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[Classic]

Insofar as "mental illness" demonstrates sympathy, at least.

I guess there is some commonality here in that there's some assumed systemic failing in both cases.

[Mongrel]

Well, there's also the fact that the Fort Hood guy specifically targeted people who were about to deploy to Afghanistan. An initial assumption of terrorism doesn't seem that ludicrous, even though it did turn out to be a case of mental illness in the end.

[Ted Belmont]

Of course, if you ask Fox News, not calling the Fort Hood shooting a terrorist incident is part of a plot by Obama.

Granted, according to Fox News, EVERYTHING is part of a plot by Obama.

[TA]

Well, there's also the fact that the Fort Hood guy specifically targeted people who were about to deploy to Afghanistan. An initial assumption of terrorism doesn't seem that ludicrous, even though it did turn out to be a case of mental illness in the end.

And the repeated communications with Anwar al-Awlaki asking specifically about shooting up the base, and whatnot.  There were and are a lot of legitimate reasons to suspect deliberate terrorist action.  Last I saw, it actually hasn't turned out to be a case of mental illness, thus far.

[Mongrel]

Last I heard it was a conflation of the two... that he'd had what were arguably mental health problems (severe anxiety, paranoia, depression) and had turned to extremist philosophies as his mental state deteriorated.

But it's been a while since I read anything, so I'm more than willing to admit that I may be misremembering. I do recall that it's being prosecuted as a terrorist act.

[Mongrel]

Actually it's worth mentioning that those crossover moments are a great example of how our views of things can get muddled up.

Where does political extremism based on poor circumstances* begin and political extremism derived from serious mental illness end? I guess maybe the easy argument is that measurable biological factors matter for the latter, but not the former? That seems too easy though. Hell, everything the brain does is technically biologically measurable on some level, at least in theory.

*(poor as in 'suboptimal', rather than 'impoverished' - though suboptimal may include being impoverished)

[Brentai]

You can be both mentally ill and a terrorist.  McVeigh.

(Also, white and male.  Very white and male.)

Although I guess McVeigh was never deemed mentally unfit either, though I suspect that's more because OK really, really wanted him to get the death penalty.

[Zaratustra]

Two sides of the same thing. You either blame humanity in general for not feeling as good as you ought to, or you decide there's actually a secret conspiracy of barbers to put you down and you hate that instead.

[Shinra]

Shooter's mother had a "Heart of Gold".

Nice hard-hitting journalism, CNN. Have we figured out why this mother with a heart of gold had an assault rifle and a bunch of handguns yet?

Nancy Lanza owned guns for self-defense, her former sister-in-law Marsha Lanza said.

I can see why, look at that crime rate!

Maybe I'm a dick for shitting on the dead, but I'd like to see a whole lot more of blaming the enablers when this shit happens. The fact that Jared Loughner's negligent guardians aren't sitting in a jail cell beside him right now is still steaming me up.

[Royal☭]

An report a Newtown NBC affiliate mentioned that she was stockpiling guns in case of economic collapse leading to societal collapse.

Also, turns out Newtown has an interesting history/dispute with assault weapons and stockpiling of guns

[Bal]

Sounds like mom hand a dash of the crazies too.

[Shinra]

Mom is a survivalist crazy who has convinced her aspergers afflicted son that the end is coming soon. Couple that with the media hype around december 21st....

Maybe he thought he was doing everyone a favor.

[Joxam]

That's awful lot of speculation you got goin' on there.

[Disposable Ninja]

It's also the closest thing to logic that can be attributed to murdering a classroom full of preschoolers.

[Shinra]

It's also the closest thing to logic that can be attributed to murdering a classroom full of preschoolers.

[Thad]

That's the Victorian era definition of mental illness, where someone who Does Something You Don't Like is mentally ill. But that doesn't mean he had an actual, diagnosed mental illness.

I'm perfectly all right with defining it as axiomatic that anyone who walks into a classroom and shoots a bunch of children has a mental illness.  Diagnosed or not.

Remember, as of right now, there are millions of people across this earth killing each other. And the only reason we say that they're "mentally fit" is because they kill the people that society agrees should die. Hell, Barack Obama has been killing women and children at random since he took office, yet nobody says he has a mental illness.

Well, they fucking-well would if he did it personally.

While my opinion of drone strikes and the inevitable civilian casualties is pretty well-established, it's distinct from something like Haditha.  It's the difference between intentionally and unintentionally killing somebody.  If we weren't talking about a warzone, it would be the difference between murder 1 and negligent homicide.

