It is true that”mental illness”,as coded in the DSM is not the chief factor in American gun violence..that factor is clearly the vast number of guns throughout society. This is so obvious that it requires mental gyrations on the part of gun groups to twist the 2nd amendment into some sort of sanctification of gun ownership,much to the delight of the merchants of death,known as gun manufacturers and their pr branch the nra to deny
Another major factor in the gun problem is an identity as a young, white male...this is the dangerous sub specie of American citizenry..who is targeted by Trump and company in order to harvest their hate soaked votes. So combine young men,alienated from society by either personal or economic circumstance,expose them to a cornucopia of murderous weaponry and address them with invective and harmful rhetoric and you have the current state of affairs.
It’s not mental health ..it’s political societal failures that underlie our murderous state
16
Let me recommend the book of a fellow psychiatrist of yours, James Fallon, who wrote: "The Psychopath Inside. A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain." I recall (I hope accurately) that Fallon observed that in times of great stress, a population (whether a clan, tribe or nation) selects for a psychopath as a leader. Such populations need a strong leader, a strong advocate.
A psychopath leader generally presents as a sane individual, but has three salient characteristics: 1) unapologetic self-confidence bordering on narcissism; 2) strong, domineering, interpersonal skills; and 3) a willingness to castigate, dehumanize, incarcerate and murder a designated common enemy, even including children, based on race, religion or ethnicity.
In other words, in times of stress, populations tend to be led by “mentally ill monsters.”
We live in a time of great stress.
30
Hate, like love, is an opinion. So is political affiliation, vegetarianism or religious preference.
It is simplistic in the extreme to imply that powerful positive feelings are inherently good and powerful negative feelings inherently bad. Some people love cigarettes, others hate pollution.
People are throwing around meaningless terms (“mentally ill!”) as if possessing what others consider an abhorrent belief supports a legitimate diagnosis of some type of mental illness and isn’t that just the on-ramp to a freakish Orwellian dystopia? Re-education for all! I wouldn’t like a white nationalist and I’m sure he won’t find common ground with my liberal pro-Jewishness. Can’t we just avoid each other and behave?
Obviously, these shooters are cowards and their sneak attacks are possible because we allow them to obtain high-velocity, high-capacity weapons. While these “mass” shootings garner international attention, we’ve had two 8-person, three 7-person and two 6-person shootings in Chicago in 2019 and a total of 1660 shot leaving 280 dead. I’d bet few of the shooters used lawfully obtained, legally registered guns. Even if we banned gun sales today (and that’s not happening), we’ve got 300 million guns in America. If you’ve ever been the victim of interpersonal violence (I have) and you have a gun (I do), I can’t expect you to turn in your weapon (I won’t) until every last other gun is in custody. Hence the stalemate. Maybe we’d have better luck controlling bullets.
3
The El Paso killer was under a delusion: he believed without justification that the people he killed were somehow a threat to him or to his "culture." To me, that means he was not mentally healthy -- i.e. he was mentally ill. Being able to write a "rational" manifesto doesn't mean that you're sane, just as being able to solve a mathematical problem, or speak in coherent sentences, or paint a portrait, doesn't mean that you are therefore sane.
There are forms of mental illness that aren't yet included in the DSM. That doesn't mean they don't exist.
5
From time to time, a wave of toxic anger floods a nation,
whether against Jews, Catholics, Germans, Irish, people of different races, political beliefs. Perhaps it is an everlasting, never-ending part of being who we are. However, political (or religious) anger mongering, on public display -- and more so with the Internet's ubiquity -- exacerbates emotions and beliefs. Consider the armed fellow who drove many miles hoping to save children he was sure were being held captive
in the basement of a (basementless) pizza establishment.
Fortunately, he killed no one. Prompted by propaganda, the El Paso murderer drove hundreds of miles to attack his victims, holding and perhaps intensifying his anger mile after mile -- until anger found "relief" in slaughter. With the billions of human beings available, only the most naive or foolish would believe those with murderous "mental illness" can be found and deterred.
Doug Giebel, Big Sandy, Montana
3
Friedman doesn't answer the obvious question--What is it about these mass murders that causes them to have so much hate. Psychologically, what produces the hatred?
2
@Teresa: Mass shooters often attack people having fun or sharing some other bonding experience. This suggests jealousy is a factor, a sense of not having something one is entitled to.
7
The only solution is to remove the weapons.
There was an attack at a school on Dec 14, 2012. A disturbed man went to a place of learning with a weapon. You think you know the story, right? Newtown, 20 dead first graders, along with several teachers, right?
I bet you've never heard this story, actually.
The school was in China. The man had a knife, and not a gun.
And no one died.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/world/asia/man-stabs-22-children-in-china.html
8
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/opinion/caravan-hate-speech-bowers-sayoc.html
“...a psychologist at Princeton, and colleagues have shown that distrust of an out-group is linked to anger and impulses toward violence. This is particularly true when a society faces economic hardship and people are led to see outsiders as competitors for their jobs...
“...a psychologist at Harvard and a co-author of that study, told me that “when a group is put on the defensive and made to feel threatened, they begin to believe that anything, including violence, is justified...
“...Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who in the early 1960s studied the willingness of a group of men to obey an authority figure...
Far more terrorists are low-paid gig workers than lone wolves...
As often as not, a lone wolf is a recently-fired low-paid gig worker...
Game, set, and match – to Yale...
PS
Any psychologists at U Penn with whom you collaborate – presumably, don’t want to be directly quoted or attributed...
Any psychologists at Columbia with whom you collaborate – presumably, their quotes are unprintable...
Dartmouth and Brown don’t need to be cited – they’re practically in Canada...
PPS
By you or me – presume you meant those with an ivy affiliation...
You, anyway...
2
The lack of knowledge of the most basic geography and history by killers and those who excuse them is striking. One cannot "come up" to Florida from points south by land, and Texas has always been Hispanic, being part of Spain and then Mexico historically. It's Anglo whites, and blacks, who have moved there more recently.
4
A white supremacist in Charlottesville used a vehicle and killed one person. A white supremacist in El Paso used a military style weapon and killed 22.
Who cares about precise labels for what may or may not have been going on in their heads?
RID OUR COUNTRY OF MILITARY STYLE HIGH ROUND ASSAULT WEAPONS!
10
But they do have mental illnesses. They are delusional. The specific delusions they have are grandiosity and persecution. They believe they have special entitlements that other people don't - like they are entitled to an all white country in which men like them rule. And they believe they are being persecuted by minorities, women, etc. when in fact the people they fear have very little power in this country. These are delusions!
Further, when they participate in groups that share these delusions, they are suffering from folie a culte, which should be treated as a disease that affects collectives. The GOP is a massive cult.
9
More guns = more murders and suicides. Look at the statistics from other countries and that's obvious. Wake up America and get rid of your guns. This gun addiction is a sickness.
5
There will never be common sense gun laws as long as the NRA has Congress by the short hairs. (full disclosure, I own 5 hand guns)
The NRA hides behind the 2nd Amendment so their puppet masters- the arms merchants can crank out War theater weapons and charge $1800 per unit.
It’s never been about right to bear arms it’s about th P/L of the munition industrial complex!
9
@Boris: If I were in Vlad Putin's shoes, I'd support the NRA bigtime.
2
Most mass killers, I have been led to believe, are psychopaths or sociopaths, people who are devoid of feelings for others, people who can't, so to speak, put themselves in the shoes of another.
As the Gospel song goes: Put your hand in the hand of the man who stills the waters, Put your hand in the hand of the man who calms the sea. Take a look at your self and you can see others differently ....
2
The singular trait that identifies all mass killers is that they are all Fox News devotees, from where they acquire their (dis) information about the world and country.
7
As Trevor Noah wisely pointed out: there's one thing all of these murderers had in common--easy access to guns.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/aug/07/trevor-noah-el-paso-dayton-shootings-daily-show-recap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AnFmfH4aNY
6
So what kind of psychobabble promotes the notion that those who are filled with hate are not insane? Are those who utter nonsense such as this not part of the problem?
1
This is not psychiatric. That's a dodge. A rabbit hole. A talking point.
This is political. We, in Mexico, live in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. And we pay a price for that every day in blood, in polluted psychology - stress, in never-ending fear. Our leader(s), made a policy choice. A political choice. To wage war on the cartels.
Only problem, that was an ill-informed, naive, poorly executed policy. Result: the cartels won.
It's also cultural. Mexico is a provincial country. The frontier. Wild West...bang...bang...bang! And the United states - with all of its money, and technology, and its hegemony over the Western hemisphere - is also a provincial country.
God...Guns...and Guts. But there is also the political dimension to mass-murder. The rule of law? (Gone) Racism? (Always there) Propaganda? (Trump rallies) Incitement to violence? Tacit support for violence? Votes?
The shooters make an existential choice to fulfill the romantic avenger's destiny. To what? Kill the black Antichrist? And, they also choose to die in the process. (It's a free country.)
Maybe a brown Antichrist (El Paso) would be good enough to kill in a pinch...
2
The mentally ill excuse doesn't wash. The manifestos that have been left make it clear. These mass murderers who have attacked Muslims, Jews, blacks, and now Hispanics are nationalists full of hate. They are part of an international movement to establish all white societies without any Jews. Those who are carrying out mass murders are following a strategy that is based on creating so much violence that societies will collapse and the white nationalists will be able to take over. Nationalist politicians like Trump are playing a role in stirring up hate against non-whites. This increases the number of people who see immigration as an invasion and a threat to whites that must be stopped and some of these people will be recruited into the violent white power movement.
3
It’s no different than suggesting Trump is mentally ill. He is not. He is a racist filled with hate who spreads his hatred.
5
First and foremost: Most of them are male!
10
Were Stalin and Hitler insane? What about all the people that committed mass murder for them? What about the genocide against the native Americans? The leaders that promote those murderous policies rarely get their hands bloody. Do Americans really believe that we are immune from having a leader that promotes mass murder. We are playing with fire by having someone like Trump as president, something could happen and things could get out of control like they have in other places.
8
Followers of Ideologies like White Supremacy should be seen as Psychotic. The delusion that White Skinned people are superior is insanity. We should not normalize these ideologies. Psychiatrists do us a great disservice by refusing to pathologize Racists and Bigots.
1
America has a mental disorder. Somehow we have collectively come to believe that killing Yemenis, Syrians, Afghans, Palestinians, Iraqis doesn't count against us. We literally don't count these deaths. If we're swimming in that kind of water, it's easy to get carried away.
6
Thank you.
Is hate classified as a mental illness?
1
Who has ever read Mein Kampf and studied Nazi tactics? It's generally not taught in colleges, it's all considered to be something of a forbidden black art.
But those who are seriously looking to practice social manipulation have found not only a trodden path but a gold mine. Here is a great working model for those who would be perpetrators. Most people, victims, have no perspective on these things. They’re overwhelmed in their gaping ignorance by the same old tricks that worked eighty years ago.
Sweeping that old Nazi thing under the rug made it invisible to all except those who would revive it's practices. The danger of Nazism was never goose-stepping or swastikas, it was our propensity to fall for the same mind and social control techniques that they developed and mastered.
Mass murderers merely need to see their actions as justified and necessary. The core technique is simply generating hate and victimhood and channeling this hatred and self-pity to the proper target.
5
Dr. Friedman, have you ever heard of personality disorders? Your simplistic analysis ("rational" versus "psychotic") is stunning.
This was an excellent article until it ended with “This should scare the hell out of all of us.”
The chance of any one of us being a victim of a mass shooting is so small relative to other risks to life and limb that being frightened about it is irrational.
By the way, our president is antisocial, has no empathy, has no conscience, hates democracy, loves dictators, excuses murders, hates moral people, refuses to learn or change his behavior, projects behavior, leans toward racism, accepts white supremacy, insults people who don't think like him, deliberately goes to cities that have had mass murders and behaves destructively, and so on and on. Is this normal behavior? People have a right to be scared of a person this distorted. Who knows what he could do. Like he says, he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and get away with it. Would he try? You think you know the answer, but do you?
3
Well, I think the history of Nazism provides plenty of support for the thesis that a psychotic state of mind is not necessary for mass killing.
2
This is the definition of a mental illness:
“What Is Mental Illness? Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. It is a medical problem, just like heart disease or diabetes. Mental illnesses are health conditions involving changes in emotion, thinking or behavior. Mental illnesses are associated with distress and/or problems functioning in social, work or family activities.” APA
These are the basic biological functioning capabilities encoded within the DNA of all living cells:
“Neuroscientist Candace Pert. 'That's what emotions are all about – Even bacteria have a hierarchy of primitive likes and dislikes. They're programmed to migrate toward or away from a chemotatic substance. They're little robots that go for sugar at all costs, and away from salt.”
This is what a psychiatrist said about Donald Trump:
“YouTube: Psychiatrist: Trump Mental Health Urgently Deteriorating. This is someone who routinely lies, who violates the rights of others, who violates norms and laws, this is the criminal personality – these are predators without a conscience, these are psychopaths. The most important component is sadism, or actually enjoying hurting others and deriving pleasure from seeing others suffer, and crushing them under your boot. Hitler forced millions to be exposed to chaos, and destruction.”
According to the scientific facts, IF “hatred” was not a “mental illness,” as in some “behavior” that IS a “change in thinking,” we would have ALL died quite a long time ago – oh man!
The Nazis recruited tens of thousands of ordinary Germans, Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, and Estonians to help them slaughter millions of people during WWII ... people who willingly shot, stabbed, beat, and abused people to death in huge numbers. It wasn’t only the SS who carried out these crimes against humanity. Were they all mentally ill? Probably not. What motivated them? Hatred and a leader who gave them impunity and freedom to express and act on it. The same thing happened in Rwanda. Hatred and encouragement to kill.
What’s different about our situation? Hate and an encouraging leader. Think about that.
6
Simple. For mass murderers - look for angry white males owning automatic weapons. For regular murderers, look for angry males owning a gun.
6
This column heads us toward asking the right questions.
I have observed that hatred seems to be a kind of pleasure for people who indulge in it. Normal people may experience passing feelings of hate to varying degrees, but find the thought of acting on it unpleasant.
Abusers and killers seem to get a kind of pleasure by showing off their ability to dominate others. Normal people don't get pleasure from hurting others, they can't relate to this. This is why it is so hard to break through normal people's denial about the true motives of mass murderers.
To an abuser's mind, their acts are not deranged at all to them. They simply are seeking a pleasurable sensation - that they know full well is wrong. Their knowledge that they will be punished if caught is why they lie, hide, pretend normalcy at times, and evade, or even kill themselves, to avoid reducing their pleasure in damaging other people.
We must face this hard-to-fathom fact. This is not mental illness. Only then can we start to be able to detect the potential abusers and killers among us.
We do not have to understand their motives, only to accept this reality and learn how to cope with this danger in our society.
2
"Mental illness" is a useful term for "let's move on without really changing anything."
A few percent of the population are either schizophrenic or sociopaths-- over ten million people. We can't yet screen every gun buyer for these conditions.
The best screen I know would be a gun buyer who is a white young man/history of skunk anger/generally not well educated/strange/bullied/no solid relationships with women/visits strange web sites and talks about strange things. That requires a lot of definitions and still wouldn't hit the mark.
I am pessimistic that we will ever regulate firearms unless there is either a magnitude 3 event (>100 killed) or a mass shooting that affects people who work to maintain the status quo or make the guns. That is incredibly cynical, but Newtown did it for me, when it showed that a Democratic president and Congress could not change the system that said nothing should change even if children were murdered.
2
The whole idea of good guys with guns versus bad guys with guns has been bogus from day one. The bad guys are just former good guys gone off the rails and predicting who will is a fool's errand. It may make a useful diversion for the gun lobby but no one should buy it.
3
Thank you but I am NOT like a mass murderer. False analogy. It is not mental illness. It is accessibility to guns. Period. Any angry person--mostly men--with access to a gun or a rifle can, potentially, become a mass murderer without being mentally ill. Let's stop the farce of mental illness and respect those who really are. Let's look at the sickness of having 500 million firearms in this country and think about that horrendous statistics.
I have never owned a gun. I will never be a mass murderer and I feel the suggestion made by Mr Friedman is flawed and, yes, rather "sick,"
1
Insightful article. It seems worth noting that there's a significant distinction between "mass murderer" and "serial killer." In the latter case, pathological abnormalities (psychopathy, narcissism, etc.) play a significantly greater role in the disorders described herein.
1
I don't know why this doesn't get said more often, but healthy, normal people are inculcated into become mass killers every day, in every society, via military training. So obviously you don't need to be insane to kill large numbers of people, you just need to be convinced you have a good reason for doing so, and a gun. That reason could be white supremacy or some other form of extreme hatred, conspiracy theories, unfounded fears of various kinds, criminal rivalry, some sort belief in the righteousness of killing an enemy, etc. People are very capable of finding reasons to kill.
Floridly psychotic people can also become murderous, and are in fact over-represented among mass killers (as the numbers in the article show, even though the writer doesn't put it this way). So it's not entirely a red herring to talk about the need to keep weapons away from people with violence-causing hallucinations. But even if 20% of mass killers (as one of the studies cited here suggests) are mentally ill, 80% are not.
The common factor in gun violence, as so many of us keep saying, is that it is too easy in the US to get a gun. Drastically changing our cultural and legal acceptance of gun ownership and access is the one thing that will reduce the level of mass killings, shootings of fewer people at a time, and suicides.
2
Every one of these murderers has one thing in common. They were all little boys. Little boys who were not adequately loved, accepted and embraced for who they were. They were marginalized in a competitive society. They were humiliated or worse.
Once the feeling of inadequacy and humiliation takes hold, the little boys will become big boys who explicitly or subconsciously want to be someone, to get even, to find meaning in an environment that has bruised them. Then they find a small group of other big boys who were similarly bruised. In that they finally find a sense of power, belonging and agency.
Most of these little boys have a core element of empathy that restrains them from acting out. But some have been too damaged.
Then we give them easy access to military weapons and elect a president who incites thuggery and demonized "the other."
We must love our little boys, notice our little boys, and never allow even one to slip into the dark shadows of humiliation and rejection.
3
While an important article, Dr. Friedman misses the most essential point: mass murderers, murderers in general, are male (“driven to mass murder because ...their girlfriend dumped them” switch the gender in that statement and recollect a similar crime). Men are not biologically programmed to commit violence, we teach it. The research mentioned by Dr. Stone looked at over two hundred mass murders some 90% by men. The fact that 10% were committed by women makes the point that we are ALL capable of such hate filled violence. What is our culture teaching little boys about feelings and masculinity? If we don’t address this issue, which is staring us in the face, as we also address hate propaganda and gun control, we’re lost.
2
The problem isn't mental health and it isn't guns either, tempting as both explanations are. The problem is political. Virtually all of these shooters are highly alienated young white men plugged into some sort of white supremacist or other far-right political networks, usually online. They exist within a larger political culture that tolerates their racism. There is a very clear path of personnel and content from Fox News to the Daily Caller to racist boards on Reddit, 4chan and 8chan and back that constitutes an ecosystem in which Tucker Carlson can feed millions a diet of paranoia about "white replacement" while thousands indulge their fantasies of "doing something about it" and hundreds actually do. These mass casualty shootings are only the most visible expressions of a rising tide of racist violence and harassment. They will only be stopped when people of good will get organized to fight back and defeat this source, not just at the ballot box but at our schools and workplaces and it the streets of the places we live.
1
"Most of them are not mentally ill." Define mentally ill and then name a source for this claim.
American psychiatrists are know in Europe as being poorly educated.
They are not even able to recognize the difference between nevrosis an psychosis.
What concept is " filled with hate " exactly ? And well armed?
You get armed by the sending of God ?
Or some people are armed because they decide to purchase war weapons and they are engaged in a paranoid process in which hate is just a symptom and an element of the delirium.
The purchase of weapons is part of the organized delirium , shooting it watching themselves in a mirror with it, etc...
It is mental illness.
There is not hate ( well armed ? ) ready to kill that is not mental illness.
A young person of 21 year old who purchases a war rifle and goes on a rampagne to kill more than 10 people is surely mentally ill.
Those American psychiatrist are one more danger in the US society by their inaptitiude and lack of psychoanalytic education.
A person who doesn't consider mass murder an option doesn't covet assault weapons.
1
Thank you for this.
It's clearer now that the so-called president and his acolytes will have little effect on reducing the assault rifle violence in our country.
But there seems to be a real thirst that remains unsatisfied and getting an amendment to the 2A seems far out of reach.
Will states deal with it? Just drive to your nearest red state and "load up."
The Gun Lobby’s Insanity Defense
The burgeoning reason for maintaining the do-nothing strategy of the gun lobby is that mass shootings are the work of crazy people and that it’s impossible to predict when a person with mental illness will snap and become violently unhinged.
The speciousness of this argument becomes obvious when these mass killers face trial. Very few have been found not guilty by use of an insanity defense, in part because buying an AR-15 and body armor provides evidence of malevolent intent and mental competency
The “they’re sickos” campaign also stigmatizes those suffering from mental illness, a minuscule fraction of whom ever commit a violent act.
President Trump and the NRA only care about mental illness as an insanity defense to quash the gun control debate. I will wait to see if Donald Trump, as is his habit, puts his thumb on the scale of justice and declares that the El Paso shooter is not guilty due to mental defect. I would also like to see Wayne LaPierre appear at the trial as an expert witness on mental illness and gun violence. Imagine him reading the shooter’s manifesto and elucidating for the jury how it provides evidence that the shooter’s volition was shattered by uncontrollable delusions.
I challenge anyone to read deeply about the Aurora Colorado shooter, Adam Lanza or the man who shot Gabby Giffords and tell me they’re not mentally ill. All of them were. They also should not have had access to guns of course. But being mentally ill and being fit to stand trial are two different things. These people are NOT like you and me. They were NOT merely filled with hate. They were mentally ill and we should not sugar coat that fact for political purposes. The two who lived were found fit to stand trial because they knew what they were doing was wrong but doctors concluded both were mentally ill.
1
Articles such as these on the question of mass shootings and mental illness--particularly the El Paso case-- suggest the following question. If the screed by the shooter, and the rhetoric used repeatedly by the President, are similar because it suggests mental illness: Is the President mentally ill?
Please do not use his name. Mentally ill or not, mass killers appear to have a desire for fame and a place in the record books. Please help deny that motivation to the next potential mass killers, by declining, whenever feasible, to publish the names of those who commit these crimes.
