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CRIME

MENTAL ILL AND CRIME

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CA499 PROFESSIONAL STRATEGIES

Mental Health

Mental health is the uprightness in our social life, psychological and emotional well-being. Mental health in deep capacity also mean our ability to handle stress properly and the ability to make good choices and relate to your peers and neighbors properly. It is the measure of sanity in all aspects of development stages i.e. from childhood to adolescent through adulthood.

Poor mental health may affect your thinking, mood and behaviour. There are several factors that contribute to mental health problems. They include; biological factors/brain chemistry, life experience such as trauma and even abuse, family history of mental problems.

Indicators to mental health problem.

Mental have got different indicators in our daily life situations. This indicators reflects abnormal behaviour, (thinking and mood) in a person.

Some of these factors include;

Underperformances of daily task. * yelling and fighting with families.
Use of drugs and alcohol more than usual *state of hopelessness
Social alienation. * mood swings
Low strength and energy. * persistent thoughts and memories
Feeling numb *feeling or believing unusual things.
Thinking of self-harm. * feeling usually confused, scared or worried
Persistent thoughts and memories *feeling forgetful.

Indicators of Positive mental health

Full potential realization.
Copping with stresses of life.
Visible efforts in work.
Meaningful contributions to the community.

Ways of maintaining a mental positive health.

Participation in social groups in order to stay connected.
Staying positive in all your undertakings.
Coping well with others effectively.
Getting physically fit.
Being generous in helping others.

Mental health recovery

Mental illness can be recovered and this only happens over time .recovery process is slow process through which individual’s improve their health and wellness, develops a self-life drive and striving to to achieve ones potential.

There are dimensions through which one can recover. Making informed healthy choices and being able to support your physical and emotion well-being is a step that one suffering from mental illness needs to make a habit in order to recover. Being stable and safe in your home is a sign of recovery from mental illness. This shows that the person is no longer feeling scared of his surrounding and can live peacefully in his home. For a critical health condition, direct involvement in the community activities is important as it will show direct relation with the community and the social behaviour of yourself. Caring for your family is another initiative one has to make in order to show a good sign of recovery. Creativity is one thing that is usually done by those in good conditions as it shows their productivity. This makes creativity a measure to quick recovery to mental illness recovery as it will shows the output level versus the input and the expected scores. Another clean step is to work for independence, income and resources in the society.it shows the performance scores. Lastly is building social networks that provide support. This is to prevent self-alienation.

Facts about mental health

Mental health is a very common problem that can affect anyone. Suicidal deaths are common and a leading cause in several countries in the United States. Homicide is ill mental health that is very devastating and can affect anyone.

Children can also be exposed to ill mental health.as they can show warning signs. Such can undergo recovery process or diagnosis. Children can acquire this through Psychological, biological and social factors.

Not all that suffer the ill mental health are violent and unpredictable. Only those with serious mental illness can suffer the fate of being violent. This in rare cases is it observed since most of this mentally ill guys are usually the productive members of the society.

Victims of ill health who have undergone recovery process usually give good results and are more productive members of the society. They record lowest number of absenteeism and decreased disability cost.

Mental ill health problems are not necessarily associated to laziness. Mental ill health is only associated to family history, biological factors and life experiences.

Ill mental health can recover and participate in the societal activities like any other person.

Friends can also help in the recovery of the mental health in the following ways;

Being always available to the victim
Sharing facts about ill mental health to give them hopes.
Helping them access mental health services
Treating them with respect as you do to the others.
Defining them just like normal people not with words like crazy..

Prevention of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders foresees known risk factors such as exposure to trauma that can affect the chances that children, youth, and young adults will develop mental health problems. It is important to promote the social-emotional well-being of children and youth as it helps to maintain the positive health as was discussed earlier in the discussion.

Violence and mental health.

Violence is not necessarily related to mental health considering the facts that are talked of above. Most of the ill mental health suffer not he crisis of being violent. Only in few occasions are they violent and that’s only for those who are deeply affected mentally. This as was discussed says they are mostly the most productive members of the society so they are very much creative and socializing. Deeper analysis shows that those who are productive in their areas of jurisdiction and can manage their jobs pretty well are always termed to be recovering. This means that they are becoming sound mind and able to criticize problems. They can also judge situations and make the right decision.

According to statistics majority of violent crimes and homicides are committed by people who do not have mental health problems. This now clearly says that this crimes are usually done by people who are sound mind.

