Mental Health and School Shootings or Mental Health: Red Herring or Cause in School Shootings? by Kathryn M. Bateman and Jonathan McCausland

In a Tweet that summarizes the opinion of some U.S. citizens in the wake of the shooting in Parkland, President Trump stated, “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!” In this statement, the President places blame for the perpetrators actions on a potential mental illness and the failure of people to prevent their own murder. He is also supporting the commonly held belief that the people who commit school rampage shootings are “deeply troubled” loners who, if shown compassion earlier on, would not murder their peers and teachers. These images are problematic, acting as distractions from placing blame on the people who commit these acts of violence, and the policies that enable them in carrying out rampage school shootings. Regardless of mental health status, those who act as rampage school shooters are responsible for their actions because most people who either suffer from mental illness, have access to guns, or experience bullying do not commit rampage school shootings. However, in many cases, additional supports could be implemented to counteract the predilection towards planning and carrying out these horrific events.

While any one factor cannot explain a rampage school shooting, and merely choosing one factor to solve will leave others to coalesce into further incidents of violence, Newman et al. (2004, pp. 229-230) outline five factors that are “necessary, but not sufficient” to bring about rampage school shootings:

• Shooter’s self-perceived social marginalization
• Psychosocial problems that magnify the marginalization (mental illness, severe depression, or abuse) and inhibit the ability to manage the psychosocial issues
• “cultural scripts” which lead potential shooters to believe masculinity is linked to violence and deflect their emotions outward
• Failed surveillance systems in schools and communities
• The availability of guns and other weapons

While many of these factors are being discussed widely, a less central conversation within the debate on rampage school shootings are the “cultural scripts” that link masculinity to violence. Unlike the other factors, this reason is explained away by focusing on the mental health of the perpetrators.

Currently our society accepts violence as an enactment of masculinity. As a result, adages like “boys being boys” are common place and are used to justify numerous violences against women that include but are not limited to sexual assault and domestic abuse. When unpacking the potential causes of gun violence and rampage shootings such as mental health, Kimmel and Mahler (2003) point out that they should drive all people, including women and gender non-conforming students to commit shootings. Instead, the most common culprits are men. Part of the explanation behind this phenomenon is that young men who fail to “enact codes of masculinity” (p. 1445) are bullied, and as a result, feel unable to reach out for assistance (Newman, 2004). In rare cases, the experience can cause men to look for a “manly exit” (p. 247) from their current situation. Rather than turn inwards, as many women are taught, they turn their rage outwards, utilizing guns to enhance their masculinity by exhibiting the power to choose who lives and who dies. For school shooters, the cultural scripts of masculinity that privilege “guns, domination, and the power that comes from terrifying the innocent” (p. 253) provide the justifications for their actions; without the access to guns, the modus operandi of the script provided by previous school shooters is eliminated. In fact, the focus on the mental health of these men takes the focus away from the fact that it is men who commit these crimes. Mental health in this case, acts as a smoke screen to larger societal problems where men are given permission to act violent, even at the expense of women’s safety and all too commonly, their lives. When these men go too far, they are quickly labeled as mentally unstable or we blame other students for bullying them to explain away their actions, when in reality, they are aligned with how masculinity is defined in mainstream American culture. While bullying and mental illness need to be addressed in schools and can be connected to school shootings, they themselves are not the cause. If they were, rampage school shootings would be more prevalent and represent a more diverse set of perpetrators.

