As gun and political violence continue to erupt in schools, workplaces, and public places we all visit every day, many Americans are living on edge. For children and teens, whose mental health is already in crisis, the constant drumbeat of violent headlines and persistent threat continues to erode the sense of well-being, safety, and efficacy known to be essential for healthy development. Schools used to signal safety, and are now common sites of violence: Between Aug. 27, 2025, and Sept. 12, 2025, there were 63 reported and verified incidents of gun-related violence at U.S. schools, according to the Gun Violence Archiveopens in new window.
Unfortunately, the stage is set for such tragedies to continue and anxiety to worsen. Previous research suggests that the incidence of mass shootings in the United States is correlated with increases in gun sales (Newsome, K., et al., Journal of Surgical Research, Vol. 280, 2022opens in new window). On top of recent surges in depression, anxiety, and suicides, teens have reported that they worry about a shooting happening at their school (Pew Research Center, 2018opens in new window). Those concerns have been linked with elevated anxiety levels and fear among students (O’Brien, C., & Taku, K., Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 186, 2022opens in new window).
Meanwhile, clinical psychologists, including Erika Felix, PhD, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, say some young people they treat are on high alert, regularly planning their escape route if violence breaks out in public.
“These tragedies are happening far too often, and the result is that many young people are feeling this constant back-of-the-mind stress,” Felix said. While most students will not actually experience this type of violence, Felix emphasized, the perception that they might is pervasive given social media and extensive news media coverage.
That stress is, of course, embedded within the context of economic challenges, political polarization, climate-related disasters, and other factors, which combine to create what psychologist Roxane Cohen Silver, PhD, of the University of California, Irvine, has called a “cascade of collective traumas” that the nation is facing.
“We’re not starting at a place where everybody is healthy and thriving,” said Rinad Beidas, PhD, a professor of psychiatry, medical ethics and health policy, and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “Our reserves are depleted as a nation, and our young people are suffering.”
Fear of mass shootings has left a large majority of Americans feeling stressed, including a third of adults who say they now avoid certain places and events as a result (Stress in America: Fear of mass shootings, APA, 2019). Experts say the frequency of mass shootings, amplified by our near-constant access to media coverage of such events, amounts to an accumulation of exposure that is harming everyone’s mental health.
[Related: APA resources for coping with mass shootings]
“The more catastrophic events we’re exposed to as a nation, the more impacted we’re going to be on a psychological level,” said Jonathan S. Comer, PhD, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Florida International University.
While some people report panic and distress, others feel numb. Psychological reactions to a crisis vary from one person to the next, based on factors such as age, trauma history, and proximity to an incident. But research has started to reveal who is most likely to be affected, what the long-term mental health problems will be, and what role media exposure plays. Psychology offers guidance about how to channel concern into action amid these atrocities.
A cycle of distress
Mass shootings account for about 1% of annual firearm deaths in the United States, but they occupy an outsize space in the public consciousness.
“These events are still relatively rare, but it doesn’t feel that way,” said school psychologist Franci Crepeau-Hobson, PhD, an associate professor and director of clinical training at the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Education and Human Development.
For survivors and witnesses of mass shootings, suffering tends to be particularly severe. Studies have documented increases in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depression, anxiety disorders, substance use disorder, and other conditions among people who have survived a mass shooting.
“A common theme is that more exposure tends to be associated with more severe symptoms,” said clinical psychologist Sarah Lowe, PhD, an assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at Yale School of Public Health, who led a 2015 literature review on the mental health consequences of mass shootings (Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2015opens in new window).
But the research is still very limited. In Lowe’s review, PTSD prevalence ranged from 3% to 91%, depending on the study, and methodological questions remain, such as what even constitutes a mass shooting.
Though relatively few people will witness or survive mass shootings, many more will experience them through news reports and social media.
“There’s a great deal of evidence that individuals who are far away from mass shootings can face anxiety and impairments, and this is often correlated with the amount of media exposure they have,” Comer said.
Such findings are highly concerning given how intertwined people’s lives are with media, researchers say. Silver and her colleagues have studied that link for more than 20 years, showing how high levels of exposure to media coverage of 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombings predicted symptoms of acute stress and posttraumatic stress (Psychological Science, Vol. 24, No. 9, 2013opens in new window; PNAS, Vol. 111, No. 1, 2014opens in new window).