The reason I make an issue out of it is because lumping Adam Lanza on the "mental illness" bandwagon is that it stigmatizes actual mental illnesses, making it harder for people who have schizophrenia, or depression, or bipolar disorder to come forward. It's really hard to seek help when everyone thinks you're one bad day away from shooting up a school full of children.

And I said as much after the Tucson shooting: while I absolutely do believe we need to have a national dialogue about providing better care to the mentally ill, having it in the context of the dangerous minority is a chilling prospect.  The appropriate way to treat people who are sick is with compassion, not fear.  (Both McDohl and Shinra have mentioned reports that the shooter had Asperger's -- I don't know about the veracity of those reports but I've heard them too and my fiancee was worried that it would lead to further stigmatization of the autistic kids she teaches.)

That said, we also shouldn't ignore the role that mental illness has played in these shootings.  Even if we're to accept the premise that this was just a regular guy who decided out of nowhere that he was going to murder a bunch of children, well, there are plenty damn more examples of people who exhibited obvious warning signs of mental illness -- and in at least one case actually spent time in an institution -- and went on to buy guns and shoot a bunch of people.

On the other hand, there comes a point at which following up on erratic behavior becomes invasive.  At what point is, say, a school obligated to speak to law enforcement about a student's erratic behavior?  At what point is a psychologist obligated to violate patient confidentiality in order to protect public safety?  There are strict guidelines for these things, as well there should be.  You can't treat every person who's a little different as a potential threat.  But the tradeoff is sometimes the ones who ARE legitimate threats manage to fly under the radar.

We're all assuming that this is the result of something that we could all, even the shooter, identify as a mental illness.

I don't see how that follows at all.

I know I'm not qualified to diagnose mental illness.  I AM inclined to believe that "murdering a bunch of kids" falls under that heading.  Short of that?  It's entirely possible I wouldn't have picked up anything wrong with the guy if I'd known him.  Lots of other people didn't.

But with a lot of these guys, there HAVE been pretty blatant warning signs.

And I'll admit, I haven't followed up much on this particular shooter.  I'd just as soon not.  I don't want to recognize his face, I don't want to know his name.  I'm sick to death of the media treating these assholes like celebrities.  (I believe my local paper has announced that from here on in they will not be covering mass shootings on the front page.  Good for them and I hope more media outlets follow suit -- though in an age of news aggregators, trending topics, retweets and reblogs I'm not sure how much difference it'll make.)

But again, there are plenty more where he came from.

And I think it's pretty axiomatic that people can be mentally ill and not realize it even when it's obvious to others.  I really don't get the "even the shooter" qualifier at all; there are any number of disorders whose symptoms include a failure to believe there's anything wrong with the sufferer.  Shinra's already mentioned bipolar disorder as an obvious one.

As uncomfortable as, we cannot just go around assuming anyone who kills is in the same category as schizophrenics, bipolar disorder, manic depressives and any other real, evaluative mental illness. Every discussion I see about this discusses how "We need access to help the mentally ill, we need better services, why can't the mentally ill get help" without any kind of evidence that he had a provable mental disorder that could have been acted on. The simple truth is we do not know, and we stigmatize people who need REAL help, who have REAL problems when we equate shooting spree with mental illness.

But on the other hand at least people are acknowledging that we have a real problem with how we treat those people, and that they DO have real problems and DO need real help.

There are different ways to look at it.  One of them IS the horrifying, stigmatizing notion that everyone who's mentally ill is a potential mass-murderer.

But another is the compassionate perspective that, on some level, guys like the one in Tucson or the one in Aurora or hell maybe this guy too for all we know are victims themselves, and that if they'd been given access to care they could have lived normal, fulfilling lives and contributed to society instead of taking from it.  I see that as both a positive and productive outlook to have, actually.  It doesn't get these guys off the hook for what they've done; of course it doesn't.  But it provides some hope that we can still help other people, set them on the right path to becoming happy and healthy.

There are also the twin assumptions that mental illness can neither spontaneously manifest nor spontaneously resolve itself.

I don't know about "spontaneously", but yes, there are certainly cases where people's mental state can change based on causes that aren't immediately clear.  Head trauma, brain tumors, or just some kind of weird chemical interaction.

It's probably worth noting that a lot of these shooting stories involve adolescents, and that a whole hell of a lot of suicides are adolescent.  Even if you take mental illness out of the equation entirely, puberty makes people behave erratically, unpredictably, and irrationally.  Add a little bit of mental illness to it, or even just a high-pressure situation, and someone who could have otherwise lived a normal and productive life can take a single action that cuts that path off entirely.

I read an article recently about childhood behaviors that sometimes indicate sociopathy -- and sometimes don't.  Sometimes children who behave with a lack of empathy and understanding grow up to be ordinary, healthy adults.

