Apparently, the Secret Service has been studying the profiles of people who carry out mass casualty shootings and they’ve discovered that most of these people showed signs of mental illness prior to going on their rampages. I guess mental illness can be easy to define in some cases, like when a person has been taking prescribed medications for a mental disorder. But I have a problem with how people discuss this issue.
If you decide, for whatever reason, to kill a bunch of strangers, there’s something wrong with your brain. I’d say that you’re ill. We can debate whether individual shooters know right from wrong and just want to do wrong, or if they’re too mentally impaired to realize that what they’re doing is immoral and illegal. In other words, insanity can be a defense in some cases. But it seems wrong to ask whether or not these people are mentally ill. Of course they are.
An organization like the Secret Service wants to know if they can predict if someone will become a threat, so I have no problem at all with them trying to identify common warning signs. Even from a policy point of view, you’d like to know if the data can support the idea that doing a better job of treating mental illness can be a fruitful way of lessening the frequency of mass casualty shootings.
But it’s silly to make a statement like “64% of suspects suffered from symptoms of mental illness.” What they actually mean is that sixty-four percent of the shooters had suicidal thoughts or suffered from paranoia or other delusions. This is what is supposed to be predictive, but the research is being done retroactively and only deals with what they can find in the record. If someone shoots themselves after gunning down a church full of people, can we really say they had no suicidal thoughts just because they never mentioned them or sought treatment? Does anyone kill themselves on purpose without thinking about it first?
It’s useful to go back and see if the shootings could have been prevented and, if so, how this might have been done. But I don’t think it makes sense to suggest that any of these killers were mentally fit. For the purpose of sentencing the perpetrators who survive their massacres, we’d like to know if they are simply insane, but it’s a safe bet that their worldview is so warped that it could never be defined as healthy.
There are all kinds of potential problems with treating gun violence as a mental illness problem, so I think we should be very specific about what kinds of symptoms and behaviors have predictive value. The broad umbrella of “mental illness” doesn’t cut it. And policymakers need to be extra careful that they don’t disincentivize people to seek treatment for themselves or their loved ones. That’s bad enough in itself, but if guns remain as readily available as they are today, such a policy would create more untreated mental illness without reducing the ease with which sick people can arm themselves and create mass tragedies.
The gun lobby only cares about mental illness as a means of deflecting blame and responsibility. The very same folks are the first ones to allege it should never be a defense or mitigating factor when a crime has been committed.
I’m not a big fan of the insanity defense. But that’s a separate discussion that leads to a complex philosophic debate over the purpose of criminal law and prison (e.g. punishment, deterrence, “justice” which I place in quotes because the concept leads to its own philosophical exploration, reform, etc.).
Whatever one thinks of the criminal justice system, there can be no doubt that the gun lobby, and most of all the gun manufacturers, are selfish folks who care mainly about their own interests. If tens of thousands of strangers needlessly lose their lives every year, it’s a price they’re willing to pay. For me, that’s the definition of a jackass.
The NRA and the gun manufacturers are not jackasses, they’re criminal organizations and abettors of terrorism to boot. Neither have ever made the slightest attempt to make it difficult to steal and use another person’s gun or to limit the availability of weapons of mass destruction like the AR-15 even though they can.
At the very least, a brave Democratic Congress would vote to eliminate the tax-empt status of the NRA (can you imagine?) and to reimpose the assault weapons ban (as well as the background checks stuff, etc.).
Basically, if the Democrats don’t take over Congress in 2018, the game maybe up and we are all going to be Putin’s pawns because the GOP, as a serious political party is a hollow shell for whatever company wants to have their own tax subsidy or other taxpayer benefit. And Trump, of course, is the Circus Master of corruption.
So those are stakes, folks.
One of the things we have to be careful about is that there is a dearth of evidence that “mental illness” by itself is much of a predictor of violent crime in general (which dovetails with the point you are making). My understanding is that individuals who are diagnosable as mentally ill are typically the victims of violence. That said, comorbidity with some other risk factor like alcohol abuse change the equation a bit. In those cases, we can say that there was a combination of risk factors, in which mental illness only has a minor impact. And we really do have to narrow down to specific mental illnesses – and I suspect that ones in which paranoid delusions are among the symptoms are the ones where at least theoretically we could find a link to aggression and violence. Someone with a generalized anxiety disorder is not going to be a threat. Certain personality disorders lend themselves as potential threats. And so on. In terms of gun related deaths attributable to mental illness, it’s typically suicide and after the individual has likely lost hope.
Mass shooters do tend to be a unique cohort, so understanding what is different about that cohort is critical. We know that they tend to be male, that there is often a history of violence against others (spouses/partners, children, family members, etc.), and in many (but not all) cases have become ideologically radicalized. Beyond that, caution in making sweeping statements about mental illness is in order.
I am reminded a bit of the old research on Type A Personality – where that was used as a means of deflecting from the impact of smoking on a plethora of health problems. Tobacco companies loved that research (and even funded some of it) because their representatives could point to Type A research and say that coronary problems, cancers, lung diseases were attributable to the apparent evidence that those dying were assholes to begin with. Eventually that all was debunked. So too will the mental illness and mass shooting speculation, I suspect.
“Mentally ill” is a meaningless term. Hell, the DSM-V was created by a bunch of people sitting around trying to agree on whether any particular disorder even exists, let alone how to define it. When this is the process by which we identify disease, we are truly screwed.
Most “mentally ill” people are no danger to anyone. And many dangerous conditions are masked or otherwise undetected. Short of mental telepathy, almost all diagnoses are after the fact, and not even agreed on then.
What all these incidents have in common is the gun. Let’s take care of that problem first. Then we can diagnose at our leisure.
