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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0209

The Making of a School Attacker: Known and Uncovered Motives

THE MAKING OF A SCHOOL SHOOTER: MOTIVES KNOWN AND UNMASKED

Most of the perpetrators of mass shootings examined in the United States were found to have undiagnosed and untreated schizophrenia, and none of the perpetrators diagnosed with schizophrenia had been taking antipsychotic medication before the offense.

The aim was to investigate whether perpetrators of mass killings and terrorists had psychiatric disorders and, if so, whether they had received psychiatric treatment; the poster was presented under the title 'Yurt içi toplu saldırganlar ve teröristler: tedavi edilmemiş psikiyatrik hastalıkla ilişki' (Domestic Mass Attackers and Terrorists: An Association with Untreated Psychiatric Illness), which differed from the title listed in the congress system. Using a database of 115 mass shootings between 1982 and 2019, the study retrospectively examined 55 perpetrators. After a psychiatric assessment questionnaire was developed, diagnoses and medication use were established through interviews with forensic psychiatrists who had assessed the perpetrators and reviews of psychiatric evaluations conducted for the courts during legal proceedings. All 35 cases in which the perpetrator survived were included, and 20 of the remaining 80 cases in which the perpetrator died were randomly selected. In 3 of the 35 surviving perpetrators, there was insufficient information to establish a diagnosis; among the remaining 32, 87.5% had a psychiatric diagnosis, with schizophrenia identified in 18 (56%) and other psychiatric diagnoses in 10 (31%), while 4 received no psychiatric diagnosis. Other diagnoses included 4 cases of bipolar I disorder, 2 of delusional disorder, persecutory type, and 2 of personality disorders; the remainder of this list is cut off in the poster image. Among the 20 perpetrators who died at the scene, schizophrenia was identified in 8 and other psychiatric disorders in 7, while information was insufficient to establish a diagnosis in 5 cases. None of the perpetrators diagnosed with schizophrenia had been taking antipsychotic medication before the offense: all 18 survivors and all 8 who died at the scene were unmedicated. The discussion emphasizes that the vast majority of people with schizophrenia, when receiving appropriate antipsychotic treatment, are no more prone to violence and do not commit violent crimes more frequently than the rest of the population. In contrast, most perpetrators in this study were reported to have undiagnosed and untreated schizophrenia. Note: Table 1 in the poster lists 14 cases of other psychiatric disorders and 3 cases without a diagnosis among the 35 surviving perpetrators; these figures do not fully align with the distribution shown in the chart of 32 cases, which excludes those with insufficient information.

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