Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine and Law at Columbia, said that identifying psychiatric illness as a primary cause of violence is misleading. About half (45.6%) of mass school shootings ended with the perpetrator's suicide.Ĭoauthor Paul S.Severe mental illness (e.g., psychosis) was absent in the majority of perpetrators when present, psychotic symptoms were more often associated with mass murders involving means other than firearms.Consistent with previous reports, perpetrators of mass shootings involving academic settings are primarily Caucasian (66.7%) and male (100%).Most involved firearms (63.2%), commonly semi- or fully-automatics.Of the 82 incidents of mass murder involving academic settings: Creating the CMMD involved extensive review of 14,785 murders publicly described in English in print or online, occurring worldwide between 19.įor the mass school shooting study, the researchers isolated cases of mass murder perpetrated at least in part at schools, colleges, and universities and categorized them by location (within or outside of the US), and whether firearms were used. To conduct their study, the researchers analyzed data from the Columbia Mass Murder Database (CMMD), developed by the COPE team to gain much-needed insight into the relationship between serious mental illness and mass shootings. “To prevent future mass school shootings, we need to begin to focus on the cultural and social drivers of these types of events, such as the romanticization of guns and gun violence, rather than on individual predictors.” Girgis, director of the Center of Prevention and Evaluation (COPE), a research clinic at Columbia/NYSPI specializing in the study and treatment of young adults at high risk for schizophrenia and other psychoses. “Our findings suggest that mass school shootings are different from other forms of mass murder and that they should be looked at as a distinct phenomenon,” said Dr.

27 in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, according to study authors, is the largest analysis ever conducted on mass school shootings. While severe mental illnesses, such as psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia, were not present in the perpetrators of these events, it is notable that almost half of these mass shooters took their own lives at the scene, leading the authors to hypothesize that these perpetrators viewed themselves as engaging in some form of “final act.” Sixty-three percent of the murders involved firearms. Girgis, MD, found that 100% of the mass killings were initiated by males (mean age 28) of whom 66.7% were Caucasian.

A research team at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) examining 82 mass murders that occurred at least partially in academic settings throughout the world found that most mass murderers and mass shooters did not have severe psychiatric illnesses.

New findings become seriously ill from