In Reply
Abstract
Dr. Torney bases his recommendations, first, on a review ofrecent studies providing data on the possible links between mental illness and violence and, second, on some very selective media accounts. Use of the latter is entirely inexcusable because they are not systematically chosen and are unrepresentative. I deplore especially the inclusion of his own feeble inquiry into cases purportedly involving mental illness and violence reported in the Washington Post during 1992. His extrapolation to the entire population of the United States is ludicrous in the extreme. Monahan (2) has written one of the most compelling recent summany papers on the topic of mental illness and violence. He concludes that, contrary to his earlier opinion that mental illness does not correlate with violence (3), it is in fact now possible to demonstrate statistically significant correlations between the two. Torney quotes from that paper as follows: âThe data that have recently become available, fiuirly read, suggest the one conclusion I did not want to reach there appears to be. . .in the present. He covered in elementany statistics classes and one that perhaps requires even greaten emphasis, that the mere existence of a statistically significant relationship between two entities like