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NEW YORK — America has societal issues with both mental health and gun violence, but mass shooting incidents apparently have less to do with mental illness than many might think. Researchers from Columbia University found that most school shootings involve shooters with no history of psychosis. Their study could help to debunk the myth that people who are mentally ill are also prone to violence.
“Our findings suggest that mass school shootings are different from other forms of mass murder and that they should be looked at as a distinct phenomenon,” says Ragy R. Girgis, the director of the Center of Prevention and Evaluation at Columbia/NYSPI, specializing in the study and treatment of young adults at high risk for schizophrenia and other psychoses, in a statement. “To prevent future mass school shootings, we need to begin to focus on the cultural and social drivers of these types of events, such as the romanticization of guns and gun violence, rather than on individual predictors.”
The study was the largest analysis of mass school shootings to date. Researchers looked at data collected from the Columbia Mass Murder Database to find a possible relationship between mental illness and mass shootings. They searched through 14,785 murders between 1900 and 2019 and narrowed it down to 82 incidents that took place in an academic setting. These included schools, colleges, and universities within or outside the U.S.
Nearly half (47.6%) of school shootings occurred in the United States, most involving semi or fully-automatic firearms. All of the school shooters were men with an average age of 28. Two-thirds (66.7%) were Caucasian.
Psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia were not observed among most of the shooters. Psychotic symptoms were more often seen among mass murder suspects who used weapons other than firearms. Roughly half (45.6%) of the mass casualty events ended with the perpetrators taking their own lives. The study authors suggest that the killers likely view their actions and their suicide as a “final act.”
“The findings strongly suggest that focusing on mental illness, particularly psychotic illness, when talking about mass school shootings risks is missing other factors that contribute to the vast majority of cases, as well as exacerbating the already widespread stigma surrounding severe mental illness,” explains Paul Appelbaum, an Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine and Law at Columbia University and co-author of the study.
Although researchers say their data won’t be able to identify who could potentially be future school shooters, it gives lawmakers and law enforcement a better profile of how mass school shootings differ from other acts of violence.
The study is published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.