Gun control works. I'm an American who has visited and lived in Colombia on and off for 46 years. The last mass murder by a deranged man in Colombia was in 1986. You cannot buy an assault rifle in Colombia and there are no gun stores. There has not been a mass murder in 33 years. No other country on earth is experiencing mass murders almost every week. It's time for democrats to engage in single issue politics like republicans with abortion and gun rights. If you want sane gun control, vote democrat. Just that issue could win elections.
Could there be a correlation between our common military actions against nations and political/religious factions that are ethnically/racially different from our mantle of "Christian whiteness", and actions of our mass murderers?
A rage filled mind might find some some semblance of motive between acting on that personal rage and hatred focused on ethnic/religious "others", and the nation's near endless military violence (mostly bombing) against "others".
My late mother was mentally ill as were a number of her family members – all had the symptomatology of paranoid schizophrenia. My mother was the most loving of all her relatives including those with the same illness. My mother was beautiful, intelligent, artistic, musical, had a great sense of humor & was the most warm & generous mother she could be. She was NOT a “mentally ill monster,” and I for one RESENT that characterization by President Donald Trump. He is free with labeling while not knowing what he is talking about. I hope that other Americans with family members who've been diagnosed with some mental illness protest as I do about this shameful & destructive comment.
Are there any children or grandchildren in Donald Trump's family who exhibit any emotional or social disorder and are getting help for it – are they monsters? Should anyone in Trump's family with any emotional, mental or social problem be labeled a “monster?” I don't think so. As much as I detest Donald Trump, he is not a monster. He is a man with a serious personality disorder. That is a diagnosis from the psychiatric community, not a screed that he is a monstrosity.
As for negative labeling by ethnicity, race, gender, sexual preference & national origin, this USA is entirely guilty of all those. It is time we stop calling the mentally ill monsters & degrading others with disgusting labels. It is time that Donald Trump listened to his own words, if he is even capable of that kind of self-reflection.
To understand that the vast majority of mass murderers are not mentally ill, it may be helpful to think about the comparison to soldiers. No one thinks that troops who shoot to kill their enemy are ill. They simply believe they're in a war and that killing is what is called for. So do white do the white supremacists like the young man in El Paso.
This is so illogical. Clearly the President has a mental health problem: he is a narcissist. Yet, according to the author, he is inspiring mentally healthy people to commit mass murders. These mentally healthy mass murders are unable to identify the mental health issue the President has? I'm confused.
Mass murderers ARE different from me. I'm a woman.
1
This whole argument over whether he is or isn't mentally ill seems like a pointless pursuit. To my eyes and ears, the act of shooting up a Walmart, or a school, or a concert, church, festival... the list goes on... is itself a sign of psychosis, delusion, or whatever other label you want to put on it.
For give the reductive C-word here: It's like debating whether someone is crazy when all you know about them is that they did a really crazy thing. It is self-evident.
A sane and mentally sound person does not do this.
As far back as John Locke, we know that the meaning of words is not just found in the dictionary, but from the way that words are used in a given society. Definitions of mental illness need not only be legal or medical, but based upon convention. The convention in the United States appears to be that when white males commit mass violence it is defined as mental illness, when it is a foreign terrorist it is not. This convention is faulty. No sympathy for the devil, please.
A few years ago, at a solemn commemoration at one of the more notorious Nazi concentration camps in Europe, Barack Obama said something like this. We must realize and remember that the people who perpetrated this (the holocaust) were human beings, they weren't "monsters". He was making the same point, I believe, as Mr. Friedman. Though some who heard this thought the President was giving undue status to those responsible. I heard rather a call and a warning. We can't rely on the false comfort of distancing ourselves from disturbing things like mass murder, or the scapegoating of an entire group of people out of fear and hatred. It can happen here, or anywhere.
What all mass murders share is access to assault weapons, 100% of the time.
Reminds me of talking about my brother-in-law, surly, irrational, and violent towards his parents, with his brother:
"He's mentally ill; he needs help," I said.
"No," replied my brother-in-law, "he just thinks he is right."
1
All mass murderers are men. Most are white men. That's what we should be looking at. If all mass murderers were women, the general consensus would be that all women are unstable. We need to examine why so many white men can not contain their emotions of hate and resentment, why so many white men feel compelled to act out their grievance by murdering people. Is there a swath of white men whose lifelong entitlement now makes them so emotionally fragile that they can't contain murderous rages? How did so many men become so fragile?
3
What about "Road Rage" ?? Happens every day on US streets.. Normal people get behind the wheel of a car then go psycho when somebody cuts in front or drives too slow... People get seriously injured or die over stuff like this.. Nobody never hears the "mentally ill" excuse for that bizarre behavior.
The manufacturers, people. The gun manufacturers.
It's clear both from the research here and from common sense that we will never prevent many of these shootings by musing about mental health -- what constitutes mentally ill? which kinds of mentally ill are dangerous? and, what? screening everybody in America to try to get them to fess up to their homicidal urges?
Follow the money. Always. Mourn the victims, but if you want fewer victims, follow the money. These boys killing everybody are not anywhere in the money trail except that last little notch, when they buy their stockpiles of artillery.
Stop gun manufacturers from flooding America with these guns designed to kill as many people as possible at once. Regulate their manufacture -- as we once did. And let people sue them.
And stop the Russians from their cyberattacks on American elections, flooding every corner of the internet -- now fully out in the open! -- with propaganda designed to convince disaffected young men that they are at war (with innocent fellow Americans!) and need to go kill somebody -- a lot of somebody.
Russian trolls have us at war with ourselves.
This is the same Russia that funds the NRA. (Remember?) These slaughters -- Americans killing our own children -- this is international autocrats winning. We can stop this problem at its source, reclaiming our government from the gun makers. Stop fussing over the semantics of hate vs evil vs ill. Let's kick these greedy warmongers out out out.
Everything with Trump is projection. Every taunt, every label, every insult that he levels could be said about him. Therefore, “mental illness.”
1
Mass murderers are very different from me, as are the non-mass murderers, the robbers, the rapists, the child molesters, the car jackers, the sex traffickers, the garden variety thugs in every city and town.
I'm not a violent male coddled since birth as a trophy son little prince who can do no wrong.
I'm a victim of that. As is my daughter. The reality is, so will be her daughter. Raise better sons or do not have them.
Mass murderers seem to be a sub set of American males. They can't manage their anger and usually seem to have found some grievance that triggers their murderous rampage. I wonder if they have homicidal/suicidal tendencies and then use an extreme political ideology to mask their shameful, in their mind, inability to control themselves or seek help.
2
Yeah, I'm tired of the right talking about mental illness being the problem and then in the same breath calling mass shooters "evil". If you're mentally ill, you're mentally ill--not evil.
To me the biggest factors are personal background and socialization. These guys most likely had troubled childhoods and many had bad parents. Another common thread is their inability to interact with other humans--particularly women (I haven't seen any of these murders come out as gay).
Law enforcement needs to start profiling these guys like they do with suspected muslim terrorists. If you can identify them by their characteristics and their affiliations (8channer, gamer, white supremacist), you may be able to stop them from committing atrocities and possibly work to assimilate them into society.
'They are mentally ill' is a Republican talking point to deflect from sane gun control. They may not be different from you but they are different from me. 'He said that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Which doesn't sound too much different from the line in the movie, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" when the would-be Manson murders said, "We are going to murder you for teaching us to murder." I don't see the thousands of Americans I have known over my lifetime as wanton murderers.
Articles on illegal immigration-related violence seem to focus on illegal immigration from south of the U.S. border. How come there are no articles on illegal immigration from elsewhere - Europe, for example? How come there is no violence directed at illegal European immigrants? Is it because they're white, with blue eyes and light-colored hair? Don't tell me nobody knows about illegal immigrants from northern Europe. It's just that we don't talk about it.
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Can we look at the fact that mass murderers are almost always men, and then gain some knowledge about the nature of the rage Friedman names? Is it physiological? Is it sociological? Well, I guess yes and yes. Can he tell us more?
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I work on my mental health daily to promote kindness. It takes delayed gratification and discipline, not a pill or gun. It is my wish our leaders would promote All Life Matters and not just a select few.
It's in the DNA. We need to fund research to identify these bad genes and a methodology to engineer or manipulate same to a corrective state.
What Dr. Friedman is saying is that it is in your genes too.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it represents a failure in logical inference. To observe that a very low proportion of people with mental illness are mass shooters and therefore infer that a very low proportion of mass shooters are mentally ill is to not understand how conditional probability works. For example, a small proportion of smokers develop lung cancer, but almost everyone with lung cancer is a smoker.
I agree with other comments that we need both a more precise and a more comprehensive definition of what it means to be mentally ill. If by mental illness we just mean psychotic, bipolar, or schizophrenic then I don't think that is what anyone is claiming to start with wrt mass shooters. But if we mean mentally suffering and not able to manage it within socially acceptable bounds, then by definition a mass shooter is mentally ill.
The latter definition is more operationally useful. People who beat their wives or their children are mentally ill. People who get in bar fights are mentally ill. People who scream at their coworkers are mentally ill. People who rob corner stores are mentally ill. These are all people who need psychological help. Accepting this definition would provide a paradigm for transformative rather than punitive justice.
In terms of gun control, I agree that simply saying it's mental illness is insufficient. We need to severely restrict access to guns that have no other purpose than to kill lots of people quickly.
As a psychologist I've noticed news reports of mass shootings often report a familiar pattern of anti-social behavior - history of social rejection, bullying, aggressive behavior towards others, trouble building relationships fueled by abuse and often other childhood adverse events. Classmates were afraid of them, or didn't want to be around them. Not exactly the kind of behavior that makes a person seek or want help. So the new mass shooter is not psychotic (a break from reality) but more sociopathic in lay terms (no empathy, remorse). This is even harder to identify and treat than "mental illness". I've worked with violent youth, it's grueling, underpaid work. All were abused by a number of people in life. Most also suicidal. The care needs to start in pregnancy and early childhood, preventing abuse, supporting families. This takes an enormous commitment from society to rectify. And of course, gun laws.
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More evidence against the proposition that there is a link between mental illness and mass murder: consider the numbers of people involved in genocidal events such as Rwanda, Cambodia, Europe in WWII, etc. The vast majority of those actors wouldn’t have qualified for a psychiatric diagnosis,. For the record, I am certified by the Board of psychiatry and neurology and have practiced my profession for 35+ years.
Excellent op-ed. Enhanced universal background checks, limiting access to assault weapons and electing leaders with a strong moral compass.
2
The real illness, when it comes to owning military grade weaponry, is Dunning Kruger syndrome. The owners of guns, and guns that shoot rounds that blast grapefruit sized holes in people think they are: Smarter than the average person, more responsible than the average person, better trained to use those particular armaments than the average person (even if they've never done more than watch a few online videos), more understanding of how to deter crime than the average person, more intelligent about how they store their weapons than the average person, and a better parent than the average person (whether that includes buying these weapons for their child to shoot, like the mother of the Newtown shooter, or making sure to "tell their kids not to touch them ever" because that absolutely works, like the parents of far too many little kids who have accidentally killed or been killed by gunshots). None of this is true. No one needs or is truly capable of handling these weapons.
2
Also, Donald Trump may not be very different from you and me. He has the support of millions, and millions more sit back and say nothing of his outrageous behavior. While praising the intelligence of the American electorate, he secretly knows that they can be led around like bulls with nose rings - only instead of bull rings, he uses their beliefs and prejudices to lead them wherever he wants. If DJT doesn't destroy our fragile democracy, he has published the blueprint and playbook for some other demagogue to do it later. If a democracy like America's is going to exist, there will have to be a paradigm shift in human thought throughout the world. In the near future, we will program the human mind in the computer based on a "survival" algorithm, which will provide irrefutable proof as to how we trick the mind with our ridiculous beliefs about what is supposed to survive - producing minds programmed de facto for destruction. These minds see the survival of a particular belief as more important than the survival of us all. When we understand all this, we will begin the long trek back to reason and sanity.
See RevolutionOfReason.com
The author won't come out and say it, so I will: Some of the grievances and anger motivating Trump voters are legitimate. The NYT and most of its readers look past those reasons and focus on Trump's toxic personality.
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Americans are uneducated and they replace culture by guns. It fits them.That is who they are uneducated people who love guns.
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Why haven’t we’ve seen much of any discussion acknowledging the meteoric rise in mass killings after Columbine? Is it really a coincidence that Columbine and the modern advent of mass killings occurred precisely during the “dot com BOOM”? Does one really doubt that the CEOs of Silicon Valley lobby, and yes COLLUDE, with both the government and establishment media to downplay the role of unregulated social media on the virulent spread not only of hate, but of IRRELEVANCE on a scale once afforded only to thoughts and ideas that have been vetted by an organic maturation process, sometimes over periods of decades or centuries? Has there ever been, before the birth of the internet, the ability for a narcissist to receive immediate gratification by knowing his or her “heroic” acts of “glory” will be made instantly infamous and memorialized in Wikipedia? I want to see the statistics of mass killings before and after Columbine. In a final irony, it was the military that first created the network that became the internet.
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The fact is that we are all animals with primal instincts for survival, which can be good or evil at different times. Good means helping others while evil is harmful. Human reasoning leads us to the conclusion that we overall do better when we do good to each other than otherwise. Thus we should constantly be aware of ever present fight for dominance between good and evil thoughts and actions within our ourselves.
Constant conscious effort to have good thoughts and actions makes it easier for us to enable good to dominate evil and thereby develop a habit of goodness. Whether we can fully eliminate evil thoughts is debatable, hence ,the necessity of be constant self awareness and self reflection of our thoughts and actions.
Lord Buddha says that the greatest emperor is the person who is able conquer his own thoughts and actions.
Background Checks imply a widely distributed list of names, and if folks suffering from depression fear being listed, they may avoid professional help - which would lead to thousands of avoidable suicides.
@Charlierf. Depression would be an excellent reason to take weapons away from a person and to prevent sufferers from owning a gun in the first place. Anyone who avoids professional help so they can have weapons is a sign of mental illness and I hope that family and friends would not be averse to reporting them to authorities.
@CountryGirl
CountryGirl, I guess I wasn’t clear. You don’t get on this hypothetical list by buying a gun; you get there by seeking mental health help.
I know that the fields of psychology and psychiatry have struggled in the past with theories and treatments which have turned out to be burdened or invalidated by culturally specific biases and normative standards.
That being said, is trying to free the discipline from such biases actually producing an idea that planning and executing mass murder is actually completely free from the idea of mental illness provided the killer is capable of high executive function and free from schizophrenic delusions?
Surely the psychiatric fields can embrace the idea that there's something not right about deciding to kill a group of strangers over a perceived ideological grievance. The human species is demonstrably wired for socialization in many ways and there's reasonable arguments humans would have died out if we did not have a social instinct to band together to cooperate. This is not normative bias, it is historical and biological fact.
I also find the desire to fall back on the religiously-derived concept of "evil" as the alternative definition laughable. Do we have a scientific measure of "evil"? Is there a test or a measurement of evil, or is it merely defense mechanism label when we can't or won't understand the problem?
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Many comments here note that lots of people suffer anger and rage, but only a few become mass (or non-mass) murderers. It seems to me that arguing that those who do are not mentally ill reflects a failing of the mental health profession. If these individuals cannot be diagnosed by the current DSM, then it's time for a new version that allows a retrospective (de facto) diagnosis for anyone who cannot contain normal emotions but instead responds with violence.
1
Months prior to my former brother-in-law committing violence against my sister and holding her at gunpoint for days, I expressed worry to my family that he would express his anger and frustration in this manner. Was he mentally ill? As a practicing psychotherapist, I did not see any indication of serious mental illness. Why was I concerned? His small arsenal of guns, along with a predisposition in family life to be the head of household, the last word, and his refusal to accept that his marriage was over.
I will also add that having his guns removed from his possession even after his arrest and detention took a court order that was requested by my sister's attorney rather than pursued by the police . . . who only acted when pushed to do so.
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Well, young men have always been the largest portion of society who are compelled to go on violent raping and pillaging sprees throughout human history. It seems like they were in fact selected for it through our hundreds of thousands of years of development. Yes, we have a civilizing factor which helps to tamp down this underlying propensity and the vast majority of young men do indeed control themselves quite nicely. But I really think so many young men are dying of boredom - literally. We live in the safest, dullest society the history of the Earth has ever known. If your nature is urging you to strive and fight for survival and there is no need to, that urge may be expressed in other ways. Drinking, drugs, womanizing and fist fighting, violent video games, violent movies and pornography (getting more and more violent it seems) are some release for them and they do participate in and consume that material in massive amounts. But adding up many factors - a loss of meaning, a loss of real, local community, social isolation, a boring suburban environment, access to drugs (opiates), radical online communities that fill that hole gnawing inside them, pushing them to feel part of something larger (whether ISIS or white supremacy or incels to name to examples) and give them a cause, an enemy, any enemy will do, and this pent up energy, and there you go. We live in an extremely false environment we did not evolve to live in comfortably yet. Is that mental illness?
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I honestly believe that we human beings are, on a collective level, mentally ill. Culture and society infuence and shape our minds in ugly ways. Just look around you, and look at some of the rituals people in other societies do that we would consider unacceptable. What is the line between a mental disorder and culturally unacceptable behavior? Just as an example, consider the crowds of spectators in Ancient Rome who watched Roman gladiators kill and be killed for sport. Now people can play extremely realistic and violent video games. But a recent NYT’s article states the following:
"According to a policy statement from the media psychology division of the American Psychological Association, “Scant evidence has emerged that makes any causal or correlational connection between playing violent video games and actually committing violent activities.” Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University, led the committee that developed the policy statement. In an interview Monday, he said the evidence was clear that violent video games are not a risk factor for serious acts of aggression. Neither are violent movies, nor other forms of media."
So why in so many incidents of mass shootings has it been noted that the killer engaged in violent video games? Yes, of course the gun laws should change and access to guns should not be so easy, but war, conflict and violence influence and shape culture and society on both a collective and an individual level.
2
I think that it is hard to argue that serious limitations on the accessibility of firearms would not reduce assaults with guns. However, nearly uniquely in the world, the US has a CONSTITUTIONAL right to firearms. Those who would abrogate the right with a wink and a nod and judicial activism are playing with fire. How do they feel about the righties abrogating civil rights by these methods. Most Americans want limitation of gun ownership. To accomplish this in a real way, I cannot see any good alternative to repeal of the 2nd Amendment.
We, non-professionals, may think of all extremists who advocate slaughter of innocents as a viable and acceptable solution as per se mentally ill.
But that doesn’t mean they are clinically mentally ill. And that provides the challenge for the community and for law enforcement.
Always, after the fact, people come forward and say they thought the shooter was strange. Law enforcement officers looking to prevent mass murders must work with community leaders, schools, peer groups, and parents to identify warning signs. The mother of the El Paso shooter knew enough to call the police. Friends of the Dayton shooter were concerned because of his fascination with violence.
People need to alert the police if they see something unusual and police need to react appropriately after assessing the situation.
And those groups who find such violence normal or a means to an end, the FBI needs to monitor them and their members closely.
@Rita I completely agree but what can the police do once notified of odd or disturbing behavior? What authority do police have unless a law has been broken?
Mental health. Video games. Why don't we blame gun violence on the one thing that actually causes it - guns?
There is absolutely no reason why assault guns that simulate military weapons should be owned by anyone in the US. Even in South Korea, where all men have to enlist in military service (and learn how to operate guns), there is a notable lack of gun violence, due to strict regulation outside the military. It's obvious - the countries with the lowest gun violence rates are all countries where there are low availability to weapons, designed to kill.
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@Melissa I get what you are saying but guns don’t actually cause the violence, they are just the weapon of choice. In other countries, bombs and cars/trucks seem to be the weapons for destruction.
I read the El Paso manifesto and I will say he wrote extremely well.
NO I DIDN'T AGREE WITH IT!
These people aren't "mentally ill" they are very smart and articulate, which makes them extremely dangerous.
3
@Aaron
Society and American taxpayers have invested a great deal of public time and tax monies in these killers from birth, along with all of the rapists and child molesters. We're not getting a ROI but a net loss, while also forced to bury our relatives and friends or visit the maimed in the hospital. And pay for their funerals or medical bills + still pay the upkeep on the vermin generation after generation. Where does the enormous culpability of the parents of these killers finally rise to the top?
There is a social contagion to these murders just as there is for suicide. I think the media would do a great service to do less wall-to-wall coverage of these crimes and stop naming the perpetrators.
Also, gun control/background checks are important, but please enforce current gun laws and get illegal guns out of the hands of those who have them. It seems like an easy place to start - get illegal guns, too.
The conclusion is almost a non sequitur. "What this suggests is that bolstering mental health programs — while a worthy goal — will not solve our mass shootings epidemic. More effective policies might involve gun control, including enhancing background checks and expanding so-called extreme risk protection orders, which would allow law enforcement to temporarily remove firearms from people deemed potentially violent.” Yes, "gun control" is the answer- ban assault-style weapons and their ammunition. Anything short of that will not work as this article documents- we cannot predict who will pull the trigger.
1
I cannot imagine becoming so angry that I could shoot someone. It is impossible to understand. We explain human behaviors that we do not understand as "mental illness", but it is not just the mentally ill that benefit from expert and competent counseling. Everyone could learn something useful from some guidance counseling, not just the mentally ill. I've been seeing a therapist since Trump was elected because I did not like the feelings of fear, anger and helplessness I had. I wanted to be happier. She has helped me cope emotionally, which has allowed me to have a healthy and peaceful life beyond the horror of the daily news. I can do this because I have Medicare and an Advantage supplement. I hope everyone can do the same soon.
Straw man argument about mental health detracting from a more valid approach of limiting access to weapons.
Just because you tick boxes on the "hatred scale" does not mean you will pull the trigger.
But, eliminating access to weapons of war WILL assure you won't.
293
@gw
... so confiscate Trump’s guns if he has any. He is high on the hate scale already.
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@Ed
"There are many other ways to save many more lives."
...and they are?
6
@Ed
The paranoia of a small percentage of the population, that the government is out to subjugate them, does not require the rest of us to live in a state of perpetual danger and fear.
If you are worried about subjugation, perhaps you should pay attention to the fact that corporate power and the voices of the super wealthy are the real threat to our democracy.
