Mentally ill unfairly portrayed as violent

[In] recent weeks, the news has been full of horrendous stories involving killers with known or suspected mental illness. As I write this, the nation is still reeling from the shootings at Northern Illinois University. Press reports now indicate that the shooter had a long history of mental illness and had recently stopped taking antidepressant medication.
To make matters worse, three psychotherapists have been assaulted or murdered in the past month. The most brutal attack involved a Manhattan psychologist murdered by a man who also gravely injured a psychiatrist. The New York Times reported that the accused man blamed the psychiatrist for having him institutionalized 17 years ago; apparently, the psychologist was not the intended victim. And only a few weeks ago, a social worker in Andover was killed, allegedly by her 19- year-old patient, during a visit to the man's home.
What do these attacks say about mental illness? Surely they create the impression that individuals with mental illness are a dangerous and violent lot. And as professor John Monahan and colleagues at the University of Virginia School of Law wrote recently, "the more a member of the general public believes that mental disorder and violence are associated, the less he or she wants to have an individual with a mental disorder as a neighbor, friend, colleague, or family member."
Yet the impression that we are awash in a sea of psychotic violence is clearly unfounded. Writing in the Nov. 16, 2006, New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Richard A. Friedman of the Weill Cornell Medical College notes that only about 3 to 5 percent of violence in the general population is attributable to those with "serious mental illness," conventionally defined as schizophrenia, major depression, or bipolar disorder. The combined lifetime prevalence of these conditions in the US general population is estimated at 19 percent - far larger than their contribution to violence.