Mental Illness and Mass Shootings

One of my favorite researchers in this area is Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at The University of Alabama. He conducts research on many types of social deviance and criminal behavior, including mass murder, mass shootings, and terrorism.

He recently released an intriguing look at mental health and mass shootings, looking for an explanation of why there are so few shooters diagnosed with mental illness, and yet mental health seems to be the first place people point to when looking for causation. He and his co-author R.G. Cowan closely analyzed public mass shooters who attacked in the United States from 1966 to 2019 and found that correlates of mental illness were approximately equally common among perpetrators, whether they had been coded as mentally ill or not.

They concluded that this is further evidence suggesting that almost all public mass shooters may have mental health problems, but that social stigmas, which reduce the likelihood that perpetrators will seek psychological treatment, may help explain popular underestimates.

To read more, go here:Has the role of mental health problems in mass shootings been significantly underestimated? which was published in the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, 7(3-4), 135–156. (Lankford, A., & Cowan, R. G. (2020)).