7
While there are many contributors to committing violent acts, mental illness is not the dominant one and clearly gun control is desperately needed in the US. However, there is a significant group of shooters who appear to have social issues and a lot of rejection in their histories which leads to hatred of other, more fortunate people. Violence is never excusable but we must all consider how our common exclusionary and cruel practices toward more vulnerable people in our society increases their resentment. Societal models extol the beautiful, the rich, short term goals and false values from which vulnerable people feel excluded. Of course, many people are excluded from this lifestyle but most are able to build community with family and friends and find satisfaction in work. Social rejects suffer, mostly invisibly. They may, however, be more vulnerable to the hateful speech and perverted logic which has been legitimized by conservatives and Trump. We can all show more kindness to others and make efforts to reduce the humiliation/rejection disproportionately heaped on some among us. This will not solve everything but it would create a more accepting and supportive environment for the benefit of all.
3
"Mental illness" is a catch-all camouflage excuse to AVOID dealing with America's easy availability of automatic assault guns
8
Let's take a moment to recall that people with severe and persistent mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3935671/#bib5
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Daniel Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" showed that regular law-abiding folks can be educated to commit mass murder and, once having done it, become more habituated to doing it, rather than having nervous breakdowns from the strain, as we would like to think. Thus, a generation of German leaders took their undergraduate training in murder in the savage trench warfare of World War One. So they pursued their graduate studies in World War Two, becoming gradually used to the concepts of industralized mass murder.
So why didn't the Allies, France,Britain and Russia beomce easy killers? Well, they had colonies. Have you forogotten the Battle of Algiers? The Amritsar Massacre? As for the Russians -- they never stopped killing.
2
Dr. Friedman makes some excellent points.
However this discussion is limited until we have a clear definition of what constitutes "mental illness".
What specific criteria distinguish someone "mentally ill" from someone who is just evil.
Was an Adolf Hitler [or other mass murderers] just totally evil or was he also "mentally ill".
I have no expertise in psychology but I consider most mass killers to have a psychological problem.
Some with "mental illness" really have a biochemical disorder.
Some [not all but some] cases of schizophrenia are caused by errors in folate metabolism.
It is essential that patients presenting with a"mental" disorder have a full MEDICAL examination by a MEDICAL doctor experienced in inborn errors of metabolism so a treatable illness is not missed.
A psychiatrist /psychologist who does not refer a patient for this metabolic testing is a quack whose license should be revoked.
This is a profoundly necessary point. The Apostle Paul himself was a violent religious fanatic who participated in the killing of innocent victims. When he woke up to what he was doing, he turned his life around and founded the Christian mission to the Gentile world.
Nothing--nothing--is more cowardly or despicably insidious than to blame those who suffer--and suffer they do--from mental illness for the gun-washed modern slaughter of the innocents.
In a moral sense, politicians who like Pontius Pilate refuse to use their power to do justice are more responsible for this slaughter than any other serious agents in our country today. Again, thanks to Dr. Friedman.
1
I suspect the author, although a psychiatrist, doesn't really know that much on the subject of mass murderers in the USA.
Why does he ignore the obvious question of military service? More than one third of our mass murderers had served in the military or had a significant connection to it. Even teenage killers were inspired by military models, like Nikolas Cruz and Adam Lanza who both played military themed combat video killing games for hours at a time, incessantly.
https://www.sapiens.org/column/conflicted/mass-killers-military-service/
What's the difference between the rage incited by media agitation of social injustice, etc. and the willingness to kill people by the dozens? There is a difference between the rage of being jilted by a lover or fired from a job and the deeper hate, if it is hate, that motivates wholesale murder of innocent people like that which occurred at Virginia Tech or Las Vegas. Where does this total disregard of human life come from?
Look to the military for answers. They know all about it. That's their job.
Seriously?
You think a person who commits a mass murder is not mentally ill?
What in the world then is your definition of mental illness?
Sorry, but I think that Dr Friedman is absolutely wrong. By definition, murders of this sort = mental disorder, whether in the DSM (diagnostic handbook used by psychiatry/psychology) or not. I also question the ability of psychiatrists to diagnose these murderers in retrospect.
My father and mother lost their entire families to Nazi or Nazi supporters in Poland during the Holocaust (they met in the USA). My father fought with the underground, subverting infrastructure, sneaking Jewish infants to brave Polish families, etc. After the war, he had access to American military rifles. He did not go off and start shooting people, though it is harder to think of a more provocative circumstance. Dr Friedman, most of us are rather different from these shooters.
The president’s dodge about “mental illness” and “video games” was his first response—to turn a phrase back upon this fraud of a president.
What the coward did not expound upon—to anyone who has a working brain—is the murderous hate that propels (mostly) men to act out fantasies of righting the wrongs that inform their warped judgment. And hate could be described as a “mental illness” if it weren’t a deeply-felt emotion that needs to be pried loose from the subconscious.
And making the purchase of assault weapons tremendously easy is the cover that the Second Amendment and the Republican Party and the Supreme Court give to these angry men.
The president was manifestly truthful about one thing, at least, when he labeled the results of his own precious his “American Carnage” a “mental illness;” it left 22 dead in El Paso. The killer there was not crazy; he was angry. And this president is the conductor of a discordant, weird symphony where the instruments do not play with one accord with the score.
The music is a twisted polyglot of resentment and hate. The president knows this; he just doesn’t care.
2
What this column lacks is the eloquent use of the appropriate pronouns, statistically speaking. He. Him. His.
Not once does it mention that the overwhelming majority of mass killers are male.
Unbelievable.
8
And white.
2
Jeffrey Dahmer, a monster, killed 17 men and dismembered and ate some of them. Five forensic psychiatrists interviewed and examined him providing the court with identical opinions that he was not mentally ill, that he was not insane. I have little doubt that each of them privately deemed him evil.
1
Republicans apparently want to deliver yet another favor to gun owners -- No fear of a criminal trial for killing people. Gun killers will be ruled unfit for trial as being mentally ill, spend a few years in a nice hospital environment, get out went declared sane again.
GOP lawmakers are amazing. MAGA!
1
Dr Friedman,
I don't argue with your premise, but I'm still thoroughly disgusted with you!
You say: "Judging from their manifestoes, you have to wonder whether, at the very least, these killers expected social approval from those who shared their racist ideology, to say nothing of a desire for fame."
So what do you do? You burnish their fame. You gave the names of the Charleston, the Christchurch and the El Paso killers, here in an internationally-read newspaper, where admiring copycats can see them.
I've noticed that the NYT appears to be avoiding their names for the most part, and I'm very grateful. It would have in no way harmed your premise here to simply call them X from Charleston, Y from Christchurch and Z from El Paso. (Yes, we've heard their names, but we don't ever need to hear them again.)
These angry, shabby, unhappy men deserve to be dropped into a modern-day oubliette. (90 years at least with no internet, video, tv, phones, etc.) We can never forget their deeds, but we should never pass on their names. That's the least we owe their victims.
3
White nationalism and identity movements are growing because much of the national press, not least the NYT, the Democratic party and many office-holders are shamelessly promoting other racial identity movements: "If they can have this, why can't we?" is a natural thought and powerful argument.
To unite us as Americans, stop playing up what divides us.
2
These people want fame.
You used the murderer's name three times. Once would have been once too often.
Dan Kravitz
3
The author shows his true blindness to the fact that he does not represent “you or me.” You or me may suffer from mental illness. You or me may not be a white straight man.
I also wonder where this comes from....” Just think of the many people driven to mass murder because they were fired by employers or dumped by girlfriends.” A very curious and dubious statement indeed. Who are these “many” people committing “mass murder.”
If mental illness is not the cause, and I agree that it is not, then what is it we should be looking for in background checks?
The only real solution is a drastic reduction in the number of guns and that’s a political nonstarter.
3
So, reading between the lines, since mass killers are no different than everyone else, the only solution is to ban guns.
Nonsense Psychological testing is common for many lines of employment. Use it to license mentally stable people to be gun owners.
Do we outlaw cars to stop the tens of thousands of highway fatalities annually? No. We test and qualify the drivers for users licenses.
2
Just try and get that past the NRA lobby and the conservative Senate. Heck. Let’s see if the SCOTUS would even uphold it if it got challenged. Imagine the handwringing at the cost, and who must pay for the evaluations? The lawsuits if someone gets a negative evaluation? The lawsuits if someone gets a positive evaluation and then goes out shooting in the mall?
I know MANY people with "mental illness" who have never considered purchasing an assault rifle and slaughtering innocent people because they are angry, lonely, abused or traumatized. (I, myself, have a nice little list of diagnoses. I've never thought about it either.) It's hard enough to talk about ones internal landscape without the fear of being mislabeled as a threat - the stigma of mental illness is alive and well.
Do you think a kid is going to reach out for help now that "mental illness" is falsely identified as the major cause of mass shootings in our country?
No.
People who desperately need to connect with others will retreat further inside themselves all because these lawmakers are shameless, lazy and keep looking for scapegoats.
4
The article "Why Mass Murders May Not Be Very Different From You" came to my attention because I believe there has been too many mass murders occurring without any major action to prevent it. After reading this article I agree with Richard Friedman that mass murders might not be mentally ill but full of hatred. In my personal opinion all the murders that have been occurring should be reason for a change in our society. Not just for weapons but for things like discrimination, abuse, and rape. I believe that there should be more places where people have been through things like this could get help, which might help someone who is full of hatred because of what has happened to them could let it out and maybe get passed it.
We know so little about diseases of the brain, yet we are so quick to blame behavior on mental illness. Whether a murderer kills one or twenty in a sensationalized murder, someone almost invariably says, "Must have been crazy. There's no other reason to do something like that." Trump was more politically correct. He said that mass killers are “mentally ill monsters".
My sense is that a diagnosis is not intended and such a statement is just name calling. Attacking and killing other human beings is so horrible that it calls for condemnation. The easiest way to condemn the killer is to assert that the killer is crazy.
Crazy is easy to condemn. We know we are not crazy and crazy people are not like us. Hate and rage are emotions we all sometimes feel. People who act on hate and rage may not be so different from us. We don't want to even consider the possibility that mass murderers are acting on human emotions that we also feel.
1
Opponents of gun control say that if we restrict guns only criminals will have them, yet this betrays the fact that up until the fateful moment when they pull out guns many of these killers were not criminals. They were the regular, law abiding, tax paying citizens with no apparent mental health issues. It's almost a newsroom cliché when reporters ask neighbours of someone accused of a horrible crime and they say that he seemed decent, quiet and never bothered anyone.
1
The question should not be whether the shooter is mentally ill or normal, the question should be how a 21 year old (and in some cases even younger people) get access to an assault rifle and cause mass massacre. It would be easier to handle a deranged person with a knife or a dagger.
2
Dr. Friedman, your message is extremely important since we have no hope of making things better if we misdiagnose the problem.
The problem, as you point out, is not about people who fit the medical "mental illness" or legal "insanity" paradigms. Rather, as the Star Trek meme warns, "It's worse than that, he'd dead, Jim." In this case, the "worse than that" news is that we are talking about evil, plain and simple, but beyond everyone nodding their heads in agreement, the implementation of effective countermeasures will elude government alone. Always has.
Lastly, I must point out, Trump is not the only public figure barking up the wrong tree, so please try, for once, to refrain from heaping the blame for everything on him. Yes, he's a floater in the punch bowl, but not the only one.
Each cult murderer by his action is admitting that the philosophy behind the murderous intent is without merit. If it were of merit (he) would ultimately be able to convert many more people to the cause who would then outweigh the rest of us at the ballot box.
It may be that many or perhaps nearly all proponents of white supremacy are there just to encourage others to die for the cause (but themselves, of course. never). It would be akin to having committed a crime yet leaving no trace of your culpability. But their may be traces in terms of text or phone calls sent or received.
I can conceive only one reason -- setting ignorance aside -- that this good doctor hasn't named the obvious and obtrusive fact of "personality disorder" in his assessment of these killers. This is that it is widely accepted that the personality disorders -- such as Antisocial, Narcissistic, Borderline -- are not mitigable by psychiatric medications, and medications are the "royal road" for psychiatrists. (An NIH / NIMH website reads: "Because the benefits are unclear, medications are not typically used as the primary treatment for borderline personality disorder.") One can easily imagine, for example, that an anti-anxiety, antidepressant or antipsychotic medication wouldn't make a dent in the president's overweening ego, or a murderer's or con man's lack of conscience. Otherwise, there could be no valid reason NOT to see mass murderers as terribly disturbed psychologically.
Just as every country is capable of genocide, whether it's Germany, the US or Rwanda---every one of us is capable of becoming a mass shooter. We are a very eclectic species, as we are also capable of producing a Beethoven, a Jesus or a Shakespeare.
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It's simpler to believe that mass murderers are different. If we had to admit that we have some things in common with them we'd have to face our own rage about how we're treated by others. However, I think we need to look at how our society has changed with the introduction of the internet and social media. More change has not led to a more civilized world. Some of that is due to how technology has been deployed.
The simple act of calling for customer service is frustrating. We don't connect to a human being: we get a voice that gives us choices and sometimes those choices are hard to select because nothing fits our need. Or we go shopping in real store and can't find what we need but we're told that it's online. We walk down the street or in the halls of a building and what do we see: people not interacting with each other but talking into the air or on a cellphone. People no longer look where they are going.
Try making a reasonable request in a polite tone to someone. Oftentimes the response is unprintable. This is not a world where people feel welcome, cared for, respected, or noticed. It's a world where Siri or Alexa is supposed to give us answers. It's a world devoid of human contact or comfort. It's a world where rules are applied and never bent. If that doesn't cause anger I don't know what does.
Too many human needs are being ignored today. Some people kill, others commit suicide, and others give up.
8/8/2019 10:34pm
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I do think there are three distinct categories to be made here. Situational rage (from a job loss or a cuckolded spouse for instance), sociopathic behavior and ideological radicalization. Each needs a decidedly different approach.
The very fact that these murderers cannot process hate, jealousy, lonliness or any other typical human experience and then choose to randomly execute innocent people indicates they have a severe brain issue.
Or we can choose to go back to the Middle Ages and blame it on ghosts or demons.
President Trump was partially correct in that these mentally disturbed people find an outlet in social media and then easy access to guns is the final issue. Society explains and accepts everything as unique but the red flag warnings were out there, especially in Dayton where his Antifa/Far left rants were all clear but rationalized away.
Stricter gun control and deep background checks with annual evaluations and gun safety certifications are needed but we must also change as a society manage and discipline our young people better and carefully monitor their social media.
Were these murderers all mentally diseased? YES as well as spoiled, entitled and living in a parentally absent environment along with schools, doctors and law enforcement who was warned about the Dayton killer.
There's one way they are different than me. I'm female.
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This article explains why Trump's normalization of hatred, ethnic vitriol and general suspicion of those with a different skin color is so monstrous. It makes it seem OK to express that hate in increasingly violent ways. The result has been 250 mass shootings in the US in this year--so far. This cannot go on.
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What this analysis misses is whether these mass murderers practiced murdering before doing it. What I'd like to know is, did they play violent computer games?
If paranoia is a mental illness, then most mass murderers are mentally ill and so are millions of other people. If being filled with hate is a mental illness, then millions are mentally ill.
The Fox view of things and the mainstream media view of things cannot both be true, so millions of our fellow citizens live in a world that has become detached from reality and is pretty much hermetically sealed against it. But this is nothing unusual. The white South was detached from its own moral reality between the failure of Reconstruction and the advent of the Civil Rights movement, and to a great extent remains so to this day.
Most of us are mad in some areas. Mental illness is the normal human condition, and very few escape from it.
Mental illness is a disease, HATE IS NOT, does everyone who expresses hate for schoolmates or parents make them ill?
No, but who decides who is mentally ill and will do harm to others? That is a mixed bag. Everyone hates something or someone and who can determine how people sane or ill will act. Timothy mkVey was not insane when he bombed Oklahoma City.
That was mass murder. People who need assault weapons to make them feel powerful are mentally ill. Is there a test to find out why they need such tools? Will they escalate to mass murder for the next big thrill?
Men with guns kill but should egoists have access to weapons of war? congress will convene when their vacation time is over and hopefully will have spent time reflecting on real gun control laws.
But I suppose by that time all this adverse publicity will have faded from the public psychy until the next event and they can go back to the endless discussions. Stand up to the gun lobby. Get Congress to work and find a plan to get these weapons away from everybody. The gun owners are not a militia to protect our democracy, which was written in the Constitution. Are they volunteering to soldier in our Army. I think not.
I work in a hospital and see mentally ill people all the live-long day, every day. I have mentally ill people among my friends and family. They are just like you and me. They don’t go killing people.
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"Mental illness" does not explain most lethal violence. We should not forget that the holocaust, other attempted genocides, massacres of civilians in war contexts, lynchings, and many other examples of violence against unknown others, have for the most part been carried out by ordinary people under the influence of authority, ideology, or group hatred. Stress, childhood trauma, unemployment, and the like may explain some individuals' vulnerability to such influences, but they are not the immediate cause. Human history shows us that when toxic ideologies, leaders and groups are not overwhelmingly countermanded by social norms and public opinion, and when weapons of war and other means of destruction are easily available, mass murder becomes acceptable, even tempting to many "normal" people with "normal" problems.
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"Rational" people keep saying all options are on the table including nuclear war.
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Does Dr. Friedman understand he’s playing three-card-monte with the concepts of rationality and mental illness? With the laudable aim of trying to avoid stigmatizing the mentally ill, he goes a fair distance towards declaring mass murder a rational act. He sees the logic in dividing the population into distinct races, and espousing violence in pursuit of those aims. Surely he can think of some terms to describe individuals so consumed by hatred that they pull the trigger on random bystanders. It’s not a clinical term, but how about saying they’re insane?
I take exception to your theory. A mass murderer is way different from me. Normal people are sometimes annoyed, but are not so filled with hate or with rage that they accumulate arsenals of guns and ammunition. They do not aspire to kill people they don't even know. The degree of paranoia and hate which compels an individual to commit mass murder is derangement.
Sorry. Can’t agree. I think the term ‘mental illness’ is so generic and insipid as to be basically meaningless. If you look at the particulars of the descriptions of the young men who have perpetrated mass murders over time there are similarities they run through everyone of them.
Details are now coming out about the El Paso shooter. Lifelong loner. Check. Reportedly “weird” or “a bit off”. Check. Expressed interest in guns and extreme ideologies like White Supremacy. Check. Family support/ environment. Unknown. Dysfunctional families are always in denial and want to cover up abuse and neglect to deflect blame from themselves. Check. In this case a lot of people who knew him didn’t want to talk or wanted to remain anonymous. Most likely to avoid questions like ‘why didn’t you do or say something ?
Not all young white males who make this checklist will become mass murders. ( And none of them would if guns were not available to them.) But the ones who do generally fall into a similar set of characteristics. Red flag laws will make no difference because these young men can hide in plain sight due to the limitations on recognizing and forcing meaningful evaluations of disturbed individuals AND the insanity of gun laws that allow ANYONE to get ahold of an assault gun.
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This was something I've been waiting for some time now to be acknowledged. What a rational piece of thinking you have offered us. Thank you
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Full of hate and well armed is inarguable, but rational and sane eludes me. Demonizing and murdering innocents while seeing yourself a noble martyr seemingly falls well short of rational or sane. If in truth there but by the grace of God stand you or I then maybe we might want to work on the arms side of that equation. As for full of hate, when did that cease to be shameful?
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Background checks please, with a specific focus on the would-be gun-owner’s history or violent and/or threatening behavior! If you can’t get through the normal stresses of life without threatening other people, Why should you be entrusted with a lethal weapon in your pocket?
I’m a doctoral-level mental health professional with decades of criminal pop experience. First, words such as delusional, psychotic, sociopath have very specific meanings in my field, yet these words are also used colloquially by the general public to generally mean crazy or cold-blooded killer. Most of the mass shooters would not meet the criteria for a mental health diagnosis.
Second, in criminal law, “innocent by reason of insanity” is used as a legal defense and is perceived by most of society as some sort of dodge, and I agree. Keeping the head of a murdered lover in the refrigerator is crazy by anyone’s estimation and suggesting that someone was innocent of the murder simply due to a mental health issue is obscene. The laws concerning “innocent by reason of insanity” were originally put in place primarily to cover the severely developmentally disabled. However, they have since been twisted by lawyers to something that damages public perception of both fields. “Justice” is rarely the result of our horribly-broken, adversarial criminal justice system (in both directions).
Third, the department of corrections is tasked with 2 things, punishment and rehabilitation. They end up doing both poorly and the privatization of Corrections took an already bad system and drove it right into the ditch, catastrophically. There is simply no incentive to genuinely rehabilitate anyone; a private prison system only gets paid for prisoners inside its walls.
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Prof. Friedman is telling the truth here. In my 82 years of misanthropy I have never been disappointed. Most people are hateful and sinful and disgusting. And capable of anything .
Trump is blaming our epidemic of gun violence, literally, on "monsters" -- I mean -- how the heck does he get away with it? Once he's got the laws in place to demonize and "involuntarily confine" people with mental illness, and there's still gun violence, he'll be blaming "ghosts." Time to look under the bed America, and deal with the problems we've been sweeping under there for far too long.
Does this mean narcissists and sociopaths are not mentally ill? I'm confused; I suppose a personality disorder is not exactly a mental illness.
Mass murderers might not be mentally ill per se, but they're certainly living in an alternate construction of reality. That much hatred is delusional.
A person who lacks compassion is damaged, malformed, sociopathic. When he commits mass murder this becomes manifest. You can’t call this mental or emotional health. Healthy people are horrified by piteous suffering.
The problem is not that we wrongly assume mass murderers must be mentally ill. It’s that we fail to recognize sociopathy everywhere in our society, because it’s been normalized.
When people blandly order bomb and drone strikes for political effect, or defend the death penalty, or torture; or use social policies to deny other people health care, jobs, decent homes, clean air or water or refuge from persecution; or deliberately destroy the environment on which we all depend for our lives, that too is sociopathic. This violence is just a bit more camouflaged than firing into a crowd.
If psychiatry cannot help us understand why a tiny minority of people strafe schools, it ought to wonder why it is funded.
You prove yourself to be an excellent scientist with forthcoming admissions about what we don't know.
Now get to work figuring out what we don't, please, instead of merely throwing up your hands.