Although mental health plays the role of a smoke screen to larger societal issues, the fact cannot be ignored that mental health has played a factor in some rampage school shootings. This has led to calls for reforms of mental health or gun control policies in the aftermath of school shootings. Unfortunately, many policies set forth to address the mental health crisis are fraught with misconceptions because of anxiety over gun violence fueled by tacit beliefs concerning race, politics, and the distribution of violence. Metzl and MacLeish (2015) looked at four frequent assumptions that follow rampage school shootings – mental illness causes gun violence, diagnosis of mental illness can prevent gun crime, shootings are the “deranged acts of mentally ill loners,” and that gun control will not prevent shootings because of the mental health crisis. In arguing that mental illness does not lead to gun violence, Metzl and MacLeish (2015) cite a statistic from the National Center for Health Statistics that states: between 2001 and 2010, fewer than 5% of all gun-related killings were the result of a person diagnosed with mental illness. In fact, individuals with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators (NAMI, 2018); alcohol and drug use (Branas, Han, & Wiebe, 2016) and access to firearms (Chapman, Alpers, & Jones, 1996; Webster, Crifasi, and Vernick, 2014) are more predictive of perpetrating gun violence than having a mental illness. While Metzl and MacLeish (2015) do concede that people with mental illnesses can commit gun crime, they outline how mental health professionals are as capable of predicting which patients will commit violent acts as laypersons. Interestingly however, the switch to fearing rampage shootings committed by unstable, lone white men is relatively new. Historically, mental illness was used to generate fear of Black civil rights activists in the 1960s and 70s. According to Metzl and MacLeish (2015), “US psychiatric and popular culture frequently blamed ‘Black culture’ or Black activist politics – not individual, disordered brains – for the threats such men were imagined to pose.” They go on to explain how some individuals believed the Black Power movement drove “Negro men” to insanity, leading to “antiwhite productions and attitudes” as well as detailing how Malcom X and other Black leaders were inappropriately labeled schizophrenic out of fear of their political beliefs. In the 1960s and 1970s this political climate resulted in widespread gun reforms. More recently, the actions of the lone white shooters have led to calls for the expansion of gun rights and isolated individuals mentally illness, rather than labeling entire swaths of the population with mental illness. Yet, the focus on individuals is what prevents gun regulations from working properly. According to Michael Bostwick, a Mayo Clinic psychiatrist, “taking guns away from the mentally ill won’t eliminate mass shootings unless such efforts are linked to larger prevention efforts that have a broader impact on communities.” (as cited in Metzl & MacLeish, 2015) In other words, limiting gun control to certain populations will not stop mass shootings, but regulating guns for all citizens and providing mental health services broadly will continue the trend of decreasing gun violence.

Mental health in this case, acts as a smoke screen to larger societal problems where men are given permission to act violent, even at the expense of women’s safety and all too commonly, their lives.

Even amongst the call for increased mental health awareness and support in popular media, currently, the trend is not towards a broader approach to mental health. This is alarming considering how challenging it is to diagnose in early adolescence. Typically, diagnosis is delayed and treatment numbers for the 20% of adolescents with mental illness floats around 35%.  Instead, many schools have promoted ad hoc solutions to providing mental health support to potential school shooters like Columbine High School’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in the form of “walk ups” which were discussed in a previous article from AJE. Post-Columbine, journalistic research put forth the theory that it was not athletic, generally well-liked Eric Harris’s subscription to goth culture, but his posthumous sociopath diagnosis that may have driven him to carryout a rampage school shooting (Cullen, 2006.) Walking up probably would not have stopped Eric or Dylan from murdering their peers, but their mental health may have contributed to their actions. Furthermore, their peers at Columbine High School did not possess the skills to serve in the capacity of a mental health professional. Although, as discussed earlier, these mental health professionals are unable to predict which patients will conduct a rampage shooting, mental health professionals belong in our schools to support the growing number of students with mental health needs. Unfortunately, social workers, school psychologists, school nurses, and other support personnel are often the first eliminated in dwindling school budgets. We state this, not to place blame on schools but to point out major hypocrisies in how we as a society interact with school shootings and mental health. Superficial mental health tips and tricks do not assuage the illnesses that subsume some of these perpetrators. So far, the one thing that has shown to diminish school shooting frequency is broad gun control measures, as evidenced by the results of Australia’s gun law reforms after a mass shooting in 1996 (Chapman et al., 2006).

Historically, funding mental health services in schools has been a focal point in school policy discussions. In 2007, the New Freedom Commission report (Stephan, Weist, Kataoka, Adelsheim & Mills, 2007), commissioned under President G.W. Bush, identified four factors proximal to school mental health:

• reduce stigma
• prevent suicide
• screen and treat comorbid mental and substance use disorders
• improve and expand school mental health programs.

