Mental Health Information

That would be interesting, but I have no reason to believe that.

Studies show about 5-8 percent of the -seriously- mentally ill are involved in -ANY- act of violence.

Not all 18 million people you refer to are mentally ill. So you can't do the arithmetic the way you did.

At minimum You've got to reference the people put into the database as a percentage of the mentally ill (and that should probably not include the total for -any and all types- of mental illness.

Nonetheless if you run the averages for the US as a whole against the population of the State of NY, the result is the 34500 represents 11 percent of an estimate for -all- mental illnesses.

That's double the low end estimate and greater than the high end estimate for violence in just persons with serious mental illnesses. Which explains why Tsemberis feels that the 34500 number is too big.