Here's one clue that you've to a ways to go before you can say that mass killers are like "you or me." You say that people with "ordinary" rage kill their "girlfriends." You don't mention boyfriends. Even if testosterone can't be implicated, your op-ed improperly denies that we can do a lot more science here. When we don't yet have the answers, scientist should get going on finding them.
I find the "replacement" conspiracy aided by elites just pure baloney. Elites are probably mostly white. Why would they want to replace themselves? Maybe they are just more open to diversity and less prejudiced. Of course, I do know that conspiracists aren't logical but you'd think they might at least see through this part of their conspiracy.
May not be very different from you or me.
Really?
You have described them as "just every day stress, anger, jealousy and unhappiness the rest of us have."
In the first place mass murderers are usually white, young men.
That leaves out a whole lot of people.
I doubt most people are as angry as these usually white, young men. Often they are described as lonely. For several years before the shooting they have been associated with white supremacy or other hate groups.
I think the word "hate" is what separates them from the rest of us. I might not like someone and I might get angry at them, but I have never thought of killing anyone or even owning a gun.
At the trial of Adolf Eichman, one of the survivors was testifying against him and suddenly collapsed. He was picked up and helped. When asked why he collapsed, he said at that moment he realized that Eichman was just an ordinary man. And if that evil existed in Eichman, then it was in all of us including himself.
Aggression towards others has two controls. One is for conspecifics, those seen as part of your species or groups. The other is for inter-species aggression or predation. The former is limited because it is damaging to the species. If one views members of another group as a different species (I.e. sub-human), than that restraint is removed and anything goes. That is why the racist rhetoric is so dangerous because it paints “those” people as sub-human, not part of us, and that removes the restraint on aggression.
If committing mass murder, or wanting to commit mass murder, doesn't qualify as a criteria for mental illness, then maybe it needs to be added as a disorder.
No, sorry, that's ridiculous. Mass shooters are not like the rest of us. Not even remotely. They are madmen who have been given access to high-powered guns.
And I would suggest that anyone -- ANYONE -- who thinks they need an AK-47 is mentally ill, and the simple act of trying to buy one should set off all sorts of alarm bells.
They are just filled with hate.
Yes. And others of them join the military and have their exploits feted in movies such as American Sniper. A long-standing fetishization of violence, maybe that too is part of the problem.
Mass murderers are different from me and the women in this country. They are all men. Except in rare instances, men commit all of these mass murders, assaults, rapes and acts of violence in our country and most of the world. How must we change the way we model masculinity to our boys?
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Anger management classes in school for all males. (I'm a male. This is a male entitlement problem.)
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If mass killers are mentally ill, as Trump claims, then how does his calling for their execution address the problem?
Let’s follow the New Zealand example and not mention the killers name when it is not necessary.
Don’t give any personal recognition to the mass murderer including his photo.
This article uses the killers name numerous times even though it is not necessary.
Likewise we should minimize quotes from his manifesto.
Thank you for your attention.
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How many mass murderers are women? Why is gender and anger not part of the discussion?
There are plenty of cold blooded mass murderers who get away with it. They hire other people to pull the trigger. I'm thinking of Duterte, Mohammad bin Salman, and the "leaders" who lied us into wars against people who never harmed us, in Vietnam and Iraq, and who are now doing the same with regard to Venezuela and Iran.
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When will we start discussing the media’s role in glorifying mass shooters through non-stop coverage of their acts and repetition of their names? Fame is what shooters seek and there’s only one institution—the media—that can provide it.
One of the ways that the masses maintain their level of comfort, security and prejudice - is to delude themselves into believing that there is a fundamental difference between the I and You, Them and Us.
Tragically, this among other things, predisposes history to literally and figuratively repeat itself. It makes it easy to judge and view certain others or groups as aberrations. It allows objectification- and treating other humans and animals as objects allows for desecration and mass murder.
The fault is not on our stars- but in us. Collectively we fail to see history not as a series of lessons- but some distant past that cannot repeat because...it is in the past. But the past is as alive as the present and to the extent our minds are chained to both- the future is all to present.
And finally, in an age of ecological holocaust- forgetting the lessons of the past- even as time evaporates- the last year- or the last news cycle- is a certain recipe for destruction.
As to the headline "Why Mass Murderers May Not Be Very Different From You and Me," the reality is that almost every mass gun killer has been, like you, a male. These murderers may be like you and share the same male consciousness and privilege and and ideology of entitlement and male supremacy, but they are not like women, not at all.
It is not women who are armed to the teeth with weapons of war. It is not women going around shooting up schools, churches, parks, movies, Wal-Marts. It is not women who are enamored of violence. The Tarantinos and others who feed the minds of the young with the most egregious violence are males, as are those who design the violent video games.
Psychologists have found that mass gun killers and other serial killers have minds and mindsets similar to ordinary everyday males. But the minds and mindsets of the killers are nothing like the minds and hearts of women. Women give and nurture life. Men like destroying life, whether using guns to kill defenseless wildlife, or firearms to kill innocents, or machinery to kill the Earth.
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It's certainly sad that you feel this way. "Men like destroying things." I don't. So do me the favor of not speaking for me.
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No human is born filled with resentment, hate and the willingness to harm another human. And while some of these tendencies can be taught and institutionally nurtured, much of them are based on experiences. After one is mugged walking down a certainstreet at night, it is rational for one to avoid those streets. After one is burglarized by a certain ethnie it is only natural for one to move away from their neighborhood. Etc etc etc...
Provided the above experiences are real, it would take an exceptionally good and brave person (or a "martyr" , or a "fool") to ignore them and believe instead the many theories and chalkboard admonitions to keep endangering one's personal safety and well-being, just to be considered a "progressive."
Human nature, anyone?
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The bottom line is that there are at least 300 million guns out there and this killing is not going to stop until most of those guns are off the street. That's probably not achievable but in the alternative we can do the following: 1) Every gun should registered. It should be a federal crime to sell/transfer a gun to somebody without reregister it. We do this for cars; why not guns. 2) Every gun owner should be licensed. The licensing process ideally should include a psychiatric evaluation. This is done in Japan. Why not here?
With gun registration the government can identify people accumulating arsenals. Ammunition sales should also be monitored. Nobody needs thousands of rounds to hunt deer.
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I get Dr. Friedman's point that many mass killers are not what's commonly thought of as "mentally ill," and it's virtually impossible to identify them before they act out. They are not in the midst of a psychotic break or disconnected from reality. In fact, they carefully plan their assaults over weeks, months or even years.
But isn't being so consumed by rage, a rage that lasts and grows for months or longer, a sign of a mental or emotional problem? And deciding it's "OK" to satisfy that rage by shooting and killing dozens of strangers? If those thoughts and behaviors aren't found in the DSM, does that mean they're "normal"? Most people would be horrified to think so.
It might not matter, excerpt that "red-flag" laws might define such thoughts as a reason to confiscate someone's guns.
Sure, let's try to identify these people and get them some help. But the only way to really cut down on gun violence of all kinds is very strong gun control, coupled with a gun buyback program to disarm America.
The omission of some discussion of the psychology of masculinity is glaring here. These “people” and “individuals” are all men. Not mentally ill, sure, but also not women. Women’s distress comes out in idioms that happen to be less violent. I’m fed up with writers calling these murderers “people”.
Call them what they are. Maybe then we can make some headway on reducing their distress.
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Yes, many are extremely disturbed by assorted issues that we live with in this time. One critical difference between those who carry out horrendous actions and those who do not is the absence or presence of impulse control...whether or not the action is long planned. Carrying it out is dependent on an impulse of the moment...a willingness to do it. Most persons harboring such tumultuous feelings have built in controls...fortunately for the rest of us.
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It’s not impulse control or the lack of it if they plan for two years to commit the crime. It’s methodical, well thought out, based on hatred.
@susan paul: Impulse control is not buying a weapon of mass destruction because it is "cool" to own one.
Why must one hold "hateful" or "racist" theories" to believe America is experiencing a tsunami of illegal immigration and mass immigration by low-skill, low-education immigrants -- which has a plethora of negative side effects? It's a sound policy position given the fact immigration by low-skill migrants, legal and illegal, has brutal consequences for our most vulnerable citizens: the working poor, working class, African-American males, the elderly who can't afford to retire, young people looking for work. They must compete with a huge cohort of cheap labor which lowers wages and worsens working conditions. A high percentage of immigrant families are on welfare programs, and illegal immigrants indeed receive government benefits for their children, but all money is fungible. That means our threadbare social safety net, including Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security are all endangered. Nor is it likely that low-skill immigrants will "make it." It's not that the immigrants have changed; America has. The manufacturing sector paid good wages, enabling immigrants to rise socially and economically. We still make things in America, but not nearly as much. Most will work in low-paying service-sector jobs. Yes, racists and demagogues can stir and act on xenophobic sentiments and commit murderous outrages, but defining every person who questions our Kafkaesque immigration system as a "hater" or "racist" simply makes a thoughtful debate impossible.
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As a high school teacher I can tell you that there is no parent and there are no students want to clean toilets. They’re perfectly happy with immigrants coming in and doing landscaping jobs. Unless they’re being paid cash under the table, immigrants are paying taxes into the social welfare system. The bigger problem is outsourcing and automation, but it is pretty hard to have a racist ideology against the machine. Who are you going to kill then?
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Some two-thirds of immigrants receive welfare. On average they make very little in wages. They do not make enough money to pay the taxes required to support the social welfare system on which a very high percentage will depend for decades. It's also the case that the next Big Thing in the economy will be an exponential increase in automation, robotics and machine-learning. It will be an economy that will require vastly fewer workers -- and none that lack at least an BA and preferably graduate education. The great majority of today's migrants from Central America have no more than 9 years of education in some of the worst schools on earth. They will undergo a trajectory from being low-wage workers to losing all employment -- when they will become permanent wards of the State. I don't have any racist attitudes. Race/ethnicity don't matter at all: what matters is education. I find myself aghast at your very ugly last sentence. Do you imagine I fantasize about "killing" immigrants? I'm the child of immigrants. Evidently you can't address the underlying socio-economic realities without resorting to foul ad hominem attacks. I trust you do better in front of your students.
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If I decide to be a mass murderer, there is almost nothing that will get in my way. There are plenty of gun shops close to where I live that will sell me all guns and ammo I might need. The truth the only thing that prevents me and anyone else for that matter from becoming a mass murderer is simply a lack of desire to be one.
Now, if I decided I wanted to hijack an airliner and fly it into a building, we've made that nearly impossible. In almost every situation we put barriers in the way of doing harm to others or to ourselves. Dangerous machinery is covered, high fences prevent people from throwing objects off highway bridges, cars are far safer than they once were, both for the occupants and pedestrians that might be struck by one.
Yet with guns, nothing.
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I would say this argument seems reasonable, but I would like to add another possible motivation. When we were kids, we had BB guns for a while, and what did we do with our BB guns ? We shot at cars and people, what else are guns for ? I don't know how fast my car will go, but I see the speedometer goes to something like 150 mph, Am I tempted to try that out ? Slightly, but I'm a too responsible citizen to do that, also I'm too chicken. The motivations are there, and with 320 million of us, for some these motivations are not so slight.
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This editorial misses a huge point: mental illness is not a well-defined box into which some people fall and others do not. Rather, as science and medicine have ventured deeper into both the psychological and physiological patterns that individual humans exhibit AND can be measured, some of these patterns have become clearer: 'bipolar', for example has been isolated in terms of the underlying biochemistry and as a result, people who would have simply been called 'insane' in previous eras now have a 'box' they can be classified into with specific treatments/medications and interventions that insurance, doctors, and therapists apply to a treatment approach. Many millions of humans have behaviors that are clearly outliers with respect to the 'Bell curve' of psychological measurements, but no 'box' the activates fairly standard treatment/management programs. Since there is no 'box' to put these into, they are not 'mentally ill'. But is there anyone who hasn't noticed that a huge proportion of mass (or even individual) murderers are described as being 'different' or 'stand-offish': they are virtually always noticeably unintegrated with a human community. So, we just don't know enough to give it a name or even measure the behavior, so by default they are classified as 'normal'.
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Dr. Friedman makes an excellent point. Background checks and red flag laws will not be very effective in reducing gun violence whether it is mass murders or single fatalities. We need to ban assault weapons and large-capacity magazines without grandfather clauses to reduce mass murders. Furthermore we must register every gun and license every gun owner. In civilized countries a good reason is required for gun ownership. That will likely never be possible in the US given the gun culture and the Heller decision by the Supreme Court regarding the Second Amendment.
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The most common denominator in mass killers is of young men who have the notion that they deserve to be important. Give them a few years without the encouragement or opportunity to act rashly, they will realize that their own importance only matters to those that are important to them.
What is needed is the denial of the tools to act rashly, primarily guns, and a safe place for them to vent.
Every college freshman class has a scattering of boys who insist on interrupting lectures with nonsequiter questions, and by the end of semester the vast majority have found a better way. That kind of opportunity to mature is not available to many boys who desperately need it.
Unfortunately venting you stifled ambitions at a Trump revival meeting does not advance your maturity.
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Reinstate the draft. It would solve a lot of problems. Taking guns will not.
"more effective policies might involve gun control"
Agreed, but perhaps only in the short run here, in the morass the US of A finds itself in.
From a broader perspective, there is no escape from issues of public education, of the need to foster a citizenry capable of critical thinking, of exposing itself to the messy mass of media, but then pausing to think, 'should I believe any of this?'
Public education has, surprisingly, never been a priority of a majority of the US electorate, I sense. "It's a local issue."
It seems we've always thought of each other, communally, as more or less "in safe hands", those of our families and their values, our churches, the values of our community organizations. Assumption: "People are good, and tend to be rationally motivated, and guided by moral standards, in the direction of their own self-interest."
However, in the age of widespread online nonsense, this view implies a gross abnegation of responsibility. People who pull the trigger of a semi-automatic weapon aimed at scores of innocents have never been asked to examine their assumptions critically. They do know, however, where to go for validation of those assumptions. (School teachers are, by the way, too busy training teenagers to pass college entrance exams.)
Clinically, many trigger-pullers may not tick all the 'mentally ill' boxes, but they do seem to me to qualify as wildly irrational, for which there is no current diagnosis i'm aware of.
Education: prevention trumps cure.
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This can only be surprising to those who haven't reflected for any length of time on the substantial role that happenstance and environment play in determining the trajectory that human affairs, and with them our own choices, our fate, take. One doesn't need to be religious to feel the substance of the thought 'There but for the grace of God go I'.
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Meditation and prayer are the answer
I’m not religious but I believe the spirituality and the believe in interconnectedness counteracts the feelings of alienation and loneliness in our computer age
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@DAB I know that "thoughts and prayers" get a bad rap in this whole debate -- and we definitely need more concrete solutions like better gun control. But I think you are onto something with the idea that this speaks to a terrible spiritual void in our society if these young men are basically seeking love and approval from strangers on the internet in these creepy, ideological fringe groups.
I am religious, but you don't have to be to wonder what happened to John Donne's "no man is an island" idea, and ask how we might help young people get back to that.
Most of us are looking for simple explanations for complex issues involving human behavior. Our personality is situational and quite malleable (referring to the Good Samaritan experiment at Princeton). All of us are capable of moment-to-moment changes in mood and personality. In fact that's the norm.
It's not the topic here but it has implications on criminal justice where we don't rehabilitate.
The cheapest and quite effective way to control our reactive flight-or-fight instincts is to meditate. It's simple logic. If you observe your thoughts dispassionately, without creating a reality out of them, you'll quickly recognize the silly ones.
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So Trump was using a red herring to divert attention from the need for strict gun-control laws. What else is new?
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A mind filled with hate should be diagnosable as a mental illness. Hate is not a natural emotion. Anger is a natural emotion, so is sorrow and fear. When sorrow grows into depression, that is a mental illness. When fear becomes a phobia, that is a mental illness. When anger grows into hate, that too should be diagnosed as a mental illness.
Psychology is in the dark ages if it does not have the tools to diagnose hate as a mental illness. Just because it isn't a permanent state, like schizophrenia, doesn't make it normal.
When anger becomes hate, violence follows. Getting justice afterwards is practically meaningless. Sure, it is something, but almost everyone would prefer their loved ones to be alive over getting justice afterwards.
Anger by itself can be good. Anger gives you the energy to change things that are wrong. But when anger becomes hate, it is self destructive and destructive of others. Nothing good comes from hate.
Our society should recognize that hate is a mental illness that needs treatment to prevent violence and protect society. There needs to be a scientific method for diagnosing people who hate, taking their guns away, and setting a treatment method.
14
The Buddha had this figured out 2500 years ago: unexamined and unmitigated reactivity from greed, hated and delusion lead to suffering.
@DB
Anger is a seed that, when nurtured and reinforced, becomes hate.
In our huge nation from a third to 40 percent of adults own guns. Maybe one in a thousand causes any harm in any one during any year. Which means very few every do any harm to any with their guns in their lives. But the perception is of this class of people posing and existential threat to all others. Mostly it's just fear of the unknown, unfounded upon facts. But we know that the vast majority of gun violence is done with handguns that are not very big, and most involve suicides. The use of long guns is low, so low that homicides with these weapons are about the same as with knives. Suicides are the result of long time personal issues but homicides tend to be spur of the moment, and accidents are not intended at all.
Mass murderers are a special class of people in that they all think about killing people for a very long time before doing so. They plan and go to great efforts and expense to prepare and usually expect not to survive after they have murdered others. It's not a normal state of mind. It may not be insanity but it's also not just someone losing their temper and exploding. They all want others to know them and to remember them, whether or not they claim political motives. They are definitely not intending to live normal lives after the event. That cannot be considered having a mental state like most other people.
3
I think you are right; a mass murderer is not going to live a normal life after the event. To foresee this, and commit the atrocity, I would consider crazy; psychiatrists, I believe, would argue it shows the mass murderer is not insane; I consider some psychiatrists under the sway of evil practice when communicating their ideas to those who did not study psychology at postgraduate level but who are still discursively intelligent!
I'm annoyed sometimes, but am filled neither with hate nor with rage. I don't own guns. I don't feel compelled to shout down people who disagree with me. I don't have enemies, and do not aspire to kill anyone. And yes, a mass murderer is way different from me. The degree of paranoia and hate which leads to mass murder defines mental illness in my book.
6
@Anne W.
Yeah. I'm concerned if I think I hurt the feelings of somebody I don't even like. There is NO WAY I could pull the trigger on a gun pointed at a person or an animal. Mass murderers are way different from me too.
Aren’t most of these killers males under the age of 25? Car insurance companies know that males of this demographic have a significant higher number of accidents than older males or females of all ages. Why don’t we take the advice of companies that keep such statistics (because of the impact on company profits)? If a teenage/young adult male wants an assault rifle, can’t we just do a more rigorous check before they can purchase one?
13
Brilliant article that really, for lack of a better word, shoots down many of the arguments put forth by the President, GOP and Second Amendment fanatics. The prevalence of mental illness, disaffection or garden variety rage in this country is not an outlier as compared with comparable industrialized nations. The main difference is that someone having a bad day or consumed by the demons of racial hatred has access to military style weapons, and is therefore able to commit mass murder with minimal effort.
4
I think "mental disease" is just a fantasy/umbrella term common people in the 21st Century use to designate any individual who doesn't act according to what society expected him to do.
2
Mentally ill can mean many different things. It is charted on multiple axis lines, and a sliding scale on each.
For each a basic consideration, the underlying question is the degree to which it affects normal function. A comparison is to a functioning alcoholic.
A normal person doesn't do a mass killing.
How abnormal must one be?
Well, someone too abnormal probably can't do it, because he doesn't function well enough.
There is a danger zone -- bad enough but not too bad.
That is why the insanity defense so often fails even though the criminal "did something nuts." He was mentally ill, but not ill enough.
He still knew right from wrong, he could still control himself if he wanted, but he'd reached the point where he no longer wanted to.
Filled with enough hate to be in that danger zone is not normal. It won't happen to just anyone. It actually happens to very few.
There is hope in this. If we'd focus in on it, we could understand better who is approaching the danger zone, crazy enough to do it, but not crazy enough to be unable to do it.
I've seen people like that. They stand out. I even saw one walk into a gun store, and the guy at the counter quietly called the police. We all knew.
2
Thank you for this intelligent, wise, noninflammatory opinion piece. Yes to this: "The scary truth is that ordinary human hatred and aggression are far more dangerous than any psychiatric illness." I already believed this and am glad this therapist has elucidated it for NYT readers. He's right. And he's also correct when he points out just how scary this is.
2
Another piece of the problem is that young men need to be socialized. Lacking guidance and a clear path to earn a place in our society and become a decent man, isolated young men are easy targets for white supremacists, incels, Isis, or other groups building their virtual armies of hate. Only a click away, recruiters are ready to step into the void we have left where there should be a sense of belonging, purpose, and identity. They pay attention to those we have ignored, and the anger and frustration of lonely young men find an easy home in an online community rooted in hatred, violence, and dreams of revenge.
5
The premise that a priori universal background checks and red flag will identify a subset or population will likely commit a crime have wobbly logic and at best indefensible. There is still the tool to commit the heinous acts. These statements may not penetrate thick McConnell and Donald skulls.
1
All abused children don't grow up to abuse, but all abusers were abused and dehumanized as children; they were shamed, humiliated, and controlled as toddlers and young children by law-abiding, friendly-seeming, mask-wearing, severely narcissistic, sadistic, and disordered parents. These parents and alleged caregivers beat the humanity out of their own children through emotional or physical violence or a combination of both. Oftentimes, emotional violence is enough. This is what goes on behind closed doors to millions of children. Some of just become alcoholics and drug addicts, others of us become bipolar or depressed and claim it 'runs in the family.' Some of us, usually the boys, grow up to kill. The culprit is not 'society,' it's individual wolves in sheeps clothing raising children. How to stop it? Intervene in nursery school and kindergarten with formal curricula that teach empathy and kindness. Keep the curricula going through high school. Let us know we have a choice early on in life when our home life, which looks 'normal' to the outside world, is a war zone.
3
I'm sorry to disagree,but the idea that any sane person , no matter how stressed,angry or frustrated, gun owner or not, no matter how disillusioned with society or depressed or whatever, would use a gun to simply mow down people as fast as possible, is way out of line. If that were true we would have many more mass murders every day of our lives. The definition of sanity does not include a mass murderer.. There is a line there. Sorry.
7
“Mental Illness” is a very broad category. There is a huge difference between someone who is so lost in hallucination that they don’t know what they are doing and someone who has a garden-variety neurosis.
