Stop Saying This About Mental Illness, Homelessness, and Violence

If there’s one thing I dislike almost as much as right-wingers wielding bad arguments, it’s people on the liberal-left doing the same.

In fact, sometimes the latter bothers me more, precisely because, as someone invested in a progressive worldview and the positions necessary to sustain and propagate it, I find it especially important to get one’s facts and analysis straight.

But sadly, an awful lot of progressive folks fail at this basic task, resorting to arguments that are utterly unhelpful and even damaging to the causes they support.

So, for instance, whenever the subjects of homelessness and violence or mental illness and violence come up — often raised by someone whose politics are hostile to both the unhoused and the mentally ill — advocates for those groups respond predictably with the same mantra, almost instantaneously.

You know what it is.

Those who live on the street or who experience mental and emotional illness are, wait for it, “more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of violent crime.”

And they repeat this, every single time, usually before saying anything else, as if it were some argumentative trump card.

But actually, it’s a meaningless statement, even though it’s true for both groups.

Why?

Simple: because the fact that a group of people might be more likely to be victimized than to victimize others doesn’t resolve the question of their propensity for violent offending or tell us if they are more or less likely than other people to commit a violent act.

Take men, for instance.

Men are far more likely than women to commit violent crime, so one could make the argument that we have a male violence problem in this country. This would be true.

And it would not be an effective rebuttal to this fact for someone to point out that men are more likely to be victims of violent crime than they are to be perps, even though this is accurate.

In 2024, for instance, there were a little over 3 million men who were victims of violent crime, but only 2.4 million male perpetrators of violent crime, according to the Justice Department.

So, if we’re trying to assuage fears about the unhoused or mentally ill or convince people to support more humane ways of dealing with the problems of homelessness or mental illness than prison or involuntary institutionalization, simply insisting that the individuals in question are more at risk than they are dangerous means nothing and cannot possibly reassure anyone inclined to look at both groups with disdain or trepidation.

There are ways to defend the homeless and mentally ill without resorting to weak and statistically meaningless arguments

If what we want to say is that homeless and/or mentally ill persons deserve to be treated with dignity and not presumed to be criminals, even though some portion of both groups commits violent crimes, then just say that.

If we want to push back against the rush to criminalize poverty and mental illness, pushing the former out of sight, out of mind, and the latter into abusive forms of confinement, then do that.

If we insist that the solution to violence (whether by homeless people, mentally ill people, or anyone else) is to address the structural conditions that we know give rise to criminal offending, like dilapidated housing and public infrastructure, concentrated poverty, and rampant inequality, cool, talk about that and provide the evidence to demonstrate how addressing those things would work best.

But if our go-to argument is some statistically meaningless data about the mentally ill or homeless being victimized more than victimizers, we sound ridiculous.

Especially because, at least in the case of the homeless who are more likely to be victimized than victimizers, guess who is most likely to victimize them while on the street? Other homeless people.

So, to protect homeless folks from the criminal violence they experience, more than they commit, one would need to take seriously the violence being done to them, mostly by other people who are also unhoused, but we’re not supposed to do that because, repeat after me: “Homeless people are more likely to be victims than victimizers.”

See how this cycle isn’t helping?

Same with the issue of mental illness.

If one has actually experienced violence or aggression at the hands of a mentally ill person, it’s pretty shitty to hear someone say that the odds of that having happened to them — after it’s already happened — were weaker than the odds of their attacker having had that done to them by someone else. After all, victims of violence are not likely to care much about abstract statistics after being assaulted. Nor should we expect them to.

We also shouldn’t lie: there are meaningful correlations between violence and both homelessness and mental illness

As much as some would rather not admit it, the idea that mental illness and homelessness are not associated at all with a greater likelihood of criminal offending, including violence, is simply not accurate. Although most forms of mental illness are not correlated with violence, others, like schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder, especially if untreated or in combination with substance abuse, are.

Likewise, homeless folks are not likely to be violent because they are homeless, but if they have a substance abuse problem or untreated mental illness, the likelihood becomes far greater.

And for the unhoused, drug and alcohol use and abuse are widespread. This is said not as judgment, but simply as a statement of fact.

It is estimated that whereas about 10 percent of the general population has an alcohol or drug use disorder, between 26 and 38 percent of those who are homeless do. Still the minority, yes, and that’s important to point out, but also not an insignificant percentage that can be waved away or ignored.

So, although the trigger for violence among homeless persons may be their use of drugs or alcohol rather than their housing situation, it isn’t honest to say that homeless persons aren’t at an elevated risk for violent behavior.

If one thing (homelessness) correlates with another thing (substance abuse) and possibly a third thing (untreated mental illness), and if things 2 and 3 are highly correlated with a fourth thing (violence), then the first thing is correlated with it too. And to deny that is disingenuous.

For profound mental illness, the research is equally clear.

A meta-analysis from 2021, which examined two dozen studies over a forty-year timespan, involving more than 50,000 people with schizophrenia in over a dozen nations, found:

• Persons with schizophrenia were more likely to commit a violent act against another person than someone in the general population.
• Men with schizophrenia were more likely to commit a violent act than similar women, although both were at elevated risk relative to the general population: about one in four for men and one in 20 for women. And finally,
• Persons with schizophrenia are more likely than others to commit homicide or sex crimes, especially younger men with schizophrenia who also have substance use disorders.

Truth doesn’t have to stigmatize: in fact, being honest can spur action and advocacy

Again, none of this should serve to justify hostility to persons with schizophrenia or any mental illness. First, because such disorders are not the fault of the person who has them, any more so than would be the case for breast cancer, a brain tumor, or some rare and debilitating congenital heart condition. And second, because stigmatizing the mentally ill will only push them further from obtaining treatment, thereby perpetuating the very cycle that proper medication might prevent.

So too with the homeless population.

Not only should the correlation between homelessness and violence — however mediated by substance abuse — not be used to mistreat the unhoused; if anything, it should spur us to redouble our efforts for better drug and alcohol treatment, including mandatory programs for habitual users, and new zoning laws to allow construction of more affordable housing for those capable of living on their own with a bit of help.

But to stick our heads in the sand and act as if the homeless or mentally ill populations are basically no different from anyone else except in material terms, or in terms of relatively benign emotional disregulation, is absurd.

As is the belief that maximizing the autonomy of addicts and simplistic harm reduction strategies will suffice to deal with long-term addiction problems among the homeless, the first victims of whom are usually other homeless people whose autonomy is sacrificed by prioritizing the rights of their victimizers to use without concern for those around them who don’t.

The calls to tear down homeless encampments, push the unhoused further out of sight, lock them up, or, as one FOX News host recently put it, perhaps give them lethal injections, are obviously motivated by horrifically sadistic cruelty. And the way we have stigmatized mental illness is morally criminal.

That said, pretending that the only thing the homeless need is homes, and the only thing the mentally ill need is understanding, is naive. Large numbers of both need proper medication, layers of well-funded social services, and drug and alcohol treatment, whether or not they want it.

Obviously, the right has no intention of providing the funds to undertake any of that, which leaves it to those of us on the left to advocate for it and then spend the money on those efforts when we have the power to do so.

But if we refuse to acknowledge fundamental realities about the connection between addiction, homelessness, mental illness, and violence, for fear it casts aspersions upon vulnerable populations, we won’t get those populations what they need.

And they’ll continue to suffer.

Which means we won’t even be doing harm reduction. We’ll just be performing empathy, and not very effectively.