President G.W. Bush also signed the Healthy Schools Act of 2007, which funded school-based mental health programs within the Department of Health and Human Services. This legislation recognized the need for mental health services to be a critical, embedded facet of K-12 education. However, current movements in policy are doing little to support these movements to improve mental health in schools. President Trump is eliminating funding for mental health services in the 2019 federal budget (Romo, 2018) while also using H.J res 40 to remove laws decreasing access to firearms for the mentally ill. H.J. Res 40 repeals an Obama-era policy which decreased access of guns to the mentally ill (Vitali, 2017.) While there are notable flaws with only limiting access to firearms to the mentally ill, eliminating both funding for mental health services and legislation regulating access to firearms seem counterintuitive considering President Trump’s proclivity towards thinking mental health, not gun access, is the reason a person decided to murder 17 of their peers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (Rogers, 2018).

Ultimately, not all is dim. The number of cases of rampage school shooting have been on the decline since its peak during the 1998-1999 school year. Newman and Fox (2009) suggest this may be linked to school awareness of warning signs and how students will come forward. They also found that more of the perpetrators of rampage school shootings had been in care of mental health professionals prior to engaging in the shooting. We’re making progress towards diagnosing and treating mental illness, however, we are not preventing access to firearms. Though more frequent early diagnosis of mental illness may be helping to decrease the school-based gun violence numbers, access to guns and other weapons needs to be the main step in preventing further atrocities that take the lives of many of our young people every day.

References

Branas, C., Han, S., & Wiebe, D. (2016). Alcohol use and firearm violence. Epidemiologic Reviews. 38(1), 42-45.

Chapman, S., Alpers, P., Agho, K., & Jones, M. (2006). Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms: Faster falls in firearm deaths, firearm suicides, and a decade without mass shootings. Injury Prevention. 12(6), 365-372.

Cullen, D. (2009). Columbine. Hachette UK.

Kenway, J., & Fitzclarence, L. (1997). Masculinity, violence and schooling: Challenging `poisonous pedagogies’. Gender & Education, 9(1), 117.

Metzl, J.M., MacLeish, K.T. (2015). Mental illness, mass shootings and the politics of American firearms. American Journal of Public Health. 105(2), 240-249.

National Alliance on Mental Illness [NAMI]. (2018a). Mental Health Facts: Children and Teens. Retrieved from https://www.nami.org/NAMI/media/NAMI-Media/Infographics/Children-MH-Facts-NAMI.pdf

National Alliance on Mental Illness [NAMI]. (2018b). Violence and gun reporting laws. Retrieved from https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Public-Policy/Violence-and-Gun-Reporting-Laws

Newman, K. and Fox, C. (2009). Repeat tragedy: Rampage shootings in American high school and college settings, 2002-2008. American Behavioral Scientists. 52(9), 1286-1308.  

Newman, K., Fox, C., Harding, D. J., Mehta, J., & Roth, W. (2004). Rampage. The social roots of school shootings. New York: Perseus.

Rogers, K. (2018, February 15). After Florida shooting, Trump focuses on mental health over guns. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/us/politics/trump-florida-shooting-guns.html

Romo, V. (2018). Trump Calls For Mental Health Action After Shooting; His Budget Would Cut Programs. NPR: The Two-Way. Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/15/586095437/trump-calls-for-mental-health-action-after-shooting-his-budget-would-cut-program

Stephan, S. H., Weist, M., Kataoka, S., Adelsheim, S., & Mills, C. (2007). Transformation of children’s mental health services: The role of school mental health. Psychiatric Services, 58(10), 1330-1338.

Vitali, A. (2017, February 28). Trump Signs Bill Revoking Obama-Era Gun Checks for People With Mental Illnesses. NBC News.

Retrieved from: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-signs-bill-revoking-obama-era-gun-checks-people-mental-n727221

Webster, D., Crifasi, C.K., & Vernick, J.S. (2014). Effects of the repeal of Missouri’s handgun purchaser licensing law on homicides. Journal of Urban Health, 91(2), 293-302.

Katie Bateman is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Instruction, focusing on Science Education at Penn State University. She is a former middle school science teacher and informal science educator, with specialization in urban education and holds a BS in Marine Science and an M.Ed. in Elementary Education. Her current research interests include Earth Science education, learning progression development, and how science curricular practices are impacted by educational policies tied to standardized testing and accountability measures. She is the Technical Chair for the AJE Forum.

Jonathan (JD) McCausland is a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus in Science Education at Penn State University. He is a former high school science teacher who served New York City’s “overage and under-credited” population and holds an M.Ed. from Brooklyn College. His current research interests surround preservice teacher education as well as understanding the experiences and policies affecting the success of “overage and under-credited” students and their teachers.