Most of the suicidal cases are strong ill mental health problems. A great percentage of the mental health problems cause major insecurity to themselves. Distress is a major cause of this suicides.

Statistics shows that a great number of people who are guilty of homicide are always sound mind. The mental health do not pose any threat to the community as posed by the media.

According to the British crime survey the victims of violent crimes beleivd that their offenders were under alcohol (majority), drugs . Ironically the statistics shows that only 1% of the victims, the offender was under the mental illness state. This is a very low population of offenders and there it shows that there is almost no criminals who commit crimes due to their mental state.

It comes out clearly that the main causes of violent crimes is always substance abuse. Such victims include discharged psychiatric patients and non-patients

It’s always important that when stating issues pertaining violence and crime, we need to stick to facts and don’t tend to factor in someone’s mental health condition as a reason for violence not unless there is a clear reasoning by facts. Try to always contextualize the fact that a few people with ill mental health are violent. A good number are never violent. Consult the guilt’s family for more facts and stories and last and most important is to seek a comment of a mental health charity. In the same context if you were in the victims shoe, what could be you’re feeling about the stories told about you?

A research done by the Howard Law Journal symposium participants talks of ideas that can reduce criminal gun violence in respect to the Second Amendment rights.

Mentally ill people are disproportionately victimized by violent crime. The largest crime-reducing benefit of helping persons with mental illness would be in reducing crimes against the mentally ill.

Considering a case where the severe mental illness is at stake, the victim is usually even at times unsafe from their own self thereby increasing the risk that a person will commit a violent crime. Risk varies based on many other factors, such as substance abuse, or unemployment. Many of the risks are from secondary effects of the mental illness; for example, cognitive difficulties make employment difficult or impossible.

Lots of ill mental illnesses have a biological origin. The genetic component is usually used to compare these types of ill health. Although the genetic effects have not been fully understood and there is no proper relation between the illness and the gene.

Severe ill mental health have got a criminal end view. Such illness is even more responsible for mass murders of strangers.

Treatment of severe mental illness which is best accomplished by a combination of therapy and drugs. Therapy can greatly reduce violence by and against the mentally ill.

Several mental ill persons who seek treatment rarely do they receive it since the number of the victims is increasingly overwhelminging the number of beds in US. Mental hospital beds per capita in the U.S. are lower than they have been since 1850.

Mental hospital capacity has decreased since the previous half century while prison and jail capacity has entirely and largely expanded. Mentally ill prisoners comprise a large fraction of the jail and prison population.

Compared to imprisonment, treating a mentally ill person in a mental hospital is very much expensive, as it is done on month-by-month basis.

However it is considered wise for cost effectiveness to allow the victim to attend a shorter term in a mental hospital which has recently been refurbished rather than serving a ten year term. It’s much important -though very much expensive- that the victims of ill mental health undergo this process. It is beneficial to the community and the society at large. As it saves an occurrence of the same mistake.

Several untreated mental illnesses (such as schizophrenia) are degenerative, therefore early treatment is utmost helpful. Preventing a first episode of psychosis (loss of contact with reality) can have major lifetime benefits. This is counteracting the condition at the warning stage.

In situations where a severely mentally ill person presents a grave danger to other persons, involuntary commitment may be necessary. Due process should be scrupulously protected—such as the right to neutral decision-maker. Involuntary commitment should not require that the danger to others be “imminent.”

Instead of commitment to a mental hospital, “involuntary outpatient commitment” is a less-restrictive alternative for many persons. After hearing the evidence, a judge may order a person to attend therapy and/or to take medication, as a condition of not being committed to a hospital. Such programs have been successful, and should be expanded.

The serious and severe ill mental health victims needs help and compassionate care. By this there is some sense of belonging. This actually encourages the victims and makes them not to feel dejected about their condition. It makes them feel they are part of the sound mind population.

Accepting this condition in the society is expensive during their care and it shows a great concern by the society. Considering the ways in which friends can help the victims done in this research, they can as well be sued by the society to show their point of help and care.

In a study of crimes committed by people with serious mental disorders in Washington DC, only a maximum of 7.5 %were directly related to symptoms of mental illness, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

Very low percentages of total crimes are directly related to symptoms of major depression, schizophrenia disorders and bipolar disorder.