Over time, media exposure to mass violence can even fuel a cycle of distress, where persistent worry about future violence predicts more media consumption and more stress, the researchers found (Thompson, R. R., et al., Science Advances, Vol. 5, No. 4, 2019opens in new window). That constant worry, known as “perseverative cognition,” has been linked to declines in physical health, including cardiovascular problems (Ottaviani, C., et al., Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 142, No. 3, 2016opens in new window; JAMA Psychiatry, Vol. 65, No. 1, 2008opens in new window).
In addition to the risks of media exposure, people with a history of trauma are more likely to experience posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms following a new exposure, such as a terrorist attack or mass shooting (Garfin, D. R., et al., Psychological Science, Vol. 26, No. 6, 2015opens in new window). Physical proximity to an incident also carries a higher risk of mental health problems. One study of 44 school shootings found that antidepressant use increased more than 20% among young people who lived within 5 miles of a shooting, versus those who lived 10 to 15 miles away (Rossin-Slater, M., et al., PNAS, Vol. 117, No. 38, 2020opens in new window).
Psychological proximity—the degree to which we relate to another person or an event—also increases the risk for PTS symptoms (Thoresen, S., et al., European Journal of Psychotraumatology, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2012opens in new window).
“Oftentimes, the more one identifies with the victims, the more difficulty they have in the aftermath of an event like this,” Comer said.
Going numb
While some people worry regularly about mass shootings, many are fatigued by the seemingly endless cycle of violence that moves rapidly through the media and public discourse.
“There’s not one single way people are experiencing these tragedies, and there’s no one-size-fits-all response,” Silver said. “One person might be very impacted by an event, and another may not be concerned about it at all.”
Research by cognitive psychologists helps explains how we perceive mass violence and why it can leave some people feeling numb. Paul Slovic, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, and his colleagues have shown that in many cases, the more people who die in an incident of mass violence, the less we care. They call this phenomenon the “deadly arithmetic of compassionopens in new window.”
Their research shows that people’s intuitive feelings of concern for victims of violence don’t respond well to statistics and don’t scale up. In other words, the horror people felt when 19 children and two adults were shot and killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, isn’t 21 times greater than what people feel when one child is murdered. Slovic and other psychologists call this dampening of the emotional response “psychic numbing.”
At the same time, people often have a false sense of inefficacy in the face of very large problems, which can lead to inaction and disengagement. In one study, participants who saw statistics about the magnitude of the hunger crisis in Africa donated about half as much money as those who saw a photo of a single child in need (PLoS ONE, Vol. 9, No. 6, 2014opens in new window).
“If we believe there’s a problem that we can’t do anything about, it makes sense that we don’t attend to it, because it’s very distressing to dwell on things you can’t fix,” Slovic said.
Finally, research on what’s known as the “prominence effect” shows how people often struggle to make decisions when they require weighing complex tradeoffs (University of Illinois Law Review Slip Opinionsopens in new window, 2015). In the case of gun legislation, this helps explain why the complex calculus of lives saved versus freedoms sacrificed has largely resulted in inaction at the policy level.
And on top of this deadly arithmetic, our attention is a scarce resource. Time passes, memories fade, and we’re inclined to shift our attention elsewhere if we don’t see progress. National surveys have shown that support for gun legislation spikes in the immediate aftermath of a mass shootingopens in new window but fades within a few weeks (Jose, R., et al., Psychology of Violence, Vol. 11, No. 4, 2021opens in new window; Filindra, A., et al., Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 5, 2020opens in new window).
“Our mind deceives us into underreacting to the most important problems in the world, including mass violence,” Slovic said. “But when one of these events occurs, we do have a window of opportunity when people are awake, emotionally engaged, and motivated for action.”
Youth on high alert
The stress of mass shootings may weigh particularly heavily on children and teens, whose mental health is already in turmoil. In 2021, three leading pediatric organizations declared a national emergencyopens in new window, while the U.S. Surgeon General issued a special advisory on youth mental healthopens in new window, citing a 57% increase in suicides between 2007 and 2018 (Curtin, S. C., National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 69, No. 11, 2020opens in new window).
