An eleven page chapter from my upcoming book Psychiatric Tales, which will be out from Blank Slate in early 2010. Feel free to point out any errors or make any other comments.
This is really good for raising people's awareness. Now if you could just get it distributed to the people who have the most misconceptions about mental illness. Your comic should be given away in doctors' offices!
As mentioned there, it is true that people who are incarcerated do have a higher rate of mental illness than randomly chosen people from the entire population. Nevertheless, at least according to that report, when the question is looked at from the point of view of a randomly chosen person's likelihood of committing a crime, mental illness is found not to be a statistically significant predictor of criminal behavior.
Excellent comic!
Here's a web page supporting your point of view about the non-association of crime with mental illness: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2009/05/22/no-significant-relationship-between-violence-crime-and-mental-illness/
As mentioned there, it is true that people who are incarcerated do have a higher rate of mental illness than randomly chosen people from the entire population. Nevertheless, at least according to that report, when the question is looked at from the point of view of a randomly chosen person's likelihood of committing a crime, mental illness is found not to be a statistically significant predictor of criminal behavior.