Mental Illness & Violence
Alex Handiside, Senior Policy Analyst, Mental Health Foundation and Brian Mckenna, Associate Professor, School Of Nursing, University Of Auckland explore the myths surrounding mental illness and violence; picking them apart and examining the personal impact that they have on public attitudes toward people with experience of mental illness.
Transcript
ALEX HANDISIDE – SENIOR POLICY ANALYST, MENTAL HEALTH FOUNDATION
My name’s Alex Handiside, I’m a Senior Policy Analyst for the Mental Health Foundation, Chair of my local school board, dad to a couple of lovely kids, and also passionate about football and coach my son’s under-eight football team.
On a good day, when I’m looking at stereotypical representations, I find it funny; when it’s really hyperbolic and totally over the top. In our photocopy room we used to have a Civil Defence kit; in the kit was an axe. So one morning, about nine o’clock on a Monday morning, I grabbed the axe - everybody knew I had, by that stage, bipolar disorder - grabbed the axe, leapt out of the room and said ‘look, I’m an axe-wielding maniac’. Three people thought that was very funny, and the rest started shuffling for the door.
A lot of the time when I’m reading stuff in the newspaper where mental illness has no relevance or no relationship to a crime that might have been committed, or not, you know. I don’t laugh at those; I still find that upsetting and it makes me pissed off.
BRIAN McKENNA – ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF NURSING, UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND
Overwhelmingly people with mental illness are no less, or no more violent than other people within society. What we did is we replicated a study which had been undertaken in England; we tracked all of the homicides which had occurred in New Zealand from 1970 through to the year 2000.
Of the total number of homicides involved over that 30-year period, 8% of them would have involved people who were experiencing serious and enduring mental illness at the time that the homicide took place.
Is that percentage disturbing? Actually that isn’t, over time, a figure that was increasing; it was staying fairly static. As the graph of violence was going up, the rates of people with mental illness was not going up – you’d expect that to be going up as well, you know, if you were feeding into the public perception. But in fact when you look at the proportion of people with mental illness that were involved in their deaths, they were going down over time.
So that dispels that public myth that out there you’ve got increased violence, and its people that are now... were in asylums, that are now out there in the general community that are perpetrating those events.
ALEX HANDISIDE
When I first became aware of that link between mental illness and violence; on a personal level, becoming diagnosed with schizophrenia was probably when that started really sheeting home. What that meant for me, personally, was the way that I was treated by people who were friends of mine, and people around me.
The caution, and the fact that suddenly I wasn’t welcome in people’s homes; I wasn’t being visited anymore; and a lot of that I took to mean was people’s perceptions of mental illness and violence. I’m a big guy, and I’m 6ft 2; that’s when those links started to be made on a really personal level. Suddenly I was somebody to be fearful of, and to be just ushered away if you like.
BRIAN McKENNA
Most of us get our everyday information about the world that exists through the lens of the media, so we thought, you know, what we’d do over a five-year period, we thought wouldn’t it be interesting to look at 20 cases that involved a definite link between mental illness and homicide; and 20 comparable similar sort of cases which involved no presence of mental illness. We found that there was a greater degree of sensationalism in some of the titles which involved homicide with people who were mentally unwell at the time.
And also there was a greater use of photographs, and they were photographs, for instance, around grieving family members. Sometimes photographs that had depicted the tranquillity of the environment in which the event had taken place; and the use of those photographs – they have a sort of lasting impact, I suppose, on the memory of the reader.
Another really lasting impression in my brain is the murders that involved Anthony Dixon. The newspapers extensively used photographs of Anthony Dixon who, by the way, was convicted of the homicide, so there was not a perceived link in the Court’s eyes between mental illness and what took place, so he was convicted. But he was pleading insanity, and there’s graphic photos of him with his head above the bench in the front of the Court, wide-eyed; and it was that depiction of, you know, this guy must be crazy.
ALEX HANDISIDE
My brother was very keen to keep me involved in his peer group; I was a very different person to what I had been previously. I wasn’t the witty, sparkling kind of ‘life of the party’ type of guy, but my brother was very, very keen to keep me included into his peer group when my peer group had evaporated.
When it came to my family, my mother, in particular, has a very, very strong sense of social justice and what’s wrong; so in absolutely no way was she going to hide me away, keep me in the bedroom when her friend’s came round.
From my family’s perspective it was knowing what’s right and what’s wrong. If somebody is doing something to your son, or treating your son or daughter differently because of their mental illness, you have an obligation just to get involved and to say ‘mate, that’s just not kosher’.
