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CBS used the tragedy in Tucson as the news hook for a confused and imprecise In Focus feature on treatment of mental illness in the national healthcare system. UnFocused is more like it. This is the statistic anchor Katie Couric used to describe the scope of the problem: "For every 100 American adults, 20 have some form of mental illness; five have disorders classified as severe. They rarely pose a danger but those odds increase without proper treatment." Watch how severe mental illness becomes conflated with schizophrenia and then how schizophrenia becomes conflated with violent psychosis and then how coerced mental healthcare becomes, not treatment, but a violent-crime-prevention technique.
This is not how mental illness is usually covered on the nightly newscasts. Search the Tyndall Report database over the past four years and you will find almost 300 stories with a MentalHealth tag. They fall broadly into two types: coverage of specific diseases and disorders and their treatments; and extraneous news events--like the shooting in Tucson--where psychiatric illness turns out to be a major angle of the coverage.
As a newsworthy mental illness per se schizophrenia, let alone its violent manifestations, has been literally non-existent on the news agenda over the past four years. Top of the list is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (54 reports), followed by the autistic spectrum (52), then dementia (Alzheimer's Disease--40), then major psychological depression (2) and problems with its medication (10). There has been a smattering of addictions (7) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity (5). Of all the severe mental illnesses, the one that may well be afflicting Jared Loughner never warrants attention.
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