Many people cope quite successfully with anxiety, depression, OCD, and various other mental ailments.
Mass shooters do, for the most part, appear to have a similar set of disorders.
• They are easily provoked to rage.
--Because testosterone boasts aggression, they
are more likely to be male.
• They hold grudges.
• They are socially awkward.
• They are obsessive.
• They aren’t good at critical reasoning.
Most of the above is contained under the description of Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD). So if you consider APD to be mental illness, then most shooters are mentally ill.
More importantly, a lot of people can skirt right along the edge of some sort of antisocial disorder and may seem to be fairly normal until they snap, so that’s why we need to focus on gun safety and regulation.
5
Quote: "(Some of my psychiatric colleagues like to point out that mass killers commonly have histories of being physically and sexually abused....)" So who DOES become a mass murderer in the U.S.? A white male. If that white male has been sexually abused as a child, and has not received treatment/justice, he is likely to face enormous doubt about his sexuality because some physical reactions are beyond the control of a victim of sexual abuse. He may have been groomed by the perpetrator to the point at which he truly believes he wanted the sexual contact. If that child comes from a household with fundamentalist or right-wing beliefs, where homosexuality is scorned, he may feel an urgency to prove that he is a "manly man," and seek ways to show dominance. White supremacy and/or "incel" ideology appeals to someone with this mindset, and that way of thinking may not offend (and may even appeal to or be fed by) his family. So what is to be done? Prevent all child abuse? Make sure all victims feel safe to disclose, are believed, and will receive justice? Oh, to be on that planet! A background check cannot detect crimes committed AGAINST the shooter that may have caused devastating harm. (In this way alone, a mass shooter is surely not "sane.") There's no way to check someone's computer without a subpoena. The simplest solution, as you suggest, is gun control. Serious, no-loopholes, enact-it-tomorrow gun control. And greater support for survivors of child abuse of all kinds.
1
Somebody needs to explain why the 1950s was known for spree killers, the 1980s and 1990s for serial murders and today we have mass murderers. It’s like fashion, changing every few years. The People’s Temple murders killed 918 people in a single day. The 9/11 murders killed 3,000. And for all the murders in the US, it’s double in Mexico and half in Canada. Japan has more people killed, but generally the person killed is the killer as suicide.
6
If psychopathy is considered a mental illness things look quite different. Some people seem to consider hearing voices - however friendly and helpful -madness and the complete lack of conscience sanity. This is the logic that considers an anxious depressed battered woman as having a psychiatric problem and her batterer as being just fine.
Janet O'Hare, LCSW
3
It's a cop out and a diversion to blame mass shootings on the shooters' mental illness, but to the extent that it is connected with addiction, mental illness is a factor in shootings. The addiction is that of America's body politic to firearms. To be more precise, it is that of our lawmakers to campaign funds from the gun lobby. They can't kick the habit. Well, it's time we kicked the habit for them, at election time.
22:40 EDT, 8/08
2
"Why Mass Murderers May Not Be Very Different From You or Me" is a misleading headline. They are different from most people. They may be similar in that most do not have one of the major and treatable psychiatric disorders.
6
my late father, although not particularly asute when it came to understanding others, would have identified just about all the mass shooters as "big nothings". which of them was anything other than a washout in ordinary life? was successful in personal relationships, or in career, or in taking care of their family members? name one, I dare you. these men were social failures and not so crazy or stupid that they weren't angry about it. that WE are so foolish and ossified that we insist on making it easy for them to gain the tools to go on a murderous rampage as a result of their life failures makes us the truly crazy ones.
1
Full of rage, well-armed, and almost exclusively male.
8
'Why Mass Murderers May Not Be Very Different From You or Me'
I have been always amazed how many people seem to rationalize that these mas shootings are perpetrated by people who are mentally ill and if only we did more to cure mental illness, much of this horror will go away.
What are they thinking? They think that the ISIS brutalizes its own people because they are mentally ill? People eat vegetarian food or vegan food because they are mentally ill? People worship one god rather than the other because they are mentally ill?
If this is so, no one is quite normal. We are all mentally ill.
1
By his own definition, anybody who could boast that he could get away with shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Ave would also be a "mentally ill monster."
10
Regardless of whether a mass murderer is sane or metally ill the likelihood that society will detect that person’s intentions prior to carrying out a heinous act is, in my estimation, pretty small. Our best bet is to ban the sale of certain types of guns, require background checks for all gun purchases and help our schools identify susceptible individuals, especially young males before they reach a tipping point. Even with these measures there will still be mass shooting although probably a lot fewer. We need to own up to the fact that we are an aggressive society that has treated immigrants, natives, and even our own citizens with contempt when it is convenient. The Brilliance of our democracy is diminished by our lack of compassion. I am always humbled by the Statue of Liberty and what it used to represent.
6
Common sense from a clinical psychiatrist - refreshing. The idea that the psychology/psychiatry tribe can save us from this affliction is preposterous, given their historical record of saving us from nothing else. They'll just slap a label on it, try and come up with some drug, and cry all the way to the bank as the slaughter continues. We don't need their help. We know what to do: ban certain weapons and magazines, real background checks, red flag laws, stop publicizing the shooters, execute them. It's just a matter of political will. That won't come from politicians - only the people.
2
A lot to take in here. I think we need some sort of young adult TV programming in the world that isn't violent, but is still relevant and speaks to issues young people feel but are afraid to say. Something like an adult Mr. Rogers show. I don't think mass killers are mentally ill, but there remains a serious problem with exploring (or not) emotions. Emotional outbursts, even premeditated, often result from too much cognitive control and lack of feeling feelings. I think emotional regulation information that is accessible and cool would do wonders. Topics could include: what to do about rejection, short social psychology information, job skills, social skills, information about how the mind works, how to get along with others while not being overly self-effacing. These are topics we struggle with in the age of anxiety and anger.
1
I am bothered when people suggest psychosis is an illness; I consider this cultural imperialism, an unnecessary degradation of real experience that may be explained more helpfully through recourse to spirituality. But I do not mind. Psychiatrists I do not like dealing with due to the immoral sypport they are given by secular law.
@Mark
Popular use of psychological terms are probably ill informed, but aren't psychosis as professionals describe due to abnormal functioning of the mind?
I reply: it is possible to hear others' voices. This is not abnormal, in my view, just not discussed as the knowledge can disturb people. It may be connected to what, as I mentioned above, a famous American (Allen Ginsberg) called a sort of subconcious (I am not sure if this was the right word) talking about others (or gossip). We need our private space, so to speak. I do not think psychosis (for me a group of symptoms) is an illness, just a very temporary, fluctuating occurrence that may provide food for thought and distress – but nothing I believe to be unchangeable, excepting death. I have met many psychiatrists, and I respect those who speak to me as the educated man I really am, and not as though they were addressing a monocultural boy.
I made a comment mentioning Ginsberg prior to the previous one; if it was not posted, it must have been deemed unnecessary. The reference to Ginsberg is from his lectures: The Best Minds of My Generation. Somewhere, he says that he "think[s] primarily in words" – listening to voices, perhaps, his speech would seem to suggest (Penguin, 2017, p.177).
These are crimes of emotion. The people who commit them have emotional disturbances. Emotional disturbances and mental illness are not the same thing although they are frequently conflated and often found in one person. Sometimes emotional disturbances lead to mental illness but other times the person who suffers them remains rational. The combination of emotional disturbance and rational thought seems to lead to violence on a pretty regular basis.
@not my ancestors Mass shootings represent only 5 % of all death by guns in the USA: nothing.
The dramas that mass shootings produce help hiding the real truth that the USA are a very violent nation. 8 times more violent crime per capita than in Europe.
1
@not my ancestors
I see much of this as "social illness" -- perhaps a new diagnostic terminology. The maleable mind yoked to a society without rules of decorum. It's sad and it's terrifying.
1
@not my ancestors Psychiatry scholars need your help.
You should develop a concept of "emotional disturbance ", and publish it. And you should explain how it is different from mental illness .
So, the core argument here is: mass murder is not necessarily evidence of a “mental illness”. We try to characterize illness in an objective and “impersonal” way; agreeing that being ill is not the fault of the ill person. Consequently, someone who commits this sort of crime may well be “responsible”, and may have some rational motivation. Tragic, morally null, and based on entirely wrong premises but nonetheless logical.
Next, then, are the moral elements. It is most certainly immoral to commit these kinds of crimes. But judging a perpetrator morally is not a diagnosis; it’s more difficult, it’s fraught with peril, and it requires more from us because ethical choices are part of our experience and all of us have fallen short on some occasion. Really, then, it’s most difficult because we are in the end judging ourselves and the society we are part of that has brought us to this point.
So, yes, these people are like us, they can’t be healed or treated medically. They are terribly, terribly wrong, bad, and yes, evil. We all have the freedom to do things good or bad. The sickness is our society, and absent a better society we have to limit the power (of the tools) to murder. Any other response will be ineffective, as so many of us differ substantially on how to achieve a culture where the moral imperative is more readily accepted.
I am not a psychiatrist, but I have worked professionally in medicine, nursing, and public health all of my life, much of it around mental health. My graduate intern program was in an adolescent psychiatric hospital and I have worked with prisoners on occasion found guilty of heinous crimes against others. The first murder of a friend happened while in college and I know the person found guilty of it. The second was of a family member killed by her husband, and it took finally actual evidence of it to convince me of it but only after he himself had died. The author's notions simply don't match my professional, lived or personal experience and frankly, I think he should "have his head examined," as the saying goes.
Extreme behaviors are due to mental states that are far from normal.
People are not killers, usually. Even elite troops find it difficult to kill the enemy unless they have been able to condition themselves to see them as objects. But even the least aggressive and most kind people have the capacity to be killers under certain circumstances.
People who become enraged and strike out most often feel remorse afterwards. It's obvious that they were in an extreme state of mind but which once passed allowed them to see that what they did was inappropriate.
The thing about these mass murderers is that they get into their extreme frames of mind and they stay that way for may months and years. They operate coolly but it's still not fully sane.
I have always been a supporter of 2nd amendment, in part because history repeats itself and a government w/ all the fire power and civilians with zero has made it that much easier for a power-hungry government to become a dictatorship (I do not want to see a world where Trump was the end all be all; look what he’s done from within a democratic government), & because I believe in self-defense.
That said, all this business that common sense controls infringe on people’s rights makes no sense to me. Background checks for all purchasers does make sense to me, along w/ enforcing requirements of agencies to TIMELY report issues so that those checks are accurate.
Blaming mental illness has become a go-to diversion tactic. To me, there is a difference between evil and mental illness; or maybe to be on same page, the definition needs clarification beyond the legal definition. These mass shooters are full of hate, and hate enables people a tremendous ability to rationalize their behavior, cemented by exposing themselves to others that champion them on, rationalizing they’re at war so it’s ok to kill; to them it’s self-defense, whether the impetus is racism or religion, they justify their actions as righteous.
Final thought, I don’t think there is one solution to fix all, but we do need to start somewhere. Common sense control with actual follow-thru & enforcement should be an easy first step. The fact that it isn’t? I agree with an earlier poster who said “follow the money.”
4
@Bonnie
not sure citizens toting guns, even the military-style ones that are preferred by mass murderers, will be a a check on a power-hungry government in this day and age. The disparity in firepower voids the primary motivation behind the Second Amendment in my mind.
1
@Bonnie
Are you kidding? The idea of the 2nd amendment as a bulwark against an abusive government is pure fantasy. I could argue this point all day, but for one thing even the worst government has its supporters and the best you could hope for is civil war.
I agree that there's no one solution to fix all, but some are more useful than others. Even with the Supreme Court's expansive interpretation of the 2nd amendment in the Heller decision, it made clear that the right to bear arms. like all rights, is not unlimited. It remains constitutional to ban private ownership of any weapon capable of firing multiple rounds in a matter of a few seconds.
23:05 EDT, 8/08
1
@S.C.
I agree. I’ve had to re-think things as I got older and technology advanced. As a kid in high school, the big bad everyone talked about was sawed-off shot guns. I definitely now think it unwise for citizens to have unfettered access to what they would need access to (missile launchers & bombs) to keep pace with the military. I think I see weapons as another area we’ve advanced technologically so quickly in that the law has not kept pace. The point I muddled from first post was that I can’t keep holding on to a belief or reason because that’s how I’ve always thought. 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 200 hundred years ago - very different times and I don’t want to be so stuck in my beliefs I’m unable to evolve to meet our current reality. Not sure I’m making any better sense this post, but thank u for “listening” to my thoughts.
1
One of the stupidest forms of reductionist thinking is people's belief that since most mentally ill people don't commit crimes, those who do commit crimes don't do it because of mental illness. Yes they do (excusing for "crimes of passion"). Antisocial Personality is a mental illness, and men qualifying for that diagnosis could be jerks, con men or serial killers. Conduct Disorder is a mental health diagnosis given to children and teens whose behavior seems to indicate a lack of conscience and a willful disregard for social conventions and people's rights. And let's not forget sociopathy and psychopathy -- unofficial diagnoses that can be understood as further along the Antisocial continuum.
3
Well if they're not "mentally ill" they certainly fit the psychologists' next favorite term: "maladaptive."
We don't call "drunks" mentally ill for the most part, either. Excessive drinking has a way of ensuring sub-par outcomes in a lot of areas of your life. That's also certainly true of picking up a gun and murdering a dozen or more people.
That we're picking nits over such labels indicates that we might be the ones with the perception problem.
1
Poor impulse control and lots of anger are the cause of most of these mass shootings. They are not necessarily "mental illnesses", but they are not totally normal, either.
There used to be a man who came to my pulmonary rehab. He was a very angry man, and felt he had been mistreated by "life". He had gone to trade school in HS but then resented that he had never gone very far in his company. He had been an enlisted rank in the National Guard, and mouthed off regularly to superiors, resulting in having his demotion in rank. He felt this was quite unfair as he "knew more than they did". He deeply resented anyone who had more than he had materially. He was estranged from his children and grandchildren due to his episodes of verbal abuse and just general unpleasantness.
It was not easy to sit with this man between exercises 3 times a week, and sometimes when he was "on a roll", I sat elsewhere - just not up to hearing it.
He described his wife as "utterly incompetent" and he had to regularly "put her in her place". She became very ill. I think frankly, she finally realized that dying was her only way out of this awful marriage. He then went on a tirade about the government expecting him to spend every penny of his savings on this worthless woman's care - VERY unfair in his eyes.
A couple of us we very afraid that this would end up with a murder suicide, he was so angry. Fortunately, she just died. It would not have taken much for him to be a mass murderer.
10
soinds. Iike the very description of a man consumed by selfishness. iow, a Republican.
1
Those who are blaming them with mental illness are actually mentally ill and are unable to grasp the situation.
1
It has everything to do with how one defines "very."
In fact, it’s a bit surprising there aren’t more victims in spree killing events given the rising tide of hatred and resentment in many of the perpetrators. Anxiety and fear creep the street in contemporary America.
1
Let's stipulate that millions of men get very angry and even fly into rages frequently.
They harbor grudges, feel slighted and treated unjustly. No doubt some have violent fantasies of the worst kind.
Yet, only a tiny percentage of these men arm themselves and slaughter the innocent and unarmed.
In plain English, Dr. Friedman, what makes these men carry out such monstrous acts, while the vast majority do not?
This leaves aside the mater of sanity versus insanity.
1
Thank you for this. The El Paso shooters' manifesto was indeed of a higher quality than the Christchurch document. Two items stand out that distinguish it from others of like ilk:
- it carefully avoided targeting Blacks. This mirrors Trumps' tactics, notwithstanding his swipe at Cummings. Ignorant people such as Trump can't avoid descent into racist tropes, but Trump went after Cummings because the latter subpoened a member of his crime family, son in law Kushner, the "son he wanted to have". At the end of the day, his family is all he cares about. As with all crime families,
- for the first time I have seen, it explicitly targets H1B and other "visa" immigrants. That differs from Trump, who has assiduously avoided this area. Can you say Comrade Modi, who has just "done a Trump" on Kashmir?
Finally, we must notice the undertone of profound dispair in the document. The shooter is deeply depressed. Political depression, not clinical. He knows that his cause is hopeless in the USA.
What we do know about all of us is that
a) We’re human
b) As humans, we’re fallible
That is exactly why smart human societies put sensible regulations on dangerous things so our fallibility is less likely to get us into trouble.
Consider poison. There are many hazardous substances that have useful purposes, but that also can cause great harm. Because humans are fallible, we restrict such poisons.
Back in the 1800’s, you could walk into a pharmacy and purchase a large bag of potassium cyanide. Today, you can’t.
The FDA and OSHA were founded for exactly this reason. You won’t find a big box of potassium cyanide on the drugstore shelf next to the Tylenol. Cyanide is on the Hazardous Substance List and regulated according to the Federal Hazardous Substance Act.
Most of us would find it absurd if there were a National Poison Association that lobbied for no regulations on poison. Most of us would laugh if a NPA spokesperson declaimed, “Poisons don’t kill people! People do! Get rid of the Federal Hazardous Substance Act. Get rid of verified buyers and sellers of poisons! Get rid of childproof caps on medications! It’s an infringement of our freedom! If a child wants a Tylenol, he will smash the bottle under foot and eat it! Childproof caps only restrict the freedom of adults to access their medication!”
All of us are fallible; that is why a civilized society creates sensible safety regulation. And why we need of a "Federal Hazardous Device Act" for weapons.
Two thoughts:
Many people would not try to complicate matters with fine points of causation and definitive diagnostic definitions. The simple fact that someone shoots up a bunch of strangers means they're crazy.
On the other hand we've all permitted violent video games and Tarantino movies to overwhelm the better angels of... oh, never mind. Is it worth repeating?
This is hogwash. The vast majority of people never assault anyone, with or without a gun.
3
Most of these young white men are from solidly middle-class or upper-middle-class homes. Rarely do we see young women, minorities, or people raised in poverty planning or carrying out mass murder.
These young men have a sense of entitlement I find troubling. it's as if they never had to learn that life isn't fair, that they were never taught that we have to solve our own problems in life rather than blame them on someone else or expect someone else to fix them for us.
is there a more entitled outlook on life than one that says to groups of innocents, "You must die to make my life better,"?
15
I had to laugh when I read this. The one with the pyschotic illness is Trump.
4
Its striking that the conservatives who are usually skeptical of an insanity defense are assuming mental illness in a politically charged shooting.
8
I'm rather shock that all of NYT Picks' comments don't advocate gun control as the necessary and perhaps only mean to deal decisively with mass killings in the US. Mental illness or not, mass killings occur regularly like clockwork in the US and taking away the guns, especially the military styled assault weapons, is the only solution. All other debates not focusing on removing guns from circulation are just not serious and honest.
2
What most mass murderers -- and the majority of other murderers -- have in common is that they are male. We need to question why that is.
7
The void was already in these young mens’ hearts before Trump and his ilk came along. Someone taught these lads to hate. Then that hate ignited into the awful violent acts we saw last weekend.
Sometimes I think there is no one in these people’s lives that question their idiotic ideas. Before their acts get so horrific is there anyone - ANYONE - that looks at them and says ‘Get that idea outta your head!’
Ridiculous, but admit I only read the headline! I did once smash plates in a rage, but KILLING? Never never never never. Although if I had ever been stupid enough to buy a gun, I might have considered using it in anger. Like to kill my brother after he killed my father. I thought long and very hard about buying one after that happened, but in the end did not buy a gun to kill him, even though he deserved to die. Good people use reasoning. Bad people do not.
Not so different than you or me? I think that's something of a distortion. Even if these people are not clinically insane, I would argue that they are quite different!
The capacity to pick up a deadly weapon and end the lives of people you don't even know, without hesitation or a pang of conscience? This is a severe alienation and disaffection that can only be deemed sociopathic. Most people are not sociopaths.
2
Dr. Friedman, I'd like for you to apply the same science to the men responsible for shooting former US Rep. Giffords, current US Rep. Scalise, and the Dayton massacre. Your findings are certainly anticipated.
I must have missed the part where he said mass killers are never mentally ill.
I don't care if you are a psychiatrist, Freud's half-step-niece or Jesus. If you define "mentally ill" in a way that excludes characterological (rather than situational) hatred for global populations, then you rid the term of any useful meaning. Really. If millions of kind-hearted depressives and anxious souls have a mental illness, wouldn't common sense tell you that serial killing and manifesto-writing botches also do?
1
I live a big part of the year in central China. My friends ask lots of questions about why the government lets this happen. Among the questions is “Aren’t you scared?” ......
2
No, they are not mentally ill. I've worked on many capital murder cases over the last 30 years, and I can tell you capital murders are not a result of mental illness but of cruel people acting without conscience. I have to wonder where Dr. Friedman went to medical school, since he seems to have never heard of antisocial personality disorder (people with this defect are popularly called sociopaths or psychopaths).
It's sort of ridiculous to assert that because these murderers don't have a diagnosis of mental illness, they are "like us." They are not. They are - for whatever reason - lacking in conscience and empathy. I have seen many of them over the years. They will tell any lie, and believe that others will believe them because they believe that they are the smartest person in the room. They lack any human sympathy or empathy. They are "cold-blooded" in the sense that they commit horrible crimes and feel no remorse, absorb none of the victims' pain. No, Dr. Friedman, they are not "like us." What a silly article you've written.
10
@Dallas Clare I agree with this wholeheartedly.
A quick google search also shows that the prevalence of psychotic illness in the general populous is 5.93 per 1000 people, which works out to 0.6%.
This shows that 5% of mass killers suffering with psychotic illnesses alone is frighteningly high. Thats not to mention people who are likely not diagnosed.
Further to this, I agree that it is likely that sociopathic/ psychopathic tendencies are high in mass killers.
One of my Dads girlfriends when I was growing up worked in the prison service. She worked with extremely high risk offenders.
One thing she said stood out to me, that was how manipulative the offenders were. They felt as though they could justify their actions with complete disregard to the feeling of others. The victims 'deserved' it.
This killing is an atrocity as are all mass killings. There are a multitude of factors & this article is poor at best.
To paraphrase Bertand Russell, this is systematic abuse of the word "normal".
6
Here but for the grace of God go I.
1
By any rational measure, owning guns is insane, because the upside is cheap thrills, but the downside is bottomless.
3
@Steve Bolger
Owning a motorcycle, riding a horse, driving a fast car, skiing, mountain climbing, hiking in Alaska, having unprotected sex, not knowing what exactly what that white powder is and most of all work all fall under the same category.
