Using a structural competency framework to teach structural racism in pre-health education

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Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms

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Structural Competency

In the era of Donald Trump, many lower- and middle-class white Americans are drawn to politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death.


Dying of Whiteness How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia-for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast 

The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease

Pills replaced the couch; neuroscience took the place of talk therapy; and as psychoanalysis faded from the scene, so did the castrating mothers and hysteric spinsters of Freudian theory. Or so the story goes. In Prozac on the Couch, psychiatrist Jonathan Michel Metzl boldly challenges recent psychiatric history, showing that there’s a lot of Dr. Freud encapsulated in late-twentieth-century psychotropic medications. Providing a cultural history of treatments for depression, anxiety, and other me

Prozac on the Couch Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs

You see someone smoking a cigarette and say, “Smoking is bad for your health,” when what you mean is, “You are a bad person because you smoke.” You encounter someone whose body size you deem excessive, and say, “Obesity is bad for your health,” when what you mean is, “You are lazy, unsightly, or weak of will.” You see a woman bottle-feeding an infant and say, “Breastfeeding is better for that child’s health,” when what you mean is that the woman must be a bad parent. You see the smokers, the ove

Against Health How Health Became the New Morality

What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms

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Dr. Jonathan Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his MD from the University of Missouri, MA in humanities/poetics and psychiatric internship/residency from Stanford University, and PhD in American culture from University of Michigan. Winner of the 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2020 APA Benjamin Rush Award for Scholarship, and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship, Dr. Metzl has written extensively for medical, psychiatric, and popular publications about some of the most urgent hot-button issues facing America and the world. His books include The Protest Psychosis, Prozac on the Couch, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, and Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.

Guns in America

Guns and Mental Illness

Gun Violence

Race, Gender and Social Justice in Healthcare

Race and Health

Politics

Mental Health

Psychiatry

Psychology

Gender

History of Mental Health

Gun Control

Mass shootings

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The Conversation Profile

When TV united America: Friday marks the day nearly half of USA watched the same show

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Dying of Whiteness

How to Talk About Guns in the Classroom

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gun-violence-expert-on-biden-gun-violence-plan

Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health, and Society

Jonathan Metzl, Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health, and Society, is available for analysis on President Biden's gun violence plan.

A recognized author and expert source in the wake of gun incidents and mass shootings, Metzl can speak from a balanced perspective on the legacy of mass shootings, gun violence, gun legislation and reform and narratives around mental health. 

Dr. Metzl is the author of the book, Dying of Whiteness, which examines the stereotypes of race and mental illness surrounding gun violence, and recent research, which lays out a five-part agenda for future research into mass shootings and multiple-victim homicides.


Gun violence expert on Biden gun violence plan

Vanderbilt professor Jonathan Metzl isn’t afraid to tackle society’s most controversial issues, like guns, mass shootings, health care, race, politics and mental illness. A physician by training, he comes to these issues with a unique perspective.

Metzl, the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology, professor of psychiatry and professor of medicine, health and society, examines how social, economic and political forces  produce polarizing health conditions and inequities and then looks for solutions.




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Jonathan Metzl on political issues that could impact your health

In this video, Dr. Jonathan Metzl Frederick B. Rentschler II professor of sociology,
psychology and chair of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University writes about his research studying the health implications of political choices tied to health care, gun legislation and tax cuts. He compiles his work in the book, Dying of Whiteness – How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.

In his most recent work, Metzl traveled across America’s heartland seeking to better understand the politics of racial resentment and its impact on public health. Interviewing a range of Americans, he uncovers how racial anxieties led to the repeal of gun control laws in Missouri, stymied the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and fueled massive cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. Although such measures promised to restore greatness to white America, Metzl’s systematic analysis of health data dramatically reveals they did just the opposite: these policies made life sicker, harder, and shorter in the very populations they purported to aid.  Thus, white gun suicides soared, life expectancies fell, and school dropout rates rose.


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How political choices of some white Americans may impact their health

Dr. Jonathan Metzl appears on MSNBC regarding the Florida shooter and predictive value of mental heath

Florida shooting suspect suffered from more than mental health | MSNBC

In the shadow of the two year anniversary of one of the worst mass shootings in American history, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, an extensive new study by two Vanderbilt University researchers challenges common assumptions about gun violence and mental illness that often emerge in the aftermath of mass shootings.
 
When a mass shooting occurs there seems to be a familiar narrative that untreated mental illness is the primary cause for the terrifying act. But a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health by Dr. Jonathan Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish finds that an isolated focus on mental illness is misguided.
 
“Gun discourse after mass shootings often perpetuates the fear that ‘some crazy person is going to come shoot me,’” said Metzl, the study’s lead author. “But if you look at the research, it’s not the ‘crazy’ person you have to fear.”
 
MENTALLY ILL NOT VIOLENT
In the article, “Mental Illness, Mass Shootings and the Politics of American Firearms,” Metzl and MacLeish analyzed data and literature linking guns and mental illness over the past 40 years. They found that despite societal pre-conceived notions, most mentally ill people are not violent.
 
“Fewer than 5 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness,” they write.
 
FOUR MYTHS ARISE AFTER MASS SHOOTINGS
Their research uncovered four central myths that arise in the aftermath of mass shootings:
 
(1)  Mental illness causes gun violence
(2)  Psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime before it happens
(3)  U.S. mass-shootings “prove” that we should fear mentally ill loners
(4)  Because of the complex psychiatric histories of mass-shooters, gun control “won’t prevent” mass shootings
 
They stress that all four of these are incorrect, though understandable assumptions.
 
“Our research finds that across the board the mentally ill are 60 to120 percent more likely than the average person to be the victims of violent crime rather than the perpetrators.”
 
MISDIRECTED BLAME
Metzl and MacLeish find that the focus on mental illness after horrific, yet statistically rare, mass shootings misdirects people from the bigger issues tied to preventing gun deaths in the U.S.
 
“There are 32,000 gun deaths in the United States on average every year and people are far more likely to be shot by relatives, friends or acquaintances than they are by lone violent psychopaths,” said Metzl.
 
“We should set our attention and gun policies on the everyday shootings, not on the sensational shootings because there we will get much more traction in preventing gun crime.”
 
Read more at http://news.vanderbilt.edu Search Jonathan Metzl.
 
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See all Vanderbilt social media at http://social.vanderbilt.edu.

Mental Illness is the wrong scapegoat after mass shootings

Media Inquiry