Crime and mental illness

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Study finds that only 10% of crime associated with mental illness. Calls it a small percentage. I don't know that 10% is necessarily a small number. Depends on what is being measured I guess, but is the study of such a small sampling in a specific location really representative of the facts?


http://psychcentral.com/news/2014/04/22 ... 68815.html

It's 10% related to symptoms of an illness. Wich is crap given the fact that prisons are chucked full of sociopaths. Anything they do illegally is a symptom. That's just stupid.

Sociopathy's not considered a mental illness. I'm not sure if any personality disorders count into this statistic or not (?)

The stats are very difficult to interpret since a detailed analysis isn't given.

I think it helps to keep in perspective that drug abuse/alcohol abuse is a stronger predictor of violence than mental illness alone.

I think prison is full of human beings who have done things that society condemns, but that does not necessarily mean that they have any official diagnosis of "sociopath."

I am sure prisons are also full of people who just "lost it" for a moment, which cost them dearly, but that doesn't mean that one moment in time defines their life.

Just because someone does a bad thing does not mean they are a bad person. Sometimes human beings do "bad" things, sometimes they do "good" things. Both are human acts.

And not everyone who has a diagnosis that would officially put them in the category of being a "sociopath" does bad things during their life. I think most people who have all the symptoms that would define them as sociopath would never actually be referred to until and if, they did actually commit a sociopathic act.

I think most of the time, the term "sociopath" is just a concept created to define an appearance or behaviorism that is classical of people who have actually done psychopathic things. Stereotyping.

Well, about 1/5 of the whole population is mentally ill, so those numbers seem similar.

I would say maybe at least 50% of the population have some kind of personality disorders, at least where I am from. Not sure how many of those would be sociopaths.