1
@JoeG: Hurting oneself differs from hurting others.
So basically these guys can't (or won't) compete in the game of life: they are losers. This is especially obvious in the "incel" label. I'm reminded of an old pop tune entitled "Lonesome Loser" (beaten by the queen of hearts every time) and more to the point an older Carole King tune "Smackwater Jack." (You can't talk to a man with a shotgun in his hand.) Nearly 50 years old; this stuff has been going on forever. The only difference is that now everyone can have, in fact, a machine-gun. They were outlawed in the past.
1
Why do we want a gun? To hunt food? Ok. To protect against crime? Ok. Because of a family tradition or you just like them? Ok. To further a delusion or a grudge or a crime? No. You have to show an id to get a firearm at the very least. If you’re on the NICs list due to certain psych/mental health issues you’ll be denied unless you meet administrative/legal criteria to get off it. Right to bear arms is at present broadly interpreted by the Supreme Court. Successfully argue to revisit and amend existing precedent. Somehow properly identify those in the fifth group, perhaps by a rebuttable presumption. Voter records are public. So should gun application and ownership be. Ours and our children’s lives are visibly obviously and painfully at stake. Red flag laws are a step in the right direction. And hey this is a short comment and obviously there’s many moving pieces, so if Captain Obvious or Glenn gun nut has beef with it, tough tarts. Write your own comment.
Most of them aren't mentally ill, just evil. Too bad we can't deny guns to people for being evil.
Have you ever "snapped"?
I'll bet that you have; I know that I have. It's scary at the time and later because you are out of control, and often can't ever really explain why.
It's irrational, a possessive takeover by the Unconscious, for lack of a better description. But your mind functions very well during these dramatic episodes.
Fortunately, I've never lost it "big-time," and I'm 70, so I'm probably much less of a risk than Joe Sixpack, but I don't know. Maybe tomorrow some powerful emotion will take me over and have me do awful things, "front-page-of-the-New-York-Times" things. I certainly have no rational plans for such, but, again, it's possible, I humbly assume. I have snapped before.
I used to be relatively fearless. What could happen, right? Well, tragically, a lot could happen. Predicting it, even in yourself, as the doctor here says, is nigh impossible. No, it is impossible. I think that's a truth "Mr. Robot" teaches, among other things. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" also gets at this human mystery.
"For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do." (Romans 7:19)
1
Mentally ill person here! Depression, anxiety, general neurotic tendencies—for my entire life, basically. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I *really* resent being lumped into the same category as mass murderers. It’s lazy thinking and just plain old scapegoating that leads people like this author (and the President!) to blame our national gun problem on mental illness. Mental illness exists in every country on earth. Mass shootings on this scale and with this frequency exist in ONE.
We have a gun control problem, distinct from our failures as a nation to address and take seriously mental illness. Killers aren’t “just like you and me” because guess what? The vast majority of us (in any mental state) don’t kill people!
10
It’s not mental illness. It’s the guns. We must find a way to first remove assault style weapons from private ownership then strengthen restriction on all firearms not unlike the laws currently in place for Australia. It will be extremely difficult to accomplish but there is no other way to effectively change the current dynamics in play here. Also, we must create buy-back programs for high capacity magazines as well a ban them from future sale. I am an avid shooter and own many single shot, bolt action rifles. I make my own match grade bullets and shoot competitively. And I am willing to accept greater restrictions even on my ownership and use of my equipment if it resulted in limiting the horrific events that seem to occur everyday in our country.
2
I think what is left out of your column (and all of psychiatry), Dr. Friedman, is where evil fits in with all this. That's the question on a lot of people's minds. I appreciate the statistics on mental illness and violence, and your desire to further the understanding of it with solid facts, but only approaching it from a clinical standpoint leaves too much out. Why do only philosophers and spiritual leaders talk about evil? How can we learn to measure it and predict when a troubled kid becomes a dangerous man? It's not just a concept -- it's real, like depression and mania and we know a lot more about those. Amazing the things science already does and we can't seem to get a handle on evil, or even make it part of the equation.
@Michele
I find the term "evil" to be absurd. It's a way out of being specific. It's an easy way to have a general answer for something. People don't steal, kill, rob, cheat, because of "evil". There are specific answers out there for people willing to give an effort to find it. For everyone else, "evil" covers it for them.....
We all know someone who doesn't think like most of us. If our friend said some "others" should be eliminated, we would tell those who can help.
How about those with no friends and such thoughts? Did they ever go to school? Of course.
Social skills, listening to students, knowing them, lessons (homework) to befriend others, how to listen and communicate and discuss problems is far more important than learning algebra.
Yes, math should be taught but isn't how to live more important?
I've always felt like most every human being has the capacity to kill - out of profound rage, fear, despondency or any combination thereof.
Clearly, each person has a different "activation energy" required to get them to that terrible place. Elements which result in a lower "activation energy" probably include: higher testosterone, poorer frontal lobe function, and a hyperactive amygdala.
And of course, the degree of carnage such a person is able to inflict absolutely depends on the weapon available to him/her. If all they have is a knife, they _might_ manage to get one victim. If they have access to a semi-automatic firearm, dozens of people could die in a minute.
2
The greatest violence we can do is to see someone as less than ourselves: then, every other type of violence becomes possible. We must understand that we all have this ability to see others as people, with needs objectives and challenges just like ourselves, or as objects, things to be used, abused or ignored. Being mindful that how we see others, including those we may vehemently disagree with, is what determines if we move down the slippery slope of violence. #Turntheworldoutward.
3
They look like you and me and they share certain human habits with the rest of us. They even sit next to us in restaurants or churches, go to concerts or state fairs, maybe even vote in elections. But unlike soldiers under the duress of firefights, the tender they carry, waiting to be lit, is more volatile because in this country, we've bought into all the myths of what makes a man a man, what makes an individual unique, what makes the news. Whether its rage over perceived slights or exaggerated fears of displacement by others, these gunmen live in fantasy worlds that too often look like movie sets without the camera. They cogitate with the myths fully ingrained, they listen to others who share the same over-blown fears, they find someone to blame for their failures (which are not due to some diminished mental capacity), they choose their weapons, pick their targets and let the world know that they have the power necessary to change the world - of their victims. Problem is, the live among us and resemble one another so much that they look like any of us with our pedestrian neuroses and anxieties.
2
The “manifesto” is an angst ridden diatribe of a very depressed young man (a boy, really) but if we’re going to ascribe blame based on what he wrote then we have to it take it in its entirety, and not just the snippets.
He also checks all the boxes for an extreme environmentalist and a far left social justice warrior. The manifesto has long rants on the degradation of the environment and how corporations are destroying the planet, etc.
6
I just read the manifesto.
The shooter held a surprisingly rational, though motley, set of beliefs shared by many on the right...and left.
What a dispiriting conclusion he reached about what to do about his convictions.
3
This is patently not true. Many recent mass shootings have been perpetrated by people who show obvious signs of mental illness, specifically sociopathy aka antisocial personality disorder. Some would meet diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia or other thought disorders. Mass shooters who do not show remorse by definition are sociopaths. As I mentioned above, sociopathy is a DSM-V diagnoses. This means that practically all mental health professionals in the United States agree that that is a form of mental illness. The problem is, how do we identify people who may actually be sociopaths.
I would argue that more resources especially in the early years of primary school would help to identify children that may show early signs of antisocial personality disorder or sociopathy. Likewise, higher education as well as secondary education should be vigilant about students who are showing signs not only of a thought disorder such as schizophrenia, but also of potential sociopathy.
We need to bolster our education and mental health services to make this happen. This requires political will.
I also recognize that there is a role for gun control. However, we need to address the despair and mental health problems that are so evident in many of the mass shooters.
3
I believe Sociopathy is a personality disorder, not mental illness. A disorder may, or may not be a mental illness. Very ambiguous...
@David Kaye
You'll have better luck cleaning the ocean with a pool skimmer than trying to diagnose millions of people for possible anti social behavior as a means to reduce mass shootings.
We'd save more lives more quickly if we go to the root of the real problem. Guns.
David, are you a professional who makes diagnostic decisions using the DSM-V?
It is our vanity that makes us want to differentiate ourselves from the ones that do abhorrent things. Unfortunately, that same impulse also blinds us from seeing the simple human motives for them.
2
My friend has advocated for several decades that only adult females should have access to weapons.
She's been correct all this time.
15
The Aurora Theater shooter was mentally ill, schizophrenia, but was found competent to stand trial. He was under a psychiatrist's care. It gives on pause to think that even this could not prevent a horrific mass murder and somewhat undermines the claim that more mental health services will help diminish these acts of violence. Most of the other shootings here in Colorado have not been identified as having been caused by any mental illness diagnosis.
The only thread that seems to connect these shootings, inspired by Trump or not, is a rage-filled, usually young, white male with perceived grievances. And there are many of those around. Nobody can predict who the next one will be.
We can round up everyone who fits this profile, or we can have some sensible reduction in weapons of mass murder. More medical services won't help a bit.
2
@Fredd R
Spot on!
I'm continually amazed by that simplistic category "mental illness." Do we speak of "physical illness" in the same way? Do we lump together the common cold and pancreatic cancer? While it's no doubt true that the majority of these shooters are not actively delusional, does that make them healthy?
The various authors arguing that the men (and they largely are men) who pick up weapons and slaughter dozens of people don't have a "mental illness" often undermine their own positions. This writer states that while many shooters have suffered sexual and physical abuse, millions of other Americans have endured similar suffering without resorting to mass violence. But doesn't that make these shooters unusual then, somehow less capable of governing their rage? Isn't this phenomenon worth investigating?
It is of course true that blaming "mental illness" for mass shootings is just a cowardly dodge, a failure to admit that the proliferation of guns in America sets us apart from the other industrialized nations and makes crimes of this nature more likely. But I think we need to start thinking more clearly the nature of "mental illness" and how it may influence human behavior.
Our understanding of human psychology is rudimentary. As we value our lives, I think we should be trying to make it less so.
132
@Shirley Gutierrez
So, by extending your argument, Bonny and Clyde were mentally deranged and all those in their home town who idolized them were similarly affected? There are outlaws and there are terrorists in this world who put their own life above others. Read any personal account of war, such as the one in Vietnam, and you will find that each of the people turned into soldiers reacts differently to the job of killing. Some take to it and get off on it.
Humans are not all that sophisticated when they feel threatened or releases from the normal bonds of behavior.
15
@Shirley Gutierrez Our understanding of human psychology is most definitely not "rudimentary." We are living in a golden age of psychological science and the nature and etiology of mental illness is well understood. The fact is anti-social behavior, even if terrifying, does not make a person mentally ill.
We are social creatures and despite our uniquely American insistence that only individuals matter, our behavior and view of the world is defined by our social interaction. Quite a bit of interesting research is out there on how ordinary people get radicalized by extremist movements, many times thru online interaction alone. The libertarian contempt for social institutions tends to weaken them and discredits the role they play in providing people with appropriate social roles while empowering amorphous white supremacist movement groups. Add to that government's unwillingness to regulate internet communication and stop the proliferation of firearms you get tragedies in the making.
19
@Shirley Gutierrez Labeling mass murder a mental illness is more denialist nonsense to avoid facing our gun problem.
6
A few months after Trump assumed his duties as president, the topic of his mental state came up at a dinner gathering I attended. There were 8 people around the table, all highly educated and some were medical professionals. Seven of them concluded Trump had to be suffering from a diagnosable mental illness to be making the decisions he was already rolling out early in his term.
One of the guests, a PhD in psychology with a long, illustrious career in a highly regarded university, begged to differ, noting that to call Trump mentally ill was an offense to people who really suffered from the ravages of such diseases. "He's a bully and a spoiled manchild, the kind of person who rarely responds to any professional effort to help him control his behavior and everyone around him will suffer for it" was his prediction. And two years later the impact of Trump's behavior on a national and worldwide scale shows this man was right on.
26
Dr. Friedman, just because a person‘s behavior and cognitive processes do not qualify him or her for a diagnosis from the extremely flawed DSM, it hardly means that they are just like you and me. Nor does a person have to be psychotic to exhibit rigid thought processes, a deep sense of persecution or weak impulse control.
7
Human beings are capable of rage. They are also capable of laughter.
Now, suppose that people could actually easily die of laughing too much. Then further suppose that a large troupe of comedians goes through the country, causing many people to die because of their antics.
The Dr. Friedman of that world would have us all cowering in fear, because any of us could die laughing at any moment, since so many of us are capable of being amused.
Absurd? No more so than the "reasoning" of this article. One would think that in that world, sane people would emerge who would do something about the comedians responsible for all the deaths.
If only there was something in this world analogous to the comedians, some group or even, say, some tool or weapon similar in effect to the comedians who make us die laughing in that other world. Something that sane people could actually do something about, rather than resigning ourselves to the potential deadliness inherent in ordinary human nature.
But, apparently not.
1
It’s a horrific storm, given that Trump has attracted the most desperate of our society and he essentially gives them reasons for their plight. He tells them that it is not their individual failings but it is the other in our society that is to be blamed. Indeed, we can not overlook the power of armed anger and desperation.
1
Humans seemed doomed to live by a swinging pendulum. Much as behavioral aberrants were treated horridly in decades past, the mental illness descriptor now seems to absolve someone of personal accountability and responsibility.
People generally label those who seek power without empathy as power mongers rather than mentally ill. Mental illness tends to be associated with irrational behavior, disorganized thought, lack of focus. None of these descriptions apply to the very focused, methodical plans of out very own home-grown terrorists. The proper goal is to discern how a human becomes so angry and filled with hate. ...More articles on parents are needed.
5
@Em It's not parenting that needs to be examined -- it's the whole society's celebration of toxic masculinity as the desirable norm for men, with it's glorification of always being right, always being strong, always being forceful and violent if necessary, and never, ever being vulnerable. So many "successful" stunted man-boys about in our society, making compassion, empathy, patience, and self-awareness so difficult to nurture, especially in boys.
Claiming mass murder with an assault weapon is motivated by mental illness conveniently ignores the fact that the military selects the best of America's youth to be armed and trained to kill people. It may be a kind of insanity, but in the context of war, we honor those who are good at it.
The El Paso shooter wasn't mentally ill. He considered himself a soldier protecting America from foreign invasion, because America's Commander in Chief called it that.
8
Beg to differ. By what standard can you claim the"best of America's youth join the military? " I will leave my personal feelings about the military aside and just say this is a bold assertion based on puffery.
1
Spoiler alert: I've never owned a gun in my life. Nonetheless: a gun, by itself in a closet, will never kill anyone. Money, in a safe deposit box, will never spend itself. Neither guns nor money are the root of all evil. People are the root of all evil. We most certainly don't need a "psychologist" or a pollster to tell us what should already be self-evident to rational people. This should be intuitively obvious. A knife is not evil. A rock is not evil. A hammer is not evil. They can be made into tools of evil because people can be evil. In so far as hate? I don't have the answer to that except people have killed each other since before we started keeping time or began counting the stars. I suspect it will continue as much as we try to stop it. I wish the race of humans luck. I don't have long to live, and I can't think of a better time to go. This really has become a truly horrid place.
3
@Tee Jones, no, a rock is not evil, nor is a knife. It’s the intent that makes those evil. If I hit you with a rock, my intent makes the rock a weapon. The same with a knife. But guns have intention built in. The pistol, invented in the 16th century, was devised to kill other people. It was always a weapon of war. So yes, guns carry death in their DNA. A rock can build a wall; a knife can cut a tomato. A gun? It kills. Period.
1
Debating whether mass killers are mentally ill or not is only going to ensure more killings. Eliminating automatic weapons and high capacity magazines is the only way to stop the mass murders that we are experiencing.
9
Look, we need to understand the Republican tropes of "the violent video games made them do it" and the "it's not a gun problem, it's a mental illness problem" for what they are.
They are Republicans reciting the talking points given to them by their NRA overlords. Those statements have one, and only one purpose, deflect the blame for mass murder away from guns. The NRA and the Republicans they own lock, stock and barrel have a mission. Ensure gun and ammunition sales are not negatively impacted. Mass murders of men, women and children shot to pieces with assault rifles are just collateral damage, a cost of doing business.
Keep this in mind the next time some NRA hand puppet talks about video games or mental illness. The violent video games are played all over the world. They're played in Japan and in Canada. Those citizens generally refrain from mass murder with guns. To accept the mental illness argument requires a belief that mental illness is a primary cause of murder. It isn't. People murder for money, jealousy, fear, love, hatred and of course ideology. You would also have to believe this country has a much higher incidence of mental illness than any other industrialized country.
Let's go with Occam's Razor: We have more guns, and easier access to guns than any other country. That's why we have more gun related murders. Simple.
12
Dr.Friedman’s column states what has already been proven many times over: the vast majority of gun violence has nothing to do with mental illness and violent behavior in an individual cannot be predicted with any accuracy.
So, while background checks might help in the occasional extreme circumstance and are therefore desirable as they may prevent some gun violence, for the most part they will not stop most gun shootings.
Like the right to drive automobiles, we need periodic gun licensing and registration. Also ammunition licensing and ballistic registrations, legal prohibition of semiautomatic weapons, as well as likenesses thereof, in private hands, and more stringent laws regarding open carry and handgun possession.
Development of smart guns able to be fired only by their owners would prevent some accidental shootings and shootings with a stolen firearm.
****A Connecticut physician
3
@Michael Richter I agree with what you say. There is a problem, however, that persons inclined to break the law are easily able to obtain almost any weapon they wish, outside the confines of regulation. Ask any juvenile how long it would take them to obtain a gun. The answer demonstrates how tricky this problem is.
This article illustrates the dangerous foolishness of simply applying a label to someone who behaves in a way that designates the offender as ‘other.’ Whew, it wasn’t me, I’m normal. Just like we now want to designate these offenders as terrorists. Whew, everyone knows terrorists are evil.
We need to start examining what is happening in our beloved country that is ripping us from one another. What is causing us to violently turn on neighbors. What is turning us into lesser humans who have no empathy for those who are suffering. What is responsible for the complete lack of compassion for human beings who are forced to flee unspeakably dangerous living conditions.
We are becoming a mentally ill nation whose hatred has made an idol of guns.
Any thoughts on who is seeding this hatred?
3
Absolutely stunning that the article does not mention one commonality among the mass murderers, that they are all men. Why is there no discussion of this, no insight into why it is always men? If the news were full of stories of women committing mass murder, or only people of one race, or one background, or one other biological or racial demographic, there would be serious research and policy solutions looking into it.
Clearly boys and men need extensive training and education from a young age about how to cope in society, how to deal with anger, rage and jealousy, and how to live peacefully with others.
21
Thank you for this.
"you and me" are not well armed,
and not angry - except at the politicians
who put gunmen's rights over the right
of the rest of the country
not to be killed and threatened by gunmen.
Gunmen shooters are very different from
"you and me." They could not be more different.
5
Everything Trump says, anytime he opens his mouth in public, is a diversion. He’s neither ignorant of this nor unaware of his own racism and what both mean in context with personal gain. Nothing in him or about him by now seems “unconscionable”.
1
There's a wonderful story in the Bible relevant to both those who would kill others and those who think they couldn't:
The Pharisee and the Tax Collector
He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
2
I am rather surprised that a professor of psychiatry sees mental illness in such black and white terms - "only 20 percent had a psychotic illness; the other 80 percent had no diagnosable mental illness..."
So there is no accounting for major depression, for personality disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, panic disorders, etc.
I see where Friedman wants to use the definition of insanity as equal to mental illness. That is not the Merriam-Webster definition, and I would say, by looking to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that that is not the psychiatric definition either.
I agree with other commenters that there is likely a combination of characteristics mass murders may have in common. These likely include unrestrained impulses, callousness & other traits - traits often aligned with psychopathy - defined as "a person suffering from a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior."
There are people who function in society as psychopaths (Trump is probably one) who do not go on mass murder sprees. That does not mean that we are all psychopaths.
3
Very true! Anyone who has ever experienced a road rage or has be subjected to it knows what momentary explosive anger can do to a person. Granted these shootings seem to have been planned ahead of time. But I can see how bottled up anger can turn to hate can turn to mass shooting. If there is something called temporary insanity then just about anyone could be dangerous if they have access to a gun.
2
@Lagrange
Absolutely.
Its tougher to adopt a dog, get a driver's license, or get married than it is to buy a gun in the USA. Let's get logical about guns and fewer mass shootings will naturally follow. This isn't rocket science.
14
Dr. Friedman says "They are just filled with hate - and well armed." Filled with hate? What causes someone to be "filled" with hate? Since our brains are the seat of our consciousness and differences in the way the brain functions can lead to all kinds of behaviors, some of which are horrific, it sounds to me like we need to rethink what mental illness really is or isn't. If from birth the brain is wired in a way that doesn't allow for empathy might we consider that something that could lead to narcissism? Is that a mental illness? When a child molester tells us they cannot stop molesting no matter what punishments are handed out might that not be considered a form of mental illness? Until we know beyond the shadow of a doubt what the causes are of what today we call being filled with hate or evil we need to rethink what we call mental illness. Insanity, is something else. Not being able to tell reality from some psychotic state where the person doesn't know the difference is where we like to draw the insanity line. I believe we need to draw it somewhere entirely different. Ted Bundy was a gregarious , personable charmer who could function in society perfectly well. Was he insane? Mentally ill? I would say yes to both counts.
1
@Magan, personality disorders are classified as a mental illness, but you don't actually have to have one to be evil.
Rational people can just about rationalize anything. Stoke them up and let them go and they're capable of just about anything.
even if it's just aiding and abetting.
5
FYI, you left out the latest FBI and Secret Service studies that found the majority of shooters from the last few years had mental illnesses or mental illness warning signs. Why did you choose to leave out 2013-present data?
5
Mental illness not unique to the United States. Repeated mass shootings are. Mental illness is a scapegoat used by the NRA and its lackeys to deflect attention away from what is obviously the problem: easy access to guns with little or no accountability on the part of the buyer, seller, or manufacturer. Regulate license restrict. BTW, no other industrialized country in the world has a 2nd Amendment and they are all doing just fine without. Why can’t we?
7
I don't believe that an "ordinary" person is capable of opening fire on a random group of strangers. I think you have to be very disconnected from yourself and from reality to do that. Even if a person has not previously been diagnosed, in the moment of doing that you can't be connected to yourself or to reality otherwise you would not be capable of doing that. This state of total disconnection may or may not have a name, but it is not the normal state of a human being.
