Crime and Mental Disorders

Crime and Mental Disorders
Relevant course material relating to history, theory, research
and statistics of crime and mental disorders why are there so many
today what will happen in the future. Include abstract not a part of
12 pages.

Despite the fact that most people with mental illness are never violent, news stories about violence often focus on whether a person’s mental health problem was responsible, according to a new report.

Only about 4% of interpersonal violence in the United States can be attributed to mental illness, the study authors conclude, yet close to 40% of news stories about mental illness connect it to violent behavior that harms other people. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), people with severe mental illnesses are more than 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than people in the general population.

In the report, published in the journal Health Affairs, researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health looked at 400 news articles about mental illness that were published over two decades, from 1994 to 2014, in popular news outlets. Violence was mentioned 55% of the time, and close to 40% of the time, the articles mentioned violence against others. Mental illness was linked to suicide in the articles or TV segments 29% of the time. Stories about mass shootings that depicted the shooters as mentally ill increased over the study period from 9% of all news stories during the first decade (1994 to 2005) to 22% in the second decade (2005 to 2014).