Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Gun Violence?

The New Yorker:

On Friday, October 24th, during the busy lunch hour in the school cafeteria of Marysville-Pilchuck High School, in Marysville, Washington, Jaylen Fryberg opened fire on his classmates, killing one student and wounding four others, three of whom later died from their injuries. Then he killed himself.

Just a week earlier, Fryberg had been crowned prince of the school’s homecoming court—he was a community volunteer, student athlete, and all-around “good kid.” But within hours of the shooting, that picture had changed. Quickly, media outlets analyzed his tweets, Facebook page, Instagram account, and his text and Facebook messages. He was “full of angst” and “anguished.” One media report concluded that “he just wasn’t in the right state of mind.”Another went further: he was a “depressed sociopath.” Many writers pointed out that the Maysville school district had recently received a large federal grant to improve mental-health services for students. “We used to have a much greater social safety net,” the district supervisor Jerry Jenkins told the Seattle Times. “Yes, he was popular, but there came a time when something changed. If people are educated to look for those, these are things they can do intervene,” Carolyn Reinach Wolf, a mental-health lawyer with a specialty in school shootings, said. The suggestion underlying much of the coverage was that improvements in the mental-health system could have prevented the violence.

Read the whole story: The New Yorker