1
This extreme “disconnection” is part of being a sociopath. There is a lack of remorse and empathy. Patterns suggestive of sociopathy often show up in childhood and teen years, as well as early adulthood. I think if you speak with pediatricians, family doctors , teachers, and guidance counselors around the nation, many agree that these “red flags” are evident. They will also tell you that too many kids slip through the cracks in our massively under-resourced educational and mental health “systems”. We can do better.
What most mass murderers -- and, for that matter, ordinary murderers -- share is a form of solipsism, a mental landscape in which other people have no innate value but exist, rather, merely as props to facilitate the action in the murderer's own self-scripted and self-focused drama.
That would appear to be the result of a moral disease, not a psychological one.
Most assuredly, President Trump is loathsome and exacerbates that disease. His rhetoric about "infestation" and "invasion" serves to dehumanize his targets in the eyes of his supporters. The most recent assaults on immigrants and minorities are certainly, to some large degree, properly laid at his feet.
But that kind of rhetoric has never been unique to the political right. Antifa "protesters" who club people in the streets that they deem to be "enemies" respond to the same ugly impulse. Baader-Meinhof and the Weather Underground were both products of the radical left, not of the radical right, and both blew up innocent bystanders along with their targets without any seeming regret. The vitriol with which Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren revile "the rich" and "the 1%" -- and their calls to "take America back" from them -- are different only in intensity, not in kind, from the vitriol with which Trump reviles immigrants.
-apl
3
Again, remember that extreme narcissism as you describe is similar to sociopathy and IS a DSM5 diagnosis. I agree that there is a spiritual and moral crisis that is part and parcel of the violence we are experiencing. But individuals that perform mass murders are more often than not people who suffer from a major mental illness. They are not well adjusted people. And yes they do have easy access to weapons of all types.
Of course the lack of a clinical diagnosis is irrelevant to those on the wrong end of the gun.
4
Everyone gets angry from time to time. Sometimes irrationally so. But it takes a truly hateful person to decide to pick up a gun a kill, and an especially hateful person to use an assault rifle to commit mass murder.
Making the conscious, planful decision to kill strangers with a firearm, that's what separates them from us.
And it makes all the difference in the world.
1
I think the NY Times badly needs to rethink some of its headlines. I was truly affronted by the caption that said, in effect, that someone filled with hate was not that much different from the rest of us. The vast majority of us, no matter our ideology or politics, are not monsters. Make no mistake--anyone who knows these mass murderers knows what they are. Their acquaintances and family may not be willing to admit it, even to themselves, but they know. The fact that these monsters are clinically sane does not erase the divide that will forever separate them from the rest of humanity.
5
@gesneri - anyone who knows these mass murderers knows what they are? That is a bold statement, and one that vastly underestimates the complexity of human beings.
@gesneri History is replete with communities of normal people who become convinced they are the victim of another group. They then perpetrate all sorts of
grotesque acts that involve mass murder because they feel they are on the side of good. It is so common as to be boring.
Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands" suggested that perhaps the best the way to avoid being an accomplice to mass murder, is to consider yourself a potential perpetrator. It is certainly something to think about.
I'm all set with this go-nowhere conversation about backgrounds checks and red-flag laws. Let's go all the way to licensing. You have to have a license to operate a vehicle, which is probably the deadliest machine of all. Seems a no-brainer to require a license for gun ownership.
2
Right you are, Dr. Friedman. The first place to look for danger is in the mirror. Let us not think we can be safe because that other guy has been neutralized. We all need to share responsibility because, contrary to the NRA's mantra, guns DO kill people.
2
Brilliant! Almost every non-middle eastern country has pretty well figured this out.
Maybe we're all living in some state of collective denial?
Get massive lethal force off the streets and out of the hands of a mentally not very stable organism.
2
Goethe said that he had never heard of a crime which he could not imagine himself committing.
4
I can’t speak for you but I am very different from mass murderers in one very important way. I will not kill one person let alone many people.
7
Great post. A hard truth we need to accept is that many people will kill if there is an impetus to do so, such as self defense, despair, mental illness, extreme ideology. We need to look at why a minority of American males, who have access to weapons, are in that category. While I think we need a rational approach to gun control, you raise an important point regarding the deeper reasons why humans (mostly male humans) decide to murder innocent people.
This pastor would insist on also considering spiritual illness as being a cause of mass shootings.
3
Mr. Friedman we have mass shootings every single week in this country , every single week.
There were three(3) mass shooting last weekend Texas, Ohioans Chicago, only two got coverage .
50 people were wounded 7 killed .
Less than a month ago
Over the July 4th weekend in Chicago 100 were shot
Wounded, 35 were killed by shot gun, 2 stabbed to death . Never made the news, didn’t see Chris Cuomo crying on CNN for these victims or their families.
2
Right. Should we assume that our soldiers are mentally ill when they kill many people, sometimes in the heat of action sometimes as snipers or pilots? Or go on very risky missions for the sake of their ideology?
Ideas are really important in human behavior.
2
They are depersonalized, by training. Otherwise they couldn't do it.
If mass shootings are being done by people nurturing rage and resentment and the feeling they are being replaced, perhaps the best policy is to listen to them speak about what they fear, to hear their concerns, to help them feel validated as humans. Resentment and fear are bes misguided response to immigration, but they are completely understandable. The way to quell the racism isn't to tell people they are hateful, or racist. It's to figure out what their fears and worries are, and meet them as humans struggling, like us all. All this can be done without condoning the racism.
99
@Syliva
Good luck with that! I grew up in the South before desegregation. My father belonged to the John Birch society. There is very little chance of changing a persons mind. There is a little thing called confirmation bias that makes it hard to believe other than what you already think.
34
@Syliva, good thoughts, but how to reach them? Arguably, of the many 63 million people who voted for Trump harbor these hatred and resentments, egged on by Fox and related media. How can you teach even a small fraction of that group?
22
@Syliva I honor your sentiments but I have grave concerns that this subset of society is not receptive to constructive conversations. Angry haters are a reality and they think thoughtful educated individuals are the enemy........
14
Thank you Dr. Friedman for this important column. As a neuroscientist married to a clinical psychologist I have been insisting to people that there is no reason to assume that the El Paso shooter is mentally ill. It is all too comforting to believe that a friend, family member or even you could never be driven to homicidal rage, but that is not true. I do agree with the commenters who point out that it is almost exclusively men who are mass shooters.
11
He is mentally ill. I have psychosis and am not. This is fact. Your definition of mental illness, I believe, is not extremely useful.
I did not see anger in the manifesto by the El Paso shooter. I saw cold and calculated ideas of despair about the future America that is well informed. The shooter's main argument was that America's job market is heading towards a cliff for low skilled workers like himself. He writes that he has been prepared for a job that won't exist. He laments that policies like UBI and universal health care will be a necessity as we continue to automate our low skilled jobs. He accurate asserts that as the number of immigrants increases, the greater the burden on society as there will be more competition for low skilled jobs due to a high labor pool and low demand. He accurately predicts that as more Hispanics move into Texas, they will influence policies that benefit them. There's nothing crazy or hateful about those claims. Texas was just celebrated recently for having majority Hispanics.
He however inaccurately believed that killing people will draw attention to these facts about the future. He saw it as the only way to be heard, like most terrorists. The future of America is great for those who can be trained to do high skilled jobs. But bleak and hopeless for everyone else. Too bad nobody actually read the manifesto because it is heavily censored by our nation.
5
Their weapons are deadly. They are not immoral enough to shoot leaders who have the power of the state apparatus to back them up! Yet they are immoral for transgressing bounds set by other members of their imaginary society?
He sounds as though he were crazy for allowing expert opinion and thought to have sway over his moral instincts. Understanding of epistemological finitude may benefit all Americans and not just those who study at an advanced level! To allow intellectualized arguments to drive one to commit suicide-in-society, this not a sign of one's being insane?
Stephanie, you've got to take care using irony. Although I am a stranger, you are not intending to suggest an incorrect act. It is of course not clear, however, what thoughts exactly you are wanting to give rise to. Care may be lacked!
The only thing that makes mass shootings less likely than running someone over in a fit of road rage is that it takes a longer period of time to grab a gun, assemble all the ammunition and magazines, then head out to meet the group of people the killer has set his sights on. With road rage, the car, i.e. the weapon, is right at hand, bypassing the moderating cooling down period that probably reduces the incidence of rage shootings.
Therefore, one has to conclude that the anger that is the driving force behind all these shootings is usually not a single flash point, but has built steadily over time and probably does not wax and wane.
That may provide a clue as to who is likely to snap. At least narrow down the list of possible perpetrators from 'the entire country' to a handful of disenchanted, disenfranchised and usually young, males.
4
Dr. Friedman's points are well taken, but to me they beg two questions. One, isn't it a little strange to be talking about walking into a store and launching a one-person attack on those within as "rational" and two, is it possible that the science of psychiatry needs to consider such behavior as prima facie evidence of mental illness? If the person's concept of reality is so bizarre that it doesn't see such behavior as deranged is that not in and of itself and indication that something is wrong?
26
@Mark
I agree with you....but. It's not really different (that sounds nuts) than going up to someone and punching them in the face. Or getting into a fight with someone. Or bullying your brother. None of those are "rational." And like he said, good luck finding that person before he starts shooting.
"Rational" is just way too broad to be a part of the conversation. As is mental illness.
The only story with merit for our problem is/are Guns.
2
@Mark
Absolutely! Thank you for this comment.
@Mark
That is a circular argument. Of course, something is wrong when someone breaks iron-clad conventions of society, simply because society makes the rules and if someone breaks them despite knowing better, then something obviously went wrong.
The point of mental illness is that the person who is ill does not get the sense that they are doing something wrong.
The El Paso loser knew exactly what he was doing. He planned it out and rationally laid out the reasons for it. He knew full well that society would not approve.
That is the difference between a criminal and a schizophrenic.
Jared Loughner, who shot Gabrielle Giffords, definitely is mentally ill. He was hallucinating in all shades of the rainbow.
1
Thank you. I have always believed that the possibility of doing great good or great harm resides in all of us.
History has shown that the greatest harm is generally perpetrated by those who see only others as perpetrators, and themselves as great and righteous defenders.
Acknowledging the duality of our nature, allows us the necessary perspective to acknowledge and guard against our base instincts.
11
There can be no doubt every single one us is just one devastating moment away from the seeming loss of every last thing that makes life worth living. Those on the margins and leaning toward violence, like these shooters, need seeking out not solely to prevent catastrophe but as a means of understanding where our own hearts, likewise injured, could lead us.
4
All of this article may be entirely true. That being said there is no explanation for the frequency and number of mass shootings in the USA. If what was said is true here they should be worldwide.
5
@Michael Cohen Perhaps a look into the availability of assault weapons and other fire arms in the other countries versus the USA might help explain the number of mass shootings.
67
@Michael Cohen
393,000,000 guns explains a lot. More guns than people in America. Given this statistic it's a wonder that the shooting death toll isn't higher in the US.
22
@Michael Cohen
300-400 million Guns in the US?
vs.
almost none in Japan?
2
Evil and mental health are two different things. People with poor mental health are more likely to be victims of violence- even significant mental health problems like bipolar disorder or psychosis. People who are evil are dangerous to society, but evil isn’t a mental illness. How do people get evil? Through bitterness and hate and not having compassion.
46
“Mental illness” is a go-to response. Just like thoughts and prayers. There is one way, and one way only, to prevent deaths by shooting. Make guns less accessible. That’s it! How can it be more obvious.
49
@CDMinPA
I share your frustration.
1
I'm practically relieved to see this article. I also was struck by the coherence and logic of the manifesto. By far the most chilling part of the tragedy. Didn't seem like "railing" to me though. It's almost calm in its delivery. Makes it all the more frightening.
6
I am not certain that psychology is anything more than a belief system. I find it hard to believe that when analyzing a person you haven't already change the answers to your questions by making the person aware of what you are doing. It also seems to me that many a psychology theory is unproven by multiple studies.
I suspect that the people who will be determined to be threats will more often be people who hold different beliefs than the interviewer, or the interviewers boss or organization. Republicans will surely assume that liberals are the biggest threat. Remember, facts are unimportant in the USA.
2
If one accepts evolution as a scientific fact, then one must also accept that a human-being is a savvy, calculating, and persistent predatory animal.
We dominate the rest of the animal kingdom to the point of causing our habitat's imminent destruction, and yet have the gumption to question whether to stop our clear over-harvest of the planet's resources.
11
From the TV show Northern Exposure: "How can we know what is in the hearts of others when we don't know our own."
8
I suspect that, given the frustrations of everyday life, the overwhelming majority of us, especially when under multiple stressors, go, in, the words of Ed Grimley, "completely mental" from time to time.
We may even experience quite violent urges at those times, and have greater or lesser degree to control those urges.
But, as many here are pointing out, most of that wouldn't matter if there wasn't such easy access to weapons of mass killing, whether our anger is a temporary fit of pique or more pervasive and long lasting.
20
The sanest, most lucid and scientific piece I've seen about the mass killing problem.
30
The vast majority of mentally ill people will not commit violent acts. Similarly, the vast majority of gun owners will not shoot anyone. The trick is not to restrict the freedoms of a large number of people just because a minuscule fraction of one percent of them may be violent.
Perhaps this is where big data could help. Monitoring social media, gun sales, and who knows what else might help to develop algorithms that can predict violent behavior. Of course the trade-off is the loss of some privacy for increased safety.
4
It's perfectly possible to do so without unduly restricting anyone's rights to own and use firearms. But if you believe no such restriction, no matter how reasonable, is acceptable, then you'd better go out and start convincing your fellow citizens to accept these slaughters on a regular and probably increasing basis.
8
I am a perfectly good driver and adjust my speed to road conditions. Why should I have to give up my freedom to go 80 in a 60 mph zone when road conditions permit? Freedon!
This must also be seen as a campaign -- vulnerable people being recruited to join these movements, via weaponized "news" and hate mongering, combined w such easy access to guns. Scariest of all is the mainstreaming of the campaign in recent years. We need to ask -- (1) who stands to gain and why and what can we do to combat them (follow the money), and (2) what can we do to make those vulnerable to these campaigns less weaponized, both literally and emotionally...
4
Some/many mass killers may not be insane by Dr. Friedman’s clinical definition.
But a person who willfully murders a dozen perfect strangers who are harming or threatening no one, and who does so intending to end his own life (or spend the rest of it in prison), and has no realistic chance of changing society in the direction he wishes, is NOT rational. In fact, I would say their behavior exemplifies “irrational”.
All of are occasionally filled with rage: fired, dumped, mocked or abused. But very, very few of us ever kill anyone, let alone uninvolved strangers. And it is not for lack of opportunity, but because we are bound by societal constraints/mores (good ones) and are rational.
23
@JG if your cause is great enough, it’s not too hard to see your victims as collateral damage to achieving your goal - an acceptable price. And then be very cool and rational and sane about carrying out your plan.
What’s the *fundamental* difference between El Paso and, say, the atomic bombing of Japan? Perhaps not much except how we perceive the worthiness of the actor’s goal. And knowing you will die as a result does not make it irrational - history is full of rational actors who sacrificed for their cause.
3
Sorry, but how do you separate the military "hero" sacrificing his life in battle from the true believer sacrificing his life for the sake of his whiteness? If dying or destroying your own or another's life for the sake of ideology is insane, then all front line soldiers are insane. By your definition the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord were insane. It isn't helpful to conflate all violence with insanity. Mass shooters mostly choose to kill because they value their beliefs over the human lives that they take. They don't have a table illness. They are criminals.
1
Please explain the fire bombing of Tokyo and Dresden, were those acts of insanity? They targeted tens of thousands of innocent strangers, mostly women, children, the sick and the elderly. They were killed in an act of terror for a purpose, though that purpose wasn't achieved.
Were the mass killers on 9-11 insane? I think not. They were willing to die for a cause I believe evil, making them evil mass murderers not madmen.
1
That's ridiculous. They are not just like you and me, or at least not just like me. Psychiatric diagnoses are attempts to classify troubled individuals who need psychiatric help. Most of the shooters are not psychotic, but I suspect they have personality disorders and /or sociopathy. They may not meet the legal definition of insanity, but, although there are way too many of them out there, they are not like most of us. come on.
37
Personality disorders are diagnosable conditions, so I assume the author is including them in his analysis.
1
@Kahunahaha
Saying "just like us" and "may not be very different" are two vastly different comments.
Your point about them having "personality disorders" is likely correct. But, problem with that is many people have personality disorders....which is kind of the point of the article. If he had said they are "just like us", almost no one commenting here would agree with him.
1
@Kahunahaha
Bingo! And you are right. Most do have personality disorders and problems with anger management. But to get the right mix for these domestic “terrorists” you need 2 more ingredients: 1) the lethality of the gun (certainly in a rage one can stab and strangle, but likely small body count) and 2) the connectivity of “like” (warped) minds: ie. the rise of Internet forums where there is a sense of insane legitimacy; the “mob” psychology of anonymity breeds; and even the disparate idea of “martyrdom for the cause” can percolate. To paint one racial, ethnicity or political group with this, is in fact incorrect; just turns out, statistically, that there are more white, isolated males with guns in this country. If you want to see a group of angry males banding together instigating violence, look no further than so-called AntiFa. The ironic name for our own “brown shirts”, who are apparently well tolerated in Portland, Oregon!
1
The vast majority of us get angry on a daily basis sometimes at the most stupid things. And we do not kill people. The gap between anger and mass murder has to be illness - lack of empathy.
126
Yes, completely! And the lack of empathy required for this kind of act means 1) a portion of one's brain is not functioning 2) to a degree that impairs normal behavior and life outcomes. AKA a mental illness.
To me it's self-evidently ridiculous to argue that a mass shooter is mentally healthy and functional. Like they're just regular guys having a bad day. Come on.
12
Not always illness - they just snap a bit quicker and go to the fully pot committed type of anger, which, with guns and ammo, results in a mass shooting. Many are people bullied, belittled, loners, no family, friends, coworkers. We need to work on being more inclusive, not exclusive, with people.
9
@Common Sense Lack of empathy like, say, Trump?
10
If you are looking for rambling and delusional, look no further than Donald Trump. Perhaps it's time someone investigated his mental health.
170
@mj: Read "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump", an assessment by 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts of the most prominent psychopath in the US.
An important article and a great perspective from an actual psychiatrist! People (like Donald Trump) fling around the term "mental illness" without really knowing what it means.
27
These studies cited by Dr. Friedman, indicating that mental defect rarely afflicts mass shooters, are missing a basic element: that the brains of all adolescents, i.e. persons up to age 25 are not fully developed, in that their powers of reasoning and forethought are hampered by structural features making decision-making somewhat problematic. To assume that those studies finding "mass killers" largely free of mental illness are definitive is entirely dismissive of research that has consistently determined young adults ages 18 to 25 are palpably deficient in situations where strong influences are combined with intense stress. In other words, Patrick Crucius may indeed be legally sane, yet entirely incapable of determining, in the face of intense propaganda such as the brainwashing so common in white supremacism, that gunning down innocents was not anything other than “necessary,” “obligatory,” and indeed "required" as his manifesto so strongly articulates. His ambivalent manner at capture and odd willingness to cooperate with authorities seems to indicate that Mr. Crucius was deeply confused, even in the area of self-preservation, and largely unable to connect the programming he probably experienced with the task of killing he eventually performed.
4
@David Keys Isn’t what you describe the very essence of successful propaganda, demagoguery, and incitement rather than a weakness in Dr. Friedman’s discussion?
9
His willingness to cooperate with the authorities shows that he is proud of what he did and that he expected this outcome.
1
@Susan Compliance does not necessarily indicate anything beyond some validation at some point in the "persuasion" he received. My guess is that Patrick Crucius has no clue as to the misery and heartbreak he has caused and has been conditioned to ignore such things; rather, in his jail cell, has only the idea of "mission accomplished" in his now very restricted view.
1
And that is exactly why all the debates and conversation around gun control are totally DISHONEST. Most of the guns used in slaughters are legally bought guns. America's real problem is the easy availability of guns. There are enough of these instruments of death (that's exactly what a gun is) currently in the society, to arm every person three times.
As long as the powers that are refuse to acknowledge that our history and culture is wrapped around the gun, then there is no honest answer to the problem. The gun is not as American as apple pie. The gun is apple pie.
Did someone say GUN CONFISCATION? Never. Like the great movie icon said: "you would have to pry it out of my cold dead hand".
18
@masai hall: People expect to be able to use what is legal for the purposes it was designed.
1
Thank you for this.
We Americans like to excuse these mass killings by first offering up that the-shooter is/was mentally ill. It also becomes a convenient excuse for dodging strict gun control because of course "only the mentally ill do this". If the statistics that I found in a persistent google search are correct, about one in five Americans suffer some form of mental illness every year. Whereas we need to have better mental illness medical coverage to assist these people the NRA, the president and the pro gun people cannot keep using this as an excuse for inaction. So called normal sane people as you point out can experience pent up rage and anger and take their aggression out in various ways, some including the random shooting of a group of people.
The one constant is the ease and convenience of guns in America. There is no reason for anyone outside of the military or law enforcement to have a gun. An exception might be a hunter and they can be regulated and controlled and licensed. And spare me the "you canst violate my second amendment rights' malarkey. We have a professional militia in this country, the army, the navy, the marines and the coast guard. I think we have that well covered. I don't want to live my life in fear so that you can have your "toys" that are designed for the sole purpose of killing.
So to trump, McConnell, the Republicans in Congress "Do Something!"
25
@Steve: The whole Republican MO is incitement of fear.
10
There's is one big reason these killers are not like me: They are men. Angry men. Who in a lot of cases have apparently been rejected by people, often by a woman or an employer. And men go out and kill women who reject them at an alarming rate. Though these murders are not part of the mass murder epidemic, they are an epidemic and have been for a long time. When will someone analyze that along with all these other data and tell us why so many men are unable to deal with rejection in life? And that includes Donald Trump, the sick man setting the tone right now.
223
@Carla
Unfortunately its men who are in control of the research grants which gather this data. The outcome of a study will favorably support that men are okay.
2
It’s called toxic masculinity.