Research shows that at least some of that distress can be attributed to mass violence. One study of more than 2,000 teens found that greater concern about school shootings and violence predicted increases in anxiety and panic six months later (Riehm, K. E., et al., JAMA Network Open, Vol. 4, No. 11, 2021opens in new window).
“When I talk to kids about this, I am shocked by how inured and accepting they are,” said Don Grant, PhD, the executive director of outpatient services for Newport Academy in Santa Monica, California. “They don’t know a world where there’s not an active shooter drill at school.”
In the educational context, that constant vigilance can be particularly problematic, and research on threat perception suggests that prolonged heightened anxiety may interfere with learning, said Crepeau-Hobson. Students who are constantly worried about a toxic stressor, such as gun violence, devote more mental resources to emotions and fewer to executive functions, including learning, memory, and sustaining attention (Dettmer, A. M., & Hughes, T. L., Education Weekopens in new window, 2022).
“When threat perceptions are escalated and stress responses are activated, we can’t access the higher parts of our brain,” Crepeau-Hobson said.
Data suggest those effects could be far-reaching. A 2020 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that school shootings increased absenteeism, reduced high school and college graduation rates, and decreased retention of teachers. Those effects persisted into the mid-20s of young adults who attended schools where a shooting occurred; they had lower employment rates and earnings than their peers (Cabral, M., et al., NBER Working Paper 28311opens in new window, 2022).
“It’s not just that individual young people experience these really deleterious effects, but there is also a societal effect,” Beidas said.
Because mass shootings impact children and teens at the individual, institutional, and societal levels, experts say a tiered approach is needed to minimize harm.
In the family context, it’s important to initiate conversations with children and teens after an incident, even if they aren’t part of the affected community, said Comer.
“When kids hear about these events from their parents, they tend to do better than when they hear about it from their friends or the media first,” he said.
If a child or teen becomes hypervigilant or starts to avoid certain places or activities, that may indicate a need for professional support, said Grant.
Educators and policymakers also need empirical data on what makes schools safe—both physically and psychologically, said Crepeau-Hobson.
School districts across the nation are spending billions of dollarsopens in new window to enhance security, installing emergency alert systems and hiring additional personnel. But many of the new approaches lack evidence and could even cause harm. For example, a law enforcement presence may make some students feel safer but may undermine a sense of safety in others, such as students of color. Early studies of active shooter drills—which are now nearly ubiquitous—suggest they may increase anxiety, stress, and depression symptoms in children and adolescents (“The Impact of Active Shooter Drills in Schoolsopens in new window,” Everytown Research and Policy, 2020).
Communities also need to be prepared to support children in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting. Comer is the founder of the Network for Enhancing Wellness and Disaster-Affected Youth (new day), which delivers large-scale professional training on disaster mental health across the country. new day teaches Psychological First Aid and other skills to teachers, coaches, nurses, and others who work with children and teens.
Sustaining engagement
More research is also needed on how mental health services can best support survivors, families, and affected communities in the aftermath of a mass shooting, experts say. Richer firearm-injury and mortality datasets can also help researchers better understand the conditions surrounding these crises.
But many feel change is urgently needed, and that partnering with the firearm community—to promote more secure storage of firearms, for example—is one way to start reducing firearm injuries and deaths right away, Beidas said.
More than 7 million Americans bought firearms for the first time between January 2019 and April 2021, mostly for self-protection (Miller, M., et al., Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 175, No. 2, 2022opens in new window). That suggests many people need education on secure storage (see Navigating firearm safety discussions in clinical settings, July/August 2025 Monitor), and that the recommended method of storing a gun unloaded and locked, with ammunition locked separately, might not be acceptable to all firearm owners.
“We need to establish a shared mission with the firearm community,” Beidas said, “and keep in mind that a harm reduction approach is the most effective way to change behavior.”
At the policy level, a majority of Americans support stricter gun laws, but progress in that domain may be incremental (Jose, R., et al., Psychology of Violence, Vol. 11, No. 4, 2021opens in new window). Slovic said it’s important to stay engaged and not to let a false sense of inefficacy prevent us from taking steps in the right direction.
“Just because we can’t fix a problem in its entirety doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do what we can do to make a difference,” he said. “We cannot afford to let our minds deceive us into underreacting.”
