Mental Illness And Crime Essay

“People with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of crime than to commit them.”

Most Mentally ill people are not violent and repeated studies have shown that there is only a small significant association with mental illness. Many people presume that crimes that are committed are committed by people with mental illness due to not knowing the facts because most people shy away from educating their selves about mental illness and what it is.

Although there have been some cases of which the person committing the crime has mental health issues due to trauma or bad up bringing in the family area one of these cases was Mr S who was a 22-year-old physics university student he was very isolated but doing great academically, he was an only child and was very introvert with few friends at school his parents divorced when he was 3, after the divorce he hardly saw his father. He had a very close relationship with his mother growing up, sharing a bed with her until puberty. The mother struggled with depression

when Mr S was a child. Following his graduation, he moved back to live with his mother. During this time, he had his first sexual experience with a female student, who broke up the relationship after only a few weeks. During summer, he was interviewed for master’s courses and the interviewers described him as suspicious and he had told them that he was implanted with a radio chip at his dentist. Over a period of weeks, he began to believe his house was under surveillance and his life was in danger. He began sleeping on his mother’s floor for safety, but then he started to believe his mother was controlling his mind and was setting him up. One evening after his mother urged him to see the doctor, he took a kitchen knife and killed her with multiple stab wounds. He then turned the knife on himself, inflicting serious injuries in an attempt to disembowel himself. In prison Mr S was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
There was a study measuring the rates of psychiatric disorders in prisons this study showed that it is much higher than the general population(Hollin,1989) with majority of prisoners diagnosed with either anti-social personality disorder or substance abuse (Blackburn, 1993).
Many people love to watch crime shows on television including real and fictional but in most cases these portray the criminal to have some sort of mental illness which in turn gives the clear majority of the population the wrong idea about the association of mental illness and crime.

"Characters in prime-time television portrayed as having a mental illness are depicted as the most dangerous of all demographic groups: 60 percent were shown to be involved in crime or violence" (Mental Health American, 1999). Another source of media that portrays mental illness as a factor in all cases is the news when reporting news stories of crimes that have committed also tell of the perpetrators have some sort of mental illness. When programs such as crime watch when describing the perpetrators with mental illness they tell the public not to approach as the person is seen to be dangerous. "Most news accounts portray people with mental illness as dangerous" (Wahl,

1995).
Although some mental disorders do tend to have a higher aggression rates to others with depression and manic patience have an increased risk of violent behaviour the medical diagnosis consistently associated with the risk of violence is schizophrenia.
Another reason mental illness is associated with crime is the fact that when criminals go to court to have a trial the lawyers try to get them off with having a mental illness even if the defendant doesn’t it is their way of trying to get their client a shorter sentence or trying to avoid them going to a jail which gives the wider population the understanding that people with mental illness commit crimes more than those without.