"Most mass shooters aren’t mentally ill. So why push better treatment as the answer?"

"The oversimplification, experts say, is perpetuated by the gun industry and a society that assumes that the mentally ill are the only ones capable of deadly rampages. Now, with the White House and Congress prioritizing an overhaul of the ­mental-health system to try to curtail mass shootings and gun violence, critics say the country is chasing an expensive and potentially counterproductive cure on the basis of the wrong diagnosis...

Jonathan Metzl, a Vanderbilt University professor who studies the history of mental illness, has written that “insanity becomes the only politically sane place to discuss gun control.”...

Psychiatrists and criminologists who specialize in mass killings say these cumbersome and expensive efforts would have little effect in stopping mass shootings. They fear that the country will be given a false sense of security and that when the shootings persist, the mental-health system will be blamed again.

Critics are especially concerned about increased stigmatization of the mentally ill, fearing that they will avoid treatment so their medical records aren’t entered into databases, some of which have derogatory category titles such as “the mentally defective file.”"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/most-mass-shooters-arent-mentally-ill-so-why-push-better-treatment-as-the-answer/2016/05/17/70034918-1308-11e6-8967-7ac733c56f12_story.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=5/20/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

FB: "“I think it’s the human inclination to explain behavior that is frightening and tragic as the result of mental illness, because it’s very hard to understand that individuals do not have to be mentally ill to do something frightening and tragic,” said J. Reid Meloy, a professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego who studies mass killings and consults with the FBI."