HLTHAGE 2G03 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1-11: Mental Disorder, Minority Stress, Binge Drinking
2 Aug 2016
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Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of american firearms. 4 misconceptions: mental illness causes gun violence, psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime before it happens, us mass shootings teach us to fear mentally ill loners, because of the complex psychiatric histories of mass shooters, gun control. Majority of those with mental illness are victims and not perpetrators. Other risk factors more strongly correlate with gun violence: history of childhood abuse, binge drinking, and male gender. Psychiatrists are not much better than a regular person at predicting gun violence. No mental hospitals at the beginning at the seventeenth century. Medicine began with the sick person seeking relief, psychiatry began with relatives seeking relief. Psychiatry begins when people start interpreting mental abnormality in medical terms. First order of psychiatry was to establish insanity as a genuine disease: next business was to distinguish insanity from other diseases and assign it the singular characteristic that it deprived the person of higher mental faculties.
