect a lot of the kind of image that the perpetrators of these crimes are going for is "I am a monster, and you cannot possibly know my mind." It's somewhat unsurprising that the vast majority of people who commit mass acts of violence against children are of the 16-27 age group, when people tend to be more emotionally and psychologically unstable. Obviously, people can't possibly have any personal vendetta against children in particular, so the only "reason" I can think of for why someone may want to kill them is to commit an extreme social taboo as the ultimate act of "edginess", so to speak. To show others "I'm an absolute sicko, and there's nothing you can do about it".