All that takes us a bit off the track of the current story, of course, but I think it does work into a macro point about all the different variables involved in situations like this and how we as a society really need to do a better job of recognizing and responding to them.

That said, what I'm hearing in this situation is that there were enough obvious warning signs to make someone think "I should probably make these weapons inacceseidkxmjurfcuijknmrfhjbnrfjnufrc

Hm, well, sounds like there are conflicting stories here.  Again, I really haven't read much on the shooter and don't care to.

Okay. I don't think Shinra wants to brand the insane and I don't think that getting confrontational is going to produce any kind of useful discussion. So if we wanna go down that route forget it.

Agreed.

I also think that Constantine is right that there are now some objective measures in place to gauge severeness and type of mental illness, though my opinon is that the treatment of mental health issues is still in its infancy, only one step ahead of the neural equivalent of sawing limbs off and pouring on hot tar (I would say THAT was the Victorian/Early 20th Century era). We just don't understand the brain well enough yet to really properly analyse problems, let alone treat them meaningfully.

I'm inclined to agree here, too.  We're getting much better at diagnosing and treating mental illness, but we've a long way to go, as Bal's pointed out.  And we're nowhere near normalizing it.

There's no "right" random killing of a bunch of children.

Separately, you can talk about military killings or whatever else, but those are at least rooted in social mores that (for good or ill) most of us have chosen to accept - or at least to not fight. We may not like killing or war personally, but we get why they happen and why people participate in them. To conflate the two as "it's all just killin'" or whatever, masks the causes of both to the detriment of any kind of useful problem solving.

Right -- while there's no "right" random killing of a bunch of children, there IS a socially acceptable way of doing it, and that's by accident in a theater of war.  But yeah, I'd say that's pretty off-topic and not particularly productive.

There is a point, though. The Fort Hood massacre was originally talked about as if it was a terrorist attack. Nobody started in on the more sympathetic mental illness angle.

Some people did.  Kay Bailey Hutchison talked about him being "upset" about his impending deployment; an early CBS piece, while it did include the "Islamic terrorism" hypothesis, also mentioned high incidence of combat fatigue and the high suicide rate among soldiers.

[Mongrel]

After thinking a bit, one of the things that strikes me is how mental illness occurs on a very long and complex gradation from negligible to severe (just like any kind of illness), there's really not a lot of comparable gradation in society's response.

Either you're "mentally fit" (or somesuch phrase), meaning you are considered fully responsible for your own actions and have the same freedoms and responsibilities as anyone else in your society, or you don't and are either locked up or have your rights signed away by power of attorney.

There's some middle ground, like denying an otherwise free and fit person various licenses (gun, car, etc.), or restricting people from certain physical places or professions, but by and large you're either free and considered responsible for your actions, or you're not.

To be fair, I'm not sure there's really effective ways to have partial or graduated responsibility with our current technology and culture. That would require an incredibly sophisticated and accurate assessment system in order to be fair and even then, broad partial restrictions on personal freedoms that vary in level from individual to individual would carry a huge potential for abuse. Of course, there are also those cases where a person simply may not reveal anything problematic until one day they just go on tilt.

[Thad]

That and you can't go giving the entire population a psych eval.  For starters, there aren't enough qualified psychologists and the potential harm for a misdiagnosis from an UNqualified psychologist is massive.

I heard a story on NPR awhile back about the PCL-R, a checklist of traits associated with psychopathy.  It's a good test; it's scientific and it's reliable.  But prisons have started employing it to determine whether inmates should be allowed parole.  That's not what the test is intended for, and its own author, Robert Hare, is opposed to its use in that context.

While Hare remains a strong believer that his test works well for the kind of basic scientific research that it was originally designed for, he and others have begun to wonder if it does as good a job outside the lab.

"Once you get into the real world, there does seem to be some lessening of reliability," says Daniel Murrie, a professor at the University of Virginia who has studied what happens when psychological tests are taken from a rarefied research environment and transferred to the rough-and-tumble world of criminal justice.

About four years ago, Murrie decided to study the PCL-R to look at what happened when a psychologist hired by the prosecution gave Hare's test to the same prisoner as a psychologist hired by the defense.

Did those two psychologists give the same score to the same person?

The answer, says Murrie, was no. "Ten, 15, even 20-point score differences we found," he says, " And overall there was about an 8-point difference in scores."

The question is why. One possibility, Murrie argues, is that the psychologists using the test in prisons and courts might not be well-trained.

