I'm Coming to Kill You! (Or so The Sun would have you believe)
Watch out folks - today, The Sun published the headline '1,200 Killed by Mental Patients'. Apparently they want the nation to believe that people with mental health problems are dangerous. I'd better chain myself to my bed tonight in case I feel the urge to go on a killing spree, because I was feeling a bit depressed this morning.
Dear oh dear! When I saw the headline I wanted to scream and shout, "Are we getting nowhere with mental health awareness?"
Still, 1,200 sounds like quite a large number. I felt the need to check the facts before getting up on my soap box. The first thing I noticed is that the figure quoted is apparently over ten years. That made me wonder exactly how many murders there have been in the UK over the last decade. According to Citizens Report there have been 5,556.
One in four people suffer from mental health problems (Time to Change) at some point during their lives.
Therefore, by chance alone, you'd expect one quarter of those murders to have been committed by somebody with a history of mental illness. 25% of 5,556 is 1386.5.
So what The Sun has actually told us, is that people with mental health problems are killing at about the same rate, or perhaps slightly less often than people without mental health problems.
The Guardian has gone into The Sun's data is more depth, and has found all manner of irregularities in their reporting. For example The Sun implies that mental health problems led to the murders yet their data included all murderers who had symptoms of mental health problems, regardless as to whether or not those symptoms led to the killings.
I will leave you for now. One of my neighbours has a phobia and another's anorexic, so I'm off to change the locks.
Front page of The Sun, Monday 7th October, 2013