3
I’ve been alive a long time and have never seen anything like this. Sitting in stalled traffic last week, turned to the car in the next lane and waved. In return I got a middle finger, then, he reached down, picked up a gun and laid it on the dash. Wherever we’re headed, this isn’t going to end well.
267
@JRB
Yes, people are getting crazier and crazier. We had someone pass us and spit on our car because they did not like us passing them before. Another person ran screaming after us cursing when we carefully went around them on a bike path. Another neighbor, foaming at the mouth, screaming insults, came after us because our tiny yorkie had wandered (on leash) for a moment onto her lawn.
It is like a mental virus or disease has taken over. Are we sure that thoughts and attitudes are not just as infectious as an actual disease?
5
@JRB That is awful - really awful. I'm scared and it didn't even happen to me. Glad you are OK.
4
Filled with hate and well armed so... yeah. Mentally ill. I’m not sure I understand the resistance to considering such consuming hated and a desire to kill as mentally ill.
6
Because, being a bad person isn't a mental illness. It does a disservice to anyone with an actual mental illness to call everyone of poor character mentally ill. It also presupposes that rationality and empathy are the defining characteristics of humans, when they're absolutely not.
216
@Susan. We conflate moral with rational, and assume rational people will all reach the same conclusion. Doesn’t happen in real life.
2
Even if we just flagged people who’d previously threatened women, we’d get some reduction in the violence (Parkland, Dayton). I understand that this won’t address shooters who have a specific goal, but there will be no single solution for this crisis, and it may help the ideological killings stand out.
12
I have felt rage before. I hope never to feel it again, but that's counting on luck. Human rage is a very good reason not to have weapons, esp. assault rifles, in one's possession. Crimes of passion leave people just as dead as planned crimes or mental illness related crimes.
64
@Chip
Yep, and guns make it much easier for terrible harm to be done in that small window of rage.
18
The scary truth is that ordinary human hatred and aggression are far more dangerous than any psychiatric illness. Just think of the many people driven to mass murder because they were fired by employers or dumped by girlfriends. In all likelihood, they were not mentally ill but simply full of rage — and well armed.
Dr. Friedman knows what he's talking about although I'd have liked a bit more specificity. It's not really human rage and aggression, its's specifically human male aggression, isn't it? The apex, apex predator.
19
@monty: Incapacity to manage rage impresses me as a very serious mental illness.
16
@Steve Bolger
There are some pharmaceutical companies that would love to run with that.
2
Please stop. Why aren't we all dead then.
5
@Nancy Because compassion and positive social interaction are also human traits, as was also shown in El Paso. One of the wisest things I was ever taught in my psychological trainings was that people who give up on love go for power and control. Killing people is the ultimate control. It takes a lot to move someone to this kind of violence, which is why it is so strange to the rest of us. But, yes, under the right circumstances, we all can be led to kill others.
8
@MEA
Considering that the vast majority of mass murderers are men, I would not include all of us in that. As a woman, I have never, once wanted to hurt anyone when I was angry. Not once. And, I think the woman who wants to kill a lot of people when she is very angry, is a very rare woman.
I also doubt that all men are capable of such violence. Perhaps a high percentage are, but I've known too many calm, gentle, caring men to be convinced that all men are capable of such violence.
More likely, men who have experienced a lot of trauma in their lives, from childhood abuse or combat etc., are more vulnerable when it comes to losing control of their rage and feeling the desire to kill others.
And, men with high levels of testosterone may also be more likely to want to kill. I just don't think it makes sense to make generalizations about the entire human race, because a certain percentage have experienced hard lives or inherited genetic traits that make them more likely to lose control of their rage and kill others.
11
If being consumed by hatred isn't a mental illness, what is?
113
@Steve Bolger Legal definitions of mental illness differ by state. In Texas, the person must have a a diagnosable condition that led to them being incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. In other words, they could be as delusional as all get out, but if they acknowledge they knew what they were doing was a crime, they are considered legally sane. As for professional definitions, as the article stated, they are more concerned with the patient's grasp on reality. Over and over again, these shooters show plenty of ability to plan and execute their crimes, showing that they are keenly oriented to time, place and person--not mentally ill. The definition of mental illness--in legal or professional terms-- simply isn't what you (or I, for that matter) would like it to be.
19
@Susan -
"Legal definitions of mental illness differ by state. In Texas, the person must have a a diagnosable condition that led to them being incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. "
Wrong. You are conflating "mental illness", which is a medical term, with "insanity", which is a legal term that does, indeed, vary from state to state. But state legislatures do not define "mental illness"; the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual does.
18
@JoanP
With all due respect, I don't think it is I who is doing the conflating. When political leaders--whose job it is to write, vote on, and approve policy that becomes law--start throwing around the term "mental illness," that term is eventually going to wind up under a legal microscope. Meanwhile, the rest of the public latches onto the term and interprets it in a way that makes sense to them personally. As a licensed clinical social worker for the past 30 years, I am well aware of the DSM's continually updated definitions of mental health, and I can assure you that the current discussion focuses on whether the individual as a grasp on objective reality. My point was essentially the same as yours: if we're gonna yap about mental health, we all need to be on the same page as to what it means--which means, listen to the professionals, even if your gut feels good.
12
Killing so many people at once is so bizarre an act that an explanation is sought, mental illness providing it, although erroneously, as Dr. Friedman reminds us. The number of people killed is related to the weapon used, usually one meant for war.
Red flag protection, removing weapons from individuals deemed too dangerous by a judge, has major limitations. Such protection can only occur if individuals are identified beforehand. This can happen with those who plan to kill themselves and allow others to know their intent. But in the cases that earn the most attention, those who commit mass killings, there usually is no beforehand knowledge. They are secretive, they plan so as not to be discovered, they strike unexpectedly and their families are unaware of their plan or even their proclivity for mass murder. Politicians are already being misleading when they imply that such laws will be a remedy to stop them.
5
Under a draft, the military relies on turning ordinary people into killing machines against a declared "enemy", and then switching them off again once hostilities are over. That this happens so reliably says something about our nature. If this was state sanctioned violence, say in a war, these people would be awarded medals for bravery. This unpleasant fact must haunt anyone returning from battle.
62
@stan continople: The opportunity to kill "bad" people legally draws volunteers to armies.
6
“turning ordinary people into killing machines”
I know a lot of service members. None of them were turned into “killing machines” in the course of their deployments. And none of them signed up because they wanted to kill “legally.”
6
@stan continople
Good point about the military's success in turning ordinary people into killers. So when the Commander in Chief tells white Americans that Hispanics are bad people who are "infesting" the country, it is unsurprising that true believers will don military hardware and commit mass murder to "defend their country".
8
Soldiers for a cause or tormented souls going out in a blaze of some kind? Wouldn't a soldier want to survive and carry on for cause?
3
Unless I missed it, the professor failed to say what percentage of mass murderers are males. What is the racial breakdown of these murderers? What is the average age of mass murderers? And if the information I have read is accurate, why was there only one mass shooting in all of the 1950's? And why were there only 8 mass shootings between 1920 and 1950, mainly gangland and labor shootings? What were the dynamics after 1959 that caused this growing increase in mass shootings? This is a public health issue and we should treat it like one. Get it out of politics and have public health doctors investigate and then follow their guidelines.
26
@CM
The internet and media have had an influence on almost every single negative behavior, from suicide to mass killings.
3
@CM: Mass-killing weapons like the AR-15 didn't become available to the public until the Vietnam War concluded. The M-1 infantry rifle of WW II held only 8 rounds.
10
@Steve Bolger
Not really, the Tommy Gun of gangland and WW II fame was available with 20, 30, 50 & 100 round magazines in the 1910’s. The fully automatic version required registration starting in 1934, but semiautomatic versions were (and are) relatively unregulated.
There are other similar examples.
5
If these mass killers are not considered mentally ill, then perhaps we need to redefine what constitutes mental illness. I think an inclination towards killing large numbers of strangers for no discernible reason other than one's internal and generalized anger at "other" people should be considered a mental disorder, plain and simple.
31
@Devil’s Advocate
Think about it. They're rational except for the influence of hateful racist ideology? Not buying that for a minute. Those ideologies are really far out there despite the claims that they are somehow mainstream. They are not.
4
@Devil’s Advocate agreed
1
@AACNY Rational does not mean devoid of emotion or bias. It means competent to think logically and make reasonable judgments and decisions. Sometimes a reasonable decision about where your interests lie make a terrible course of action rational. If you are persuaded that an invading force is an immediate threat to your nearest and dearest, it is rational to take defensive action - and sometimes the best defense is a good offense.
This is why the words, the rhetoric, private as well as public, matter so much. Those who persuade others, by claiming a knowledge or authority that is false, that a rag tag band of refugees is an invading army set to supplant and replace you, share the guilt of the gullible people who act rationally upon their belief of the lies. Gullibility is not a mental illness. It is an abdication of adult responsibility to ascertain the trustworthiness of leaders - but that is what every would-be demagogue demands people do. Corrupting the immature minds of adolescents should be a crime, but it is not a mental illness, either.
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In the age of big data, it's only a matter of time before all the pieces are put together to develop an "at risk" profile. The FBI must then be explicitly tasked with prevention of these attacks using this profile.
My own feeling is that one of the reasons these killers have been free to murder is because no one -- not police, sheriffs, doctors, social workers, teachers, neighbors -- has had the responsibility to stop them. Law enforcement has behaved as though it's powerless.
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@AACNY
We, meaning law enforcement, the media, the courts, doctors (including myself), mental health teams, and a family intervention, stopped one. I wrote up a proposal to do just that and sent it to two senators. In addition, I have been directly involved in other cases. It can work to reduce the risk overall.
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@Michael S. Greenberg, Ph.D.
That's very encouraging! After learning how all those who came in contact with the Parkland shooter -- from sheriffs to social workers to the FBI -- all knew he wanted to be a school shooter and did nothing to stop him, I've been very concerned that there is no actually accountable. Hence my focus on the FBI. If not them, who?
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Before you say that, check with law enforcement- they were able to bring people in on a psych hold much easier in the past. Now, they can rarely do that on a 5150 hold. Their hands are tied, literally.
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This issue, being purposely clouded by the Right, is one of semantics and legal deffinitions. In court, defendants are thought to be criminally insane if they're unaware their actions were unlawful and subject to punishment. Yet in the everyday world most of us sense that a sociopath, completely unable to experience empathy, is a mentally unhealthy personality -- even if they know their unlawful actions are banned by society. In any case, the whole argument is a red herring meant to distract from the widely proven remedy of gun control.
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Under the DMS -IV, sociopathy, psychopathy and narcissism are axis 2 diagnosis. They are considered personality disorders, which are non responsive to medication or therapy. Schizophrenics, bi-polars, and schizo- affective are axis 1 and can be treated through medication. Axis 2 personality disorders will never fit the legal definition of insanity; they are both aware of what they are doing and appreciate the wrongness of their actions.
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These mass murderers are not potentially just like Dr. Friedman or me, because I am a woman and he is probably not all that young.
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@Itzajob
These particular mass murderers are not the entire point. It's a very small sample size. The fact is that the mass murderers display natural human emotions, just to a greater degree and with a particular indoctrination of extreme ideas. That's it.
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They’re not like me—I’m female.
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@Candace Lawrence this comment should be recommended a billion times.
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@Candace Lawrence In Goleta, CA a FEMALE postal worker shot and killed I believe 5 people at a post office.
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@Candace Lawrence
They are not like me either. And I am male (a white one, to be exact!)
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yeah I dunno. I have never once thought to purchase a gun with the sole aim of committing murder.
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@ricky
Right, that's the point of the article. The article didn't start off with the premise that mass murderers are "just like you or me", it said "not very different from you or me".
I was so glad to read this column. I have held the opinion expressed by Dr. Friedman for a long time.
I believe there are two reasons why people want to, and do, believe that anyone who commits a mass murder is mentally ill. First, that belief feels right to many people. The idea of picking up a gun and mowing down dozens of strangers is so foreign to most of us that we have no context in which to place it. It feels crazy to us; so we conclude that it is crazy.
Second, and more important, it is comforting to believe that. If it is true that people who commit such acts are insane, then we can hold out the hope that we will one day be able to identify these people and stop them. Or, at least, identify and isolate them before they can act. The belief offers the promise of a scientific solution: If we can just develop better diagnostic tools, we can lick the problem.
A variant of the belief that all mass murderers are insane is the belief that they are "evil". Again, evil is perceived as something outside the normal range of human experience -- suggesting that it might one day be identifiable and, therefore, preventable.
The much scarier truth is that most people who engage in such acts are fairly average people who have been molded by experience and ideology into the terrorists they became. That problem is much wider and deeper than mental illness and much harder to fix.
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@cds333
Your theory puts too much emphasis on nurture: Nurture can work only if it has a foundation to stand upon; that foundation, of course, is human nature.
We're hairless apes, animals with clothes on, beasts with a reptilian brain stem. When push comes to shove, we are capable of extreme violence; for example, parents who abuse and even kill their own flesh and blood. No one or no thing nurtures that; it's built-in, just as the myths have it: Cain slew Abel; it was his first go-to response. The first two brothers, and one murdered the other. Cain was not taught that; he had no such role models to follow. He was the first murderer. (Of course, this story is a myth, but that's its strength: it's universal in its validity.)
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@Jim Muncy You misunderstand me. I am not discounting human nature at all. That was kind of my point: that it does not take mental illness to produce a mass murderer. Life experiences can take an ordinary person and turn him (and a very occasional her) into a mass murderer.
And you're wrong about myths. Mythical characters are always responding to life events. Cain was motivated to kill Abel by God's preference of his brother's sacrifice over his. Jealousy has motivated many a murder over the millennia.
Also, your example does not respond to the discussion at hand -- i.e., whether all mass murderers are mentally ill. I have never heard anyone say that all killers are mentally ill. Although murder is wrong, many individual killings are understandable to the average person -- motivated by fear, jealousy, greed, etc. Many people can even understand feeling an urge to kill, although they would never act on it.
It is the mass killing of strangers that leads to the conclusion that the perpetrator must be insane --because it is an act that most of us cannot fathom, much less relate to. Dr. Friedman and I are saying that sane people commit such acts. Human nature can get to that place, given certain circumstances. Of course, some mass murderers are mentally ill. But far from all of them.
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@cds333
There's a third reason: Namely, that if one has to be insane to do such a thing, and you yourself do not regard yourself to be insane, then you're not going to be one of those monsters, are you? Nor are your (sane) friends and relatives. So thinking that it requires insanity gives a sense of (false) comfort.
They differ in one important way: they kill people. Think about that. Take your time.
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@J. Colby
Right, that's the point of the article. Why do we have to take our time?
Just because a mental illness has not yet been "labeled", does not mean it doesn't exist! Being angry and full of rage...without boundaries that tell you to stop before you act on those emotions...is not accepted normal!! These mass shooters seem to act under a delusion that their actions will change how society operates...how we think. They not only have unfettered rage and the will to act on it, but they are also delusional. Now...I'm not a psychiatrist, but I'm a very good critical thinker, and what I described surely sounds like mental illness to me! And let's remember...psychiatry is an art...NOT a science. They don't operate with empirical information!
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@J. G. Smith I'm not sure mass killers "think" that they will change how society operates. I think they emote that they must do something or explode, that they are willing to die themselves to leave their misery behind, and that it would be good to take some bad people or some people of any kind with them so as to have not made a total waste of their lives. Sick, but not necessarily a classifiable illness.
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@Chip
Agreed; these domestic “terrorists”, for the most part, are not critical thinkers. Just lost souls; “dead enders” who have bought into a corrupt idea to express their frustration/anger with life. Think Talaban types and/or ISIS “foot soldiers”.
Let me add that it was white people who invaded Texas and replaced Hispanic people and the same white people imposed slavery though it had been abolished in Mexico.
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If you’re going to quote history, remember the Mexican-American war, where we won those territories.
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@Ed Weissman What's your point?
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In lieu of an impeachment, shouldn't (couldn't?) the citizens of the United States collectively sue a sitting president for inciting violence, spreading racism and repeatedly voicing hatred which have so far cost multiple killings?
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No kidding. It’s very convenient to blame “ mental illness “ and deflect from the real problem. Guns, and rage filled Males. Very, very rarely are Women involved in these mass killings, when they are, it’s almost always paired with a male. Women turn their rage inward : Depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse.
These killers choose the path of NRA Carnage: Kill as many people as possible, before you are stopped, or killed.
It’s the Guns, it’s the Guns, IT’S THE GUNS.
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@Phyliss Dalmatian
No, we have always had guns, and a lot of them. Mass killings have become a social contagion, and an accelerating one the past few years. It is something else.
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It may not be the guns. It may be weak non-linear controls. All factors in a particular context may act as signs informing thought. These factors can be manipualted to prevent, albeit irrationally, behavior not conducive to social harmony.
@Alberto
If the Confederate army had AR15s and the Union did not, we'd all be singing Dixie. So we haven't always had those in your sense that we have "always had guns." We haven't always had guns that could kill 50 people from a building hundreds of feet away, in minutes. Now we do. It is that.
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This all reminds me of the problem with religious fundamentalism: if you grow up following scripture and listening to leaders who tell you that non-believers are destroying the world and endangering everyone, isn’t it rationale to kill as many of them as possible? Shouldn’t believers try to eliminate the threat of those who they’re told will destroy them? What I’m saying is that it is rationale to act violently when we preach hatred about others. It’s not insane. It’s access to weapons of war in a climate of hatred that breeds these acts.
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Scapegoating happens when pundits declare that it just couldn't be as simple as an evil person deciding to kill. It has to be video games, violent movies, mental illness, 8chan, or some other external factor that turns ordinary people into killers. The truth is that killers are just evil, they know what they're doing, and that no analysis more sophisticated than that is necessary. The best society can do is make it harder for them to kill, but denied one method, they will just seek another.
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@Mark Lebow. Maybe. But it will be harder to kill so ,any in such a short period of time without a gun.
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@Mark Lebow
And eventually, those methods become sufficiently ineffective.
There was an attack at a school on Dec 14, 2012. A disturbed man went to a place of learning with a weapon. You think you know the story, right? Newtown, 20 dead first graders?
I bet not.
The school was in China. The man had a knife, and not a gun. No one died.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/world/asia/man-stabs-22-children-in-china.html
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@Mark Lebow Unfortunately, the difference between good and evil is opinion. A society codifies which is which.
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In my view, mental illness doesn’t just encompass psychosis or other standard diagnosable disorders. It also encompasses inability to regulate emotions like anger, a demonstrable lack of empathy for others, an antisocial personality, obsessions with violence, and many other traits. Excessive amounts of anger, hatred, and fear—especially to the point of wanting to commit mass murder—are not the signs of someone who is mentally healthy.
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@Elise, You said it better. The clinical approach is too narrow for understanding and preventing a social problem. Normal people don't kill fellow human beings to solve what they perceive as problems. Many soldiers suffer PTSD after returning from war despite that they have sanctimonious mandate to kill.
Mental health professionals cannot accurately predict who will murder.
We need a way to reliably identify people who are more likely to murder large groups of people.
It seems to me that people who buy weapons designed to kill large groups of people are much likely to kill large groups of people.
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@Dan Mullin
There is no test for crazy.
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@Dan Mullin
Concise, reasonable, and brilliant!
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@Dan Mullin
Gun owners don't buy guys to kill people. You need to come to terms with this single fact.
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The specter of mental illness and mass killings is simply a gun advocate talking point. It serves to blur the lines between "terrorists" who, presumably, are not mentally ill, but responding to a sense of powerlessness in the face of oppression, and right wing racists murderers, who are usually members of a privileged minority but seething with hatred. Terrorists are often not mentally ill, but responding to circumstances where they see no options. Mentally ill people are not thinking straight. White supremacist killers are simply murderers.
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"Still, the clear implication of these findings is that people in the grip of ordinary emotion are capable of carrying out heinous acts of violence; you don’t need to have a mental illness to be a “monster.”"
Indeed, Dr. Friedman, thank you for this reality check - we need to remember it over and over. Hannah Arendt spoke decades ago of the "fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil,” And now we are seeing it play out all too vividly in our communities day after day.
We must all speak up when bullies do what they do, whether it be the lady at the water park or the present occupant of the Oval Office. If we stand by silently we are complicit.
5
If they are filled with hate and are well armed, then they are most certainly very different from me and hopefully you too.
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@Scott
The point is that everyone has the potential to be filled with hate given a certain environment, upbringing, indoctrination, etc. Hatred is a human emotion. Most of us are able to control/regulate our emotions better than these mass killers sure, but there is always that potential. Do you believe, for example, that all Nazis in Germany were completely unlike you? Before Hitler's rise most were likely normal people leading normal lives. They simply became swept up in a movement... a movement not entirely unlike the white supremacist movement we see around us today. An ideology of hate that started out on the fringes of German society then slowly but surely made its way to the very top of the government.
Most people feel much more comfortable believing that killers are "monsters" of course... in effect not human. For example you are afraid of the idea from the headline of the article, thus you reject it. Yet the research and real world evidence is plain to see. Humans have been killing each other for millennia. In a way, logically it MUST be seen as an aspect of the human condition (albeit a dark and scary one), not the work of some beings that are completely unlike the rest of us. The challenge is to control this behavior in the population and for people to learn to regulate their emotions.
1
I was with you up until this: "More effective policies might involve ... enhancing background checks and expanding so-called extreme risk protection orders, which would allow law enforcement to temporarily remove firearms from people deemed potentially violent."
While very familiar, how did you get to this? Are you saying these sane ideologically-inspired mass murderers often have flags that would turn up in a background check, or that they are likely to be "deemed potentially violent" BEFORE they act?
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Although it might not appear in the DSM, have you considered that hatred may be a mental illness?
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Hatred is not a mental illness, and we know that from the fact that people can choose to stop hating and do so successfully. Hatred is better understood as a sin — in fact, a deadly sin, right up there with pride, wrath, avarice and envy.
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@Richard Wells Unfortunately,it is apparently epidemic in Trump's America.
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@Richard Wells. Being gay was in the DSM. If hatred is a treatable disease of the mind, how far will society want to go with it?
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The problem here is that the data are obtained by sampling on the dependent variables. We need to know with reliable data what the independent variables are and how they relate to the dependent variables.
This is the same flawed method that said that marijuana was the gateway drug to heroin and other addictions. They only looked at the addicts and found that almost all of them also used marijuana. What they didn't look at was the population as a whole and found the relationship between marijuana use/non use and non-addiction and addiction.
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