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Charlie Pickering says we need to stop blaming mental illness for violent behaviour.

“With this stigma, is it any wonder that one in four Australians believe that people with depression are a danger to others?”

Following the tragic shooting of American reporter Alison Parker and camera operator Adam Ward live on air last week, speculation has been rife over what could have been going on inside the shooter’s head.

He was:

Sick.

Mental.

Disturbed.

Deranged.

Mad.

Crazy.

Psycho.

Depressed?

Last night on The Weekly, Charlie Pickering addressed some of the rhetoric that it too often dispensed to describe the perpetrators of random acts of violence.

Last night, Charlie Pickering tackled the stigma around mental illness.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve seen commentators immediately try to explain a tragedy they don’t understand by playing ‘Guess the Mental Illness’,” Pickering said.

“If you watch some news coverage you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s a straight line between depression and violence but there isn’t.

“In fact the closest most depressed people get to violence is murdering a four litre tub of death by chocolate ice cream in one sitting.”

Pickering also pointed to a worrying statistic, which says that one in four Australians believe that people with depression are a danger to others.

Given that 350 million globally suffer from depression, this is blatantly absurd.

“The world is threatening enough without inventing things to be scared of,” Pickering said.

“If depression turns people into killers, we’d all be dead.”

Watch the full segment below: