In a Violent Context



I’m familiar with these questions more in terms of sexual behavior. Why was homosexuality considered a mental illness? How do we justify a diagnosis of “paraphilia” (illness) instead of “fetish” (non-illness) based on whether a desire causes problems functioning in society when society itself is deeply irrational about sex, and kinky sex in particular? Where do we draw the lines for what someone can legally consent to for pleasure when we allow people to damage their own health and bodily integrity for other reasons?

These aren’t questions with easy answers. Nor are the kinds of questions we should be asking ourselves with regard to mass violence, whether in the presence of clear mental illness or not. Violence is not anything like an inevitable outcome of of mental illness, even extreme paranoid schizophrenia. Also, there are commonalities to those who do commit mass violence that do not match the patterns we see in mental illness itself. Then there’s the fact that our society maintains certain kinds of delusional thinking that can fuel violence but are so prevalent we don’t consider them a mark of mental illness.

Daniel doesn’t necessarily have answers. Neither do I. But I do recommend reading his post and some of the information he links to. The questions implicit in that information are worth thinking about instead of simply explaining away with a label.


  1. baal says

    Thanks for pointing out the other blog. I was one who assumed (wrongly) that the latest shooter was in fact mentally ill or a right-wing nut job. The other blog emphasized the constellation of circumstance where young (almost all) men are hyper-violent.

    It’d be interesting to get his take on how race plays into it. I can’t sort out the options. 1) I think of the mass killers as overwhelmingly white, is this reporting bias, true, or a failing in my memory? 2) do non-whites lack equivalent opportunity to have killing sprees? 3)do non-white not have the same sense of entitlement (excess privilege) that leads to feeling broadly disappointed in society? 4)do non-white communities contain memes that protect against mass violence? 5)…etc

  2. Pteryxx says

    baal: from John Douglas’s profiling books (a bit old), the vast majority of serial and mass killers of strangers in the US and Canada are in fact white. He doesn’t go into the reasons for this much – he’s a profiler, not a sociologist – but it’s definitely not your imagination. I’m inclined to think that entitlement, disproportionate benefit-of-the-doubt from law enforcement, and US gun culture overlapping racism, all probably contribute.

  3. says

    Whoa. Fascinating stuff — I think it’s worth the time and effort to really dig down deep and figure out just what it is that sets these mass-murderers off. (It’s clearly more than just being mentally ill, or being “on drugs”, or whatever the explanation-du-jour is.)

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