On October 24th in the cafeteria of Marysville Pilchuck High School in Marysville, Washington, 15-year-old freshman Jaylen Fryberg shot four people before turning the gun on himself.

This incident took two lives and left the other two severely injured. Another layer of complexity came to the incident when authorities discovered shortly after the shooting that the two survivors were the shooter’s cousins.

According to CNN and stoptheshootings.com, there have been 387 school shootings in the last 22 years, including 74 within the last 18 months. In these incidents, 65% of the victims were under the age of nineteen, and 69% of the shooters were between the ages of ten and nineteen. Additionally, 29% were over nineteen and, surprisingly, 2 % were under the age of nine.
Another notable shooting took place on September 21, 2011 in Socastee, South Carolina when Christian Helms, the 14-year-old who had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and who took anti-depressants, shot and wounded Socastee High School’s school resource officer. The incident left many in dispute over what might have pushed him to do what he did.

Helms was not alone in his issues or the violence with which he responded. According to the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), thirty-four other school shooters in the US had also been on some type of medication for mental illness. The staggering statistics of total shooting incidents and the issues that caused them reveal that there are many factors that cause violent incidents. While bullying is often seen as the cause for such violence, it is not the only issue that causes such acts. In fact, the popularity, or lack thereof of a young person is not necessarily an indicator of his or her feelings toward school or classmates.

According to the New York Post, students at Jonathan Law High School in Milford, Connecticut described Chris Plaskon, the teen charged in the stabbing death of 16-year-old Maren Sanchez in 2014, as a “class clown” and someone who was even looked up to by most of his peers. “He seemed like a nice guy. He’s the class clown,” Sanchez’s classmate Imani Langson told the New York Post. However, later reports say that Plaskon was exhibiting signs of psychosis and was taking medication for depression.

Although profiling school shooters is not the most accurate or simple solution to preventing violent outbreaks in schools, there are a number of warning signs for potential violence in schools or among youth that can be identified. According to Stephanie Verlinden in “Risk Factors in School Shootings,” chronic feelings of isolation or rejection, frequent angry outbursts, social withdrawal or depression, fascination with or possession of weapons, alcohol or drug dependency, history of bullying behavior, and lack of interest in school or poor school performance are often portents leading to these events.
Plaskon, Fryberg, and Helms are just a few of the many who showed signs of mental health issues and didn’t get help. According to the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), only 20% of mentally ill children received any form of mental health services in 2010. These numbers are extremely low considering the effectiveness of treatment. “The best treatments for serious mental illnesses today are highly effective; between 70 and 90 percent of individuals have significant reduction of symptoms.”