But to what degree does having PTSD make you more willing to kill again?
Further, Being emotionally distressed makes thinking through an action harder; This can blur a person's ability to distinguish between 'murder' and 'killing', or general level's of violence. Hence the deteriation of many police officer's personal relationships outside of work.

While this feeds back into the distinction between "Criminally Insane" and "Mentally ill", that distinction doesn't prevent those actions from occuring.

I'm not denying that this happens, I just don't necessarily see a one-to-one relationship between murder and madness because people are diverse and react in a multitude of ways. Not all cops and soldiers experience PTSD. And what about say, political assassination, financially motivated murder (bump off grandpa for the inheritance), revenge killing, honour killing, or even assisted suicide? I don't think that all of these actions always meet the criteria for either legal insanity or clinically diagnosable mental illness. Sometimes people are just dicks, or they value something more than life.

I can agree that people kill, and even murder, for a variety of reasons, but i don't think highly paid, trained assasins are the ones walking into large anonymous crowds and offing people en masse. I mean... barring some crazy conspiracy. Perhaps we're running tangent...

What i'm saying is that you have to start small and start incrementally to get people the right care, and most illnesses, mental or otherwise, start small and then get big. If everything started off huge we'd find piles of bodies around of some these people's homes.

Well, like I was saying before, some people are born with significant mental problems, but since they're children, their ability to commit large-scale violence is limited. In those cases, it's not that their mental disability has gotten worse, it's that their ability to commit violent acts has increased.

Also, the severity of the mental disorder has no correlation to their likelihood to commit mass violence. Incidents like the Sandy Hook shooting typically require premeditation, and the more severe the mental disorder, the less likely it is that the individual will be capable of the required premeditation.

This entire tangent is completely based on your misreading of Kea's original point. She never said that military and police officers were the people who do this, or that they were all mentally ill. All she was saying is that a definition of mentally ill that encompasses everyone who kills another human being for any reason is a useless definition because it applies in so many situations where it is completely inappropriate.

The point being there are, sometimes, rational reasons to kill another human being, and to argue contrary to that is both foolish and incorrect.

Also, not all mental disorders are alike. Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and antisocial personality disorder have been identified as the ones with the highest risk violence. People with say, severe generalized anxiety disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder, not so much.

In fact, I'm sure I read somewhere that when considered as a whole, people with mental health problems are statistically less likely to be violent than the population as a whole.

I'm sure there's been a variety of studies, but according to this extremely relevant article that just happened to be in today's Washington Post, mental illness increases the risk of violence by a small amount. But it's basically tiny, unless said mental illness is combined with substance abuse.

But we're talking in very general terms here.
Killing isn't the last, nor the first, sign of a mental illness.

Everyone who kills as part of their job (military and police) is evaluated for mental illness before they go back to normal civilian life. Someone who kills for reasons other then "Work", be it mercy killing, something criminal, or just through negligence, should probably talk to a mental health professional. That's all I'm trying to put across.

Automatically giving someone a "pass" because the circumstance under which they committed the act made the decision logical doesn't denigrate the emotional trauma of taking another person's life. Admittedly, some people manage that better then others, but to look at those individual cases indepth would be exhaustive.



Bureau of justice statistics for inmates states otherwise.
percentage wise, 60% is kinda high.

There's problems with using the percentage of the prison population with mental illness as a measure of how prone mentally ill people are to violence:

1. % of inmates with mental disorders =/= % of people with mental illness with violent tendencies. In other words, you've got a self-selecting population of mentally ill people who have already committed crimes, which ignores all those people out there with mental disorders who haven't committed crimes.

2. Confusion of cause and effect. The report you quoted said that something like 23%-30% of prison inmates had the symptoms of major depression. Well who wouldn't be depressed if they were in prison? Prison is depressing.

3. Circular diagnostic criteria. In a prison, you're going to have a huge skewing of diagnoses because the clinical definitions of things like antisocial personality disorder and oppositional defiant disorder actually list "lawbreaking behaviour" as a symptom.

4. Tendency to interpret all behaviours as symptoms in captive populations. Heard of the Rosenhan experiment?

I realize that not all mentally ill people are violent, but it's been brought up in other conversations IRL: innmate populations often have higher incidences of mental illness then the populace at large. That's not just violent offenders. While Rosenhan's observation may well apply (and the fact that many pschiatric drugs are watered down street drugs), this is exactly part of the issue at hand with involuntary committment.

More pertinent to what i was thinking: Why not screen children while they're in middle school or highschool for warning signs of mental illness? Not to say that councilor's aren't busy, but kids like opportunities to skip class and it might prevent someone from doing something dangerous.

The fact that inmate populations have high incidences of mental illness is not that useful for trying to identify potential offenders outside of the prison population. One study found that, people who have neither mental illness nor substance abuse problems had a 0.8% chance of committing a violent crime within a 3 year period. Those with severe mental illness but no substance abuse problems, 2.9%. Those with both severe mental illness and substance abuse problems, 9.4%.

So we're able to identify the most at-risk people, but even those still have less than a 1 in 10 chance of committing violence within a 3 year period. Is that a big enough probability to justify court-ordered drug/mental health treatment if they won't go in for it voluntarily? I don't know.

To be totally honest, I'm all for the mandatory treatment of drug problems (everything from caffeine addiction to alcohol and the heavy stuff, obviously).

For mental illness, many people advocate psychiatric drugs as the main source of treatment of issues, and that disgusts me to a degree to which "Honey Boo-Boo" as a thing disgusts me. It's a quick fix for a long-term problem. While I will never advocate non-treatment of severe mental illness, many people, including lawmakers and judiciary members, are just as happy to see people sedated to the point of ZHOAS-status.

If you look at a bridge collapse, it could kill hundreds of people on a major thoroughfare. But the problem doesn't start overnight. Cracks form over time, the problems aren't seen by an overtaxed oversight system, and the cost-effectiveness of periodic time expenditures on repairs is considered "too costly for society to bear". The cracks become heavy deterioration, and the supports that make up this major thoroughfare collapse, and possibly hundreds can die if it happens during rush hour, the height of stress on this bridge.

And in the end, we have more sympathy for the bridge that collapses due to laziness and greed than the gunman that snaps after so many years of non-treatment. Where is the outrage against the politicians that put funds ahead of safety? Where is the outcry against the parents that failed to provide basic human care for their children?

I think any decent human being should feel ashamed that we let the innocent turn into the guilty by our inaction. "Evil Triumphs When Good Men Do Nothing."