“Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Gun Violence?”

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In the New Yorker, Maria Konnikova explores various philosophical and scientific questions — and reviews some of the recent research — related to possible links between mental health and gun violence.

“When mass shooters strike, speculations about their mental healthā€”sometimes borne out, sometimes notā€”are never far behind,” writes Konnikova. “It seems intuitive that someone who could do something terrible must be, in some sense, insane. But is that actually true? Are gun violence and mental illness really so tightly intertwined?”

Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Gun Violence? (The New Yorker, November 19, 2014)

3 COMMENTS

  1. “possible links between mental health and gun violence.”
    If you go with circular diagnosing DSM style – “whoever commits an atrocious crime has a mental disorder (hence everyone with a mental disorder is a potential violent criminal).” then you could find a link I guess. Not that it will make any sense but it’s psychiatric logic so who cares.

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  2. Is there a link between stupidity and articles like this. Yes. Psychotropic drugs induce violence, suicide, and a host of other ills. Psychotropic drugs destroy the brain and create symptoms that ignorant doctors and psychiatrists diagnose as “mental illness.” If anyone is “mentally ill” it is the psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical company chieftains that fund their abusive enterprise. The first step is to abolish psychiatry and pharmaceutical fraudulence. Stop drugging people and watch health increase. Stop drugging people and watch violence subside. Stop drugging innocent people for money. That is the first step.

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  3. There is no such thing as “mental” illness because you can’t separate the brain from all the other organ systems in the body. More serotonin, the “feel good” neurotransmitter, for example, is manufactured in the small intestine than in the brain. There is a huge interconnection between the gut and the brain via the vagus nerve. Natasha Campbell McBride, MD has figured a lot of this out in her book “Gut and Psychology Syndrome” htt://gaps.me where she explains how anyone can heal and seal their leaky gut by making dietary changes to kill off the candida albicans, the opportunistic yeast that rips microscopic holes in the walls of your small intestines allowing undigested food particles, some of which are neurotoxic, to escape into your blood and brain.

    I was able to kill off my candida by stopping sugar and fast acting carbs and by making the dietary recommendations McBride recommends. I was able to get my gut flora back into balance so I can finally properly absorb the nutrients from the food I eat.

    There is an abundance of evidence that psych meds such as Prozac cause suicides and homicides. These meds are dangerous. We need to move beyond the allopathic medical model to embrace a holistic, functional medical model that does not separate the brain from all the other organ systems in the body.

    Mainstream psychiatry almost killed me, but orthomolecular medicine saved my life. We need to look at ways to use food as medicine. Hippocrates had this idea more than 2000 years ago. He also said that all healing begins in the gut and he was right. Psych meds are toxic, they destroy the brain and body, but micronutrients are non toxic and can be used for healing purposes.

    Some on this site throw the baby out with the bathwater in a total rejection of biochemical approaches to treatment. That is a shame. Lets not reject anything that works. Nutritional approaches to treatment saved my life.

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