Story highlights Psychiatrists: Ex-wife called Omar Mateen "bipolar" -- but throwing term around erroneously is dangerous

Bipolar disorder not characterized by such violence; mislabeling adds to stigma of vulnerable group, they say

Maryam Hosseini is a psychiatrist at Emory University Student Health Services and assistant professor in the Emory Department of Psychiatry. Christina Girgis is a psychiatrist at Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Loyola University Medical Center. Faiza Khan-Pastula is the former director of psychiatry at St. Joseph's Hospital in Bethpage, New York, and is now in private practice in New York. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors.

That's how the ex-wife of Omar Mateen described the Florida man who shot to death 49 people early Sunday in a gay nightclub in Orlando. Sitora Yusifiy spoke of her ex-husband's history of domestic violence and abuse. By now you have probably seen or heard some variation of this quote in news reports about the massacre.

Lately, the term mental illness has come up a lot when we talk about mass shootings. For many, words such as "bipolar" have become almost synonymous with violent and unpredictable. It's human to look for reasons, to find any cause that could explain senseless or atrocious acts. But blaming "mental illness" is a dangerous precedent that moves the conversation in the wrong direction.

The fact is, we cannot know yet why Mateen took his disastrous course; the reasons are likely complex, and we are in no position to hazard a guess, much less diagnose from afar.

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As psychiatrists, it scares us whenever we read the words bipolar in relation to mass shootings. It increases the stigma against an already vulnerable population without addressing any attributable cause.