Crimes dealing with mental illness usually tend to be big headline.(Jillian Peterson) The vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent, not criminal and not dangerous

Research have not yet revealed any predictable patterns linking criminal conduct and mental illness symptoms over time. A good number of the offenders who had committed crimes directly related to their mental illness symptoms also had committed unrelated crimes for other reasons, such as poverty, unemployment, homelessness and substance abuse, according to the research. There are no petty offenders who claim they are being controlled by their state of ill mental health hence no link. It’s either social (poverty) or economic (unemployment) reasons. Such factors might lead to such crimes and not their mental state.

In the United States, more than 1.2 million people with mental illness are confined in jails or prisons. People with mental illnesses also are on probation or parole at two to four times the rate for the general population.( federal Bureau of Justice Statistics)

In addition to interviews with offenders, the researchers reviewed criminal history and social worker files to help rate crimes based on their association with symptoms of schizophrenia disorders (hallucinations and delusions), bipolar disorder (impulsivity and risk-taking behavior) or major depression (hopelessness and suicidal thoughts). The ratings were: no relationship between mental illness symptoms and the crime, mostly unrelated, mostly related or directly related.

A crime could be rated as mostly unrelated or mostly related to mental illness symptoms if those symptoms contributed to the cause of the crime but weren’t solely responsible for it. For example, an offender with schizophrenia who was agitated because he heard voices earlier in the day later got into a bar fight, but he wasn’t hearing voices at the time of the altercation, so the crime was categorized as mostly related.

When the directly related and mostly related categories were combined, the percentage of crimes attributed to mental illness symptoms increased from 7.5 percent to 18 percent, or less than 1 in 5 of the crimes analyzed in the study. Of crimes committed by participants with bipolar disorder, 62 percent were directly or mostly related to symptoms, compared with 23 percent for schizophrenia and 15 percent for depression. Some participants may have described their mood as “manic” during a crime even though they could have just been angry or abusing drugs or alcohol, so the percentage of crimes attributed to bipolar disorder may be inflated, Peterson said.

Almost two-thirds of the study participants were male, with an average age of 40. They were evenly divided between white and black offenders and 85 percent had substance abuse disorders. The study did not include offenders with serious violent offenses because the mental health court did not adjudicate those crimes, but the participants did describe other violent crimes they had committed. The study also did not examine how substance abuse interacted with mental illness to influence criminal behavior.

The researchers said programs designed to reduce recidivism for mentally ill offenders should be expanded beyond mental health treatment to include cognitive-behavioral treatment about criminal thinking, anger management and other behavioral issues. Programs to address basic needs also are essential to reduce recidivism for all offenders after incarceration, including drug treatment and housing and employment support. (j.peterson.)

Mental Health Facts, Statistics and Data

Mental Health America is committed to promoting mental health as a critical part of overall wellness. They advocate for prevention services for all, early identification and intervention for those at risk, integrated services, care and treatment for those who need it, and recovery as the goal.

The gathering and providing of updated data and information about disparities faced by individuals with mental health problems is a tool for change

Goals of mental health America

To provide a snapshot of mental health status among youth and adults for policy and program planning, analysis, and evaluation;

To track changes in prevalence of mental health issues and access to mental health care;

To understand how changes in national data reflect the impact of legislation and policies; and.

To increase dialogue and improve outcomes for individuals and families with mental health needs

The mental health America gathers information in order to measure the societies health needs, access to care and outcomes regardless of the difference between the states and their varied health policies.

Rankings explore which states are more effective at addressing issues related to mental health and substance use.

Analysis may reveal similarities and differences among states in order to begin assessing how federal and state mental health policies result in more or less access to care.

The above three points states why the mental health America gathers information.

(Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms)

Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms

Mass shootings represent national awakenings and moments when seeming political or social adversaries might come together to find common ground, whether guns are allowed, regulated, or banned. Doing so, however, means recognizing that gun crimes, mental illnesses, social networks, and gun access issues are complexly interrelated, and not reducible to simple cause and effect

There are four common assumptions under this topic namely;

Ill mental health causes gun violence
psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime
that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners
that gun control “won’t prevent” another school mass shooting

In this case study ill health is used as a potential threat instead of a medical designation. Its believed that mass shooters are often mentally ill and of low societies .it is understandable that US policymakers, journalists, and the general public look to psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines as sources of certainty in the face of the often-incomprehensible terror and loss that mass shootings inevitably produce. This is especially the case in the current political moment, when relationships between shootings and mental illness often appear to be the only points upon which otherwise divergent voices in the contentious national gun debate agree. Its entangled affirmation of mental health solutions to ostensibly mental health problems creates an indefensible situation in which mental health practitioners increasingly become the persons most empowered to make decisions about gun ownership and most liable for failures to predict gun violence. Meanwhile, public, legal, and medical discourses move ever-farther away from talking broadly and productively about the social, structural, and, indeed, psychological implications of gun violence in the United States.