"We don't know if the people giving the test in the field have gotten formal, rigorous training, or if they've just sort of bought the manual and maybe read a couple of papers and just decided to start using it," Murrie says.

But Murrie thinks it's also something else. He says that in his study, psychologists hired by the prosecution consistently gave higher scores than psychologists employed by the defense.

Probably, Murrie says, because they're being paid for those opinions, and that money influences them.

Basically: the test, properly employed, is a very good test -- there are studies correlating its results with a convict's likelihood to re-offend.  On those terms, it seems like a damn good tool for protecting public safety by gauging the danger of releasing a felon back onto the streets.

But in real life, the test isn't always conducted competently or impartially.  It's reliable in the lab, but not in the criminal justice system.  And of course once you brand somebody a psychopath, there's no parole board in the world that's going to be willing to let him out, let alone any elected official who'll be willing to sign off on it.

That's an extreme example, and not directly relevant to the subject at hand.  (I am, of course, totally cool with convicted violent criminals being denied the right to own guns, whether they're sociopaths or not.)  But it's a good example of the potential problems with putting mental health diagnoses in the hands of people who may not be qualified or who may have ulterior motives.

[Healy]

And I said as much after the Tucson shooting: while I absolutely do believe we need to have a national dialogue about providing better care to the mentally ill, having it in the context of the dangerous minority is a chilling prospect.  The appropriate way to treat people who are sick is with compassion, not fear.  (Both McDohl and Shinra have mentioned reports that the shooter had Asperger's -- I don't know about the veracity of those reports but I've heard them too and my fiancee was worried that it would lead to further stigmatization of the autistic kids she teaches.)

I dunno, from what little I've read of the case it didn't seem like he had been diagnosed with anything at all. Not that he wasn't suffering from mental illness, of course; in fact, if his parents wouldn't go to the relatively simple measure of getting him a proper psych evaluation, that probably just made things worse. Even just giving a context for whatever mixed-up thoughts he had might have kept him from going on a shooting spree.
(also goddamn you write long posts--took me a while to isolate this bit in the tiny quick reply pane)

[Shinra]

That and you can't go giving the entire population a psych eval.  For starters, there aren't enough qualified psychologists and the potential harm for a misdiagnosis from an UNqualified psychologist is massive.

I heard a story on NPR awhile back about the PCL-R, a checklist of traits associated with psychopathy.  It's a good test; it's scientific and it's reliable.  But prisons have started employing it to determine whether inmates should be allowed parole.  That's not what the test is intended for, and its own author, Robert Hare, is opposed to its use in that context.

While Hare remains a strong believer that his test works well for the kind of basic scientific research that it was originally designed for, he and others have begun to wonder if it does as good a job outside the lab.

"Once you get into the real world, there does seem to be some lessening of reliability," says Daniel Murrie, a professor at the University of Virginia who has studied what happens when psychological tests are taken from a rarefied research environment and transferred to the rough-and-tumble world of criminal justice.

About four years ago, Murrie decided to study the PCL-R to look at what happened when a psychologist hired by the prosecution gave Hare's test to the same prisoner as a psychologist hired by the defense.

Did those two psychologists give the same score to the same person?

The answer, says Murrie, was no. "Ten, 15, even 20-point score differences we found," he says, " And overall there was about an 8-point difference in scores."

The question is why. One possibility, Murrie argues, is that the psychologists using the test in prisons and courts might not be well-trained.

"We don't know if the people giving the test in the field have gotten formal, rigorous training, or if they've just sort of bought the manual and maybe read a couple of papers and just decided to start using it," Murrie says.

But Murrie thinks it's also something else. He says that in his study, psychologists hired by the prosecution consistently gave higher scores than psychologists employed by the defense.

Probably, Murrie says, because they're being paid for those opinions, and that money influences them.

Basically: the test, properly employed, is a very good test -- there are studies correlating its results with a convict's likelihood to re-offend.  On those terms, it seems like a damn good tool for protecting public safety by gauging the danger of releasing a felon back onto the streets.

But in real life, the test isn't always conducted competently or impartially.  It's reliable in the lab, but not in the criminal justice system.  And of course once you brand somebody a psychopath, there's no parole board in the world that's going to be willing to let him out, let alone any elected official who'll be willing to sign off on it.

That's an extreme example, and not directly relevant to the subject at hand.  (I am, of course, totally cool with convicted violent criminals being denied the right to own guns, whether they're sociopaths or not.)  But it's a good example of the potential problems with putting mental health diagnoses in the hands of people who may not be qualified or who may have ulterior motives.

Tangental, but that NPR report actually got me to read the book they were talking about, the Psychopath Test. It's a great read, but a bit on the short side.