Guns kill people, and sometimes they kill a bunch of people in one go, as happened in the recent grocery store shooting in Buffalo, New York, and the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Thoughts and prayers, yada yada yada, but what can be done to actually reduce gun violence? This post focuses on youth gun …
This was originally going to be a book review of The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. However, at 800 pages, it’s a serious commitment, and I only made it partway through. Still, he had me convinced, and I wanted to share my thoughts on what I did get through. In the book, …
Violent actions are obviously a bad thing, but what about violent thoughts? It’s not exactly socially acceptable to talk about, which makes it hard to get a sense of how common it is. I would guess that it’s fairly common to have the occasional thoughts of violence, even if they’re just fleeting and there’s no …
Stereotypes are a way that we store knowledge about social categories. When a category is considered by society to be deviant, such as the group of people who are mentally ill, members of that category tend to be viewed as a homogeneous group that is accurately represented by stereotypes. There may be a grain of …
Inaccurate & Damaging Mental Illness Stereotypes Read More »
I recently came across Manhattan Institute fellow Stephen Eide‘s 2020 article In Defense of Stigma in the online magazine National Affairs. It had some… odd… ideas about mental illness stigma, so I thought I would explore some of them. Okay, forget about exploring, I’m going to rant. The basic argument in the paper is that …
One of the most common and damaging stereotypes about mental illness is that mentally ill people are chronically dangerous and violence-prone (Corrigan & Watson, 2002). This stereotype is especially strongly linked to people with psychosis. Like many stereotypes, it’s not true in the vast majority of cases, but the general public may not realize that. …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the psychology of war atrocities. This post won’t go into any details of the atrocities themselves; rather, the focus is on what contributes to people becoming perpetrators. This post is based on a comprehensive paper on the …
Two men get killed. Some members of the Christian right are calling the man who killed them a hero and a patriot sent by God. Something isn’t adding up here. On August 25, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse grabbed his AR-15 style rifle and left his home in Antioch, IL, to head over to Kenosha, WI. He …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is victim blaming. Victim blaming involves placing the responsibility for a violent or otherwise harmful act either entirely or partially on the victim of that act. It arises from distorted beliefs regarding victims, perpetrators, and the harmful acts …
In this emerging blogger post, HealthComesFirst!!! Blogger writes about the stigma around bipolar disorder. I have often felt that the stigma associated with bipolar illness is as big if not bigger (twice as big) than dealing with the illness itself. Every time there is a school shooting or a gun incident or a drug cartel …
