(Sept. 17, 2013) Reports that Navy Yard mass killer Aaron Alexis, 34, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia should not surprise us. Mental illness has emerged as a factor in an estimated 50% of rampage killings and 10% of all homicides since the wholesale closure of public psychiatric hospitals began a half century ago.
“The federal government in 1963 dedicated itself to bringing an end to the mental health system that had provided treatment to individuals with acute or severe mental illness for the preceding 100 years,” said Doris A. Fuller, executive director. “It succeeded. Today, the nation has 5% the number of public beds we had in the late 1950s and exponentially more mass homicides, among other dreadful consequences.”
Only one mass killing occurred in the 1940s, the last decade before deinstitutionalization; 73 occurred in the 1990s. Six of the nation’s 12 deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the last six years; severe mental illness has been implicated in two-thirds of those tragedies.
Research shows that individuals receiving effective mental illness treatment are no more likely to be violent than anyone else, but the system for providing timely and effective treatment to those most at risk for violence has essentially been dismantled without being replaced.
The Treatment Advocacy Center in 2012 called for a moratorium on state hospital bed closures until replacement facilities to meet inpatient treatment need are created. We also promote improved civil commitment standards to increase treatment access for people too ill to volunteer for treatment and the universal use of court-ordered treatment in the community – often called “assisted outpatient treatment” or “AOT” – for qualifying at-risk individuals with the most severe mental illnesses. AOT is a less-restrictive and less-costly alternative to hospitalization and to the homelessness, incarceration and other consequences that individuals with untreated severe mental illness often suffer.
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