How bad is mental health in other countries?

Anyone paying attention to the aftermath of the Florida school shooting knows that the president considers mental health to be the issue and not the readily availability of guns. Quoting the president immediately after the Texas church shooting, "But this isn't a guns situation … I think that mental health is your problem here."

How do school shootings in the U.S. compare with the rest of the world? Data collected by the Academy for Critical Incident Analysis shows that between 2000 and 2010 comparing the U.S. with 35 developed countries, almost half of the school shootings, 28 out of 57, occurred in the United States. So assuming that mental illness, not guns, is the problem, the U.S. needs to research why mental illness rates are so much less in those 35 countries than in the U.S. Or conversely, why are mental illness rates so high in the United States.

Should mental illness rates in the U.S. turn out to be about the same as in the other 35 countries in the study and the president says that guns are not the issue, what are we missing here?

David Thiessen

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