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.