A psychiatrist, claimed that about half of the mass killings are being done by people with severe mental illness, mostly schizophrenia, and if they were being treated they would have been preventable. (Torrey) however a few population evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. a growing body of research suggests that mass shootings represent anecdotal distortions of, rather than representations of, the actions of “mentally ill” people as an cluster group. It also suggests that laws and policies that enable firearm access during emotionally charged moments also seem to correlate with gun violence more strongly than does mental illness alone. Belying Lott’s argument that more guns lead to less crime. Homicide was more common in areas where household firearms ownership was higher (Miller et al)

The law in some of the states now allows the psychiatrist to asses theitr patientsto see the potential to commit violent gun crime. New York State law requires mental health professionals to report anyone who “is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others” to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, which then alerts the local authorities to revoke the person’s firearms license and confiscate his or her weapons.California adopted a 5-year firearms ban for anyone who communicates a violent threat against a “reasonably identifiable victim” to a licensed psychotherapist. Similarly, a bill “passed as a response to mass shootings” requires Tennessee-based mental health professionals to report “threatening patients” to local law enforcement. Supporters of these types of laws argue that they provide important tools for law enforcement officials to identify potentially violent persons. Indeed, an investigative report by the New York Times found that in Connecticut in the aftermath of similar legislation, “there were more than 180 instances of gun confiscations from people who appeared to pose a risk of ‘imminent personal injury to self or others.’ Close to 40% of these cases involved serious mental illness.”

Mass shootings in the U.S. are often framed as the work of loners—unstable, angry White men who never should have had access to firearms. “Gunman a Loner Who Felt No Pain” read a headline in the wake of the Newtown shooting. ABC News detailed how geneticists planned to study Lanza’s DNA for individual-level “abnormalities or mutations and the Associated Press later described how Newtown spurred research on the brains of mass shooters. Meanwhile, CBS News reported that Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger was a “smart loner” who had trouble looking people in the eye.

The common phrase that gun control “would not have prevented Newtown” is frequently cited by opponents of such efforts. This contention generally assumes that, because none of the recent mass shooters in Tucson, Aurora, Newtown, or Isla Vista used weapons purchased through unregulated private sale or gun shows, gun control in itself would be ineffective at stopping gun crime, and that gun purchase restrictions or background checks are in any case rendered moot when shooters have mental illness

Research suggests that connections between mental illness and gun violence are less causal and more complex than current US public opinion and legislative action allow. US gun rights advocates are fond of the phrase “guns don’t kill people, people do.” The findings cited earlier in this article suggest that neither guns nor people exist in isolation from social or historical influences. A growing body of data reveals that US gun crime happens when guns and people come together in particular, destructive ways. That is to say, gun violence in all its forms has a social context, and that context is not something that “mental illness” can describe nor that mental health practitioners can be expected to address in isolation.

The research says that the stigma linked to guns and mental illness is complex, multifaceted, and itself politicized, in as much as the decisions about which crimes US culture diagnoses as “crazy” and which it deems “sane” are driven as much by the politics and racial anxieties of particular cultural moments as by the workings of individual disturbed brains. Beneath seemingly straightforward questions of whether particular assailants meet criteria for particular mental illnesses lay ever-changing categories of race, gender, violence, and, indeed, of diagnosis itself.

The research entirely connects ill mental health to crimes which is cited by different articles and resources that there is still no connection between ill mental health and crimes. Its main causes are usually due to social and economic status of the person inconsiderate of the mental state.

Resources

Stuart .H. (2003) violence and mental illness world psychiatry vol2(2),pp.121-124
Dolan M. castle D. McGregor K.(2012).criminally violent victimization in disorders. BMC Public Health vol.12(445).
Hilday V. ,swatz M., Borum J,Wagner H.(1999) criminally violent victimization in severe mental illness. Psychiatric services vol.50(1) pp62-68.
Hiroeh U. Appleby L. Mortensen P.(2001) death by homicide in people with mental illness vol 358(9299), pp2110-2112.
Swanson W. –American Journal of public health vol.104(12),pp 2342-2349
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/ mental health facts.