Heck, homosexuality was considered a “mental illness” until 1973, when it was removed from the DSM. What gets classified as a “mental illness” by the folks responsible for the DSM is as much a political document as it is based on anything even remotely resembling sound evidence. If I were Kurt Vonnegut, writing the terminology Bokononists used in his book Cat’s Cradle, I’d be tempted to refer to the contents of the DSM as mostly foma – although according to Bokononists foma are generally harmless lies, and the DSM has arguably led to real harm being done.
Beyond that, the article cited is just awful. Supposedly 64% of mass shooters showed symptoms of mental illness. I am willing to wager that the nearly all of us have at one time or another shown symptoms of mental illness. Showing some possible symptoms and being even remotely diagnosable are two very different things, and we’re making the assumption that the diagnostic categories for the various mental illnesses are accurate, and that independent mental health professionals can look at the same individual and arrive at the same diagnosis (easier said than done).
Sorry to leave a long rant in a thread you started, and in which I essentially agree with you. It’s just that I’ve had it with folks pathologizing criminal and terroristic behaviors for their own political ends. The nonsense of these folks needing better medications or a few hugs or whatever needs to stop. As a society we need to: regulate the hell out of firearms and ammo, make sure any mass shooter who survives long enough to be arrested never sees the light of day again, and stop giving these assholes their 15 minutes of fame. That won’t put a complete stop to the madness, but it will certainly make mass shootings a much more rare occurrence.
. . . You evoke digby’s occasional reprises of the parallels between gun violence and Dr. John Snow’s insight into the cause of an 1854 London cholera epidemic which, when acted on, brought the outbreak to a halt. The nut:
There’s no need to repeat this trial specifically for guns. (As digby also points out,) Australia already did. It worked.
Boo, your last sentence…”…..would crate more untreated mental illness with reducing the ease with which sick people can arm themselves….” Reducing the ease?
Propaganda that helps make folks mentally ill (paranoid, anxious, etc.) sells guns. Which is probably why the NRA bans guns at their conventions (the convention crowd could be volatile).
Advertisers use Jungian archetypes to sell beer.
With guns, if your ads make people miserable (angry, afraid, suspicious), you sell guns. It’s pretty awful.
This is a waste of time. Take away the guns.
Long-time reader, first time poster etc
Mental illness is used in the American context to absolve guns and gun culture of responsibility for violence, but it’s also very relevant to preventing violent incidents. Psychosis and delusional disorders correlate with targeted violence and mass-casualty events worldwide, and depression features in extended suicides, so it can’t be discounted as a risk factor.
The USA Today article doesn’t convey the depth and extent of modern threat assessment, which isn’t simply retrospective and has (imperfect) predictive validity, but it at least mentions leakage, which is the most important factor in early intervention.
Mother Jones and other outlets have covered this quite well in the articles below:
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https:/www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/mass-shootings-threat-assessment-shooter-fbi-columbine
https:/www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/03/mass-shooting-hesston-kansas-threat-assessment
https:/www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2017/10/the-las-vegas-shooter-didnt-just-snap-they-never-d
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https:/www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/the-warning-signs-of-a-mass-shooting/433527
https:/www.newscientist.com/article/dn28300-how-to-spot-the-warning-signs-and-prevent-mass-shooting
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Soooo …we’ve identified the source of this illness?
I am thinking … the gun manufactures?
Pretty sure most of them are white males!
Seems that this could be a clue!
Hummm … better put Scubby Do and Columbo on the case!
Observation points to a correlation between the mass shooters we’re seeing on our soil and the terrorists who are active globally.
Family members, friends, co workers, neighbors and even professionals are all failing to recognize signs other than to say, ‘he was quiet or maybe he was bullied’. But society may just not be equipped to reliably identify the specific qualities of a specific kind of mental illness that directs these heinous acts. Have to say I wouldn’t enter a movie theater if Dana Loesch was in the crowd…
I’m just not sure we can ever reverse engineer this issue to put the onus on identifying the illness that inhabits these shooters. I’ll always believe the only way to stop shootings and worse is to either deny or take away access to the guns from anyone who can’t pass a rigorous background check.
Crazy like a fox. They know exactly who they want to kill or pick a place to kill strangers. Planing has been reduced to getting the gun. A gun so powerful that the whole killing thing take less than 30 seconds. The only way to stop the killing is to take the military killing machine out of civilian hands.
. . . banning outright any sales of AR-15-like weapons of mass murder to the mentally ill AND/OR to white males.
Seems logical. By the same logic.
Booman writes:
OH yes!!!
Good on ya, Booman!!!
But..wait a minute!!!
Isn’t that what Obama and Clinton I did in their various “police actions?” And what Clinton II would most assuredly have done had she been successfully (
s)elected?Oh.
Nevermind.
Yore freind…
Emily Liitella
Crazed girls flood Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz with fan mail
People with good mental health do not got out and slaughter people because….. whatever. There is hardly anything profound about suggesting mental illness is a contributing factor.
Some of these mass shooters were being treated for mental health issues at the time of the slaughter. James Holmes (Aurora), for example. Although mental illness is more treatable than ever before, it’s still not a simple affair like vaccinating someone against an infectious disease. Any reasonable person knows that. Most of us have have experience with someone or even many someones with intractable mental health issues.
Also, as most of us know, most gun deaths do not involve a mentally off mass shooter but are far more pedestrian in nature. Suicides, domestic violence, accidents, drug deals, gangs, etc.
It’s a deep cultural issue that is being cultivated by the gun manufacturers for their own financial benefit with the NRA aiding and abetting them. Followed closely by the politicians who are cynically using the outmoded Fourth Amendment hot button to get elected.
Oops. Of course I meant Second Amendment.
And we start by outlawing AR 15s and similar guns, along with high capacity magazines. From everything I’ve read it had a positive impact when we did it before.