In response to the recent shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school that left 17 students dead, President Donald Trump said Feb. 22 more mental hospitals would reduce the number of mass shooters. However, mental health experts have pushed back against that claim, according to The New York Times.
"We're going to be talking about mental institutions. And when you have some person like this, you can bring them into a mental institution, and they can see what they can do. But we've got to get them out of our communities," Mr. Trump said during a meeting, according to The New York Times.
Michael Stone, MD, a forensic psychiatrist at New York City-based Columbia University, said while many school shooters are described as angry or antisocial, not everyone displays the kinds of behaviors that would warrant institutionalization, and this course of action would not address the core issues that cause mass shootings.
The decline in mental health beds in hospitals in recent decades has led to a number of problems, experts in the article say, such as a rise in homelessness, but only two of the many mass shootings in recent years can be attributed to individuals with conditions that would warrant institutionalization, E. Fuller Torrey, MD, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, told The New York Times.