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"Being a violent criminal" is not a mental disorder; most people who commit acts of violence do not have any diagnosable mental health issues. Only a small min

• astrange 4y ago
  This is a very popular statement on the twitter and all, but I think it comes from their need to support marginalized people, which ends up requiring mental illnesses to make you more virtuous and never less. So then you have to go around saying that serial killers are the most healthy people there can be and 100% rational. Surely this is a mistake? Of course we have mental illnesses that describe things like this, like "antisocial personality disorder". If anything, all we need to do is invent "wants to shoot people personality disorder".
  • jasonhansel 4y ago
    They're evil, vicious, and morally reprehensible. They're not (in general) mentally ill.
    • s1artibartfast 4y ago
      This is just semantics around the definition of mentally ill. You can move away from it and ask what is unique about the mental state where someone wants to shoot children and follows through on it. You can ask if this mental state is preventable.
      • guerrilla 4y ago
        Mental illness isn't about general states and conseqncues but suffering and disability to the patient, like all illness.
        • s1artibartfast 4y ago
          Semantics again. Who cares? Don't call it mental illness then, but mental states, neuro architecture, chemical disfunction, or bad brains. It is clear that healthy well adjusted people don't fixate on slaughtering children
          • guerrilla 4y ago
            "Semantics" Ueah the meaning of words is important becUse of the consequences. What we care about with mental illness is suffering because its good to reduce it. It's absolutely critical. > It is clear that healthy well adjusted people don't fixate on slaughtering children All the people who waged war and genocide throughout history have nothing to do with the suffering of the mentally ill due to their genetics , behavior and genrics. Don't be so dismissive. It's very disrespectful.
            • s1artibartfast 4y ago
              I was the one offering alternative language here to not offend people with a specific definition of mental illness. If you just want to argue the point I'm offering to concede, I'm happy to steal man it. If you have you ever known someone that is mentally ill, you know that their illness does not preclude the ability to harm and make those around them suffer. Many School shooters are capable of suffering themselves, and in fact their suffering often plays a large role in their motivations. They can also suffer during a lifetime of incarceration or the anguish of being executed. They often have major mental disabilities, like the inability to feel empathy. There are a large number of neuropsychiatric disorders associated with persistent antisocial and criminal behavior, such as Psychopathy, Sadistic personality disorder, narcissism, depression, and paranoia. Are these not mental illnesses by your definition? Nobody is claiming that the mentally ill are dangerous. However, deadly mass shooters are often mentally ill. For example, studies have found some indication of autistic spectrum disorder in ~30% of of school shooters[1]. This is but one neuropsychiatric disorder. To ask the inverse question, Do you think that school shooters are mentally healthy?? If not, how would you fit their psychology and behavior into our scientific model of neuroscience? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223980.2016.1175998 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223980.2016.1...
    • astrange 4y ago
      Mentally ill means whatever we want it to mean, and there’s no reason not to make it include this. If there was a "treatment" that worked, it'd be a good alternative to life in prison. (Although if that was some kind of future-lobotomy, it'd have a lot of its own ethical issues.)
      • rhcom2 4y ago
        > Mentally ill means whatever we want it to mean That isn't how medicine works though.
        • itsyaboi 4y ago
          Sure it does. All it takes is consensus.
        • astrange 4y ago
          I don’t think the problem is it’s untreatable so much as it’s ego-syntonic (ie they don’t feel anything is wrong) and so they’re not going to ask for help. But most personality disorders are like that. IIRC mass killers do have some prior behaviors in common, but it’s not that they like wearing trenchcoats and violent video games, more like they often start with domestic violence or hit women.
        • l33t2328 4y ago
          It is how mental health works though. The DSM can record whatever the community wants as an illness.
        • jcims 4y ago
          Most medical definitions of the term disability largely rhyme with the CDC's: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/disability.html https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/disability.ht... >A disability is any condition of the body or mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions). Why would commission of a violent crime, which could lead to life imprisonment or the death penalty, be less of a mental health issue than sex or gambling addiction, alcoholism, etc which generally have less of an impact on one's life?
• Zak 4y ago
  This may be a problem with our current categories of mental illness. It is my opinion that if someone murders another person for most of the common reasons (robbery, relatively minor interpersonal disputes, nonsensical rage, etc...) something is wrong with the murderer. Perhaps the wrongness is that the murderer is simply evil. I don't have a framework for helping evil people nor positively identifying them before they commit evil acts. If someone does evil, they can be punished to dissuade further evil acts, caged to protect others from them, or killed. It is an injustice to do any of those things to a person before they commit an evil act. If, however the wrongness is an illness, it might be possible to diagnose them before they do great harm to others and provide treatment. Of course there's a dangerous slippery slope possible here in which anyone who's at all atypical is given involuntary "corrective" treatment.
  • guerrilla 4y ago
    > This may be a problem with our current categories of mental illness. It is my opinion that if someone murders another person for most of the common reasons (robbery, relatively minor interpersonal disputes, nonsensical rage, etc...) something is wrong with the murderer. Even if they do it because they'll die of starvation otherwise?
  • v-erne 4y ago
    >> It is my opinion that if someone murders another person for most of the common reasons (robbery, relatively minor interpersonal disputes, nonsensical rage, etc...) something is wrong with the murderer. This seems like wishful thinking - You are making some assumptions about the nature of human kind (that murderous behaviors are not part of it) and then you work backward to classify someone who has commited murder as not healthy. The safer assumption would be to give some credit to social norms, and be grateful that murdering each other is mostly out of fashion (when did we last witnessed real duel to death?)
• _xp 4y ago
  The context here: the media claimed the shooter has "no history of mental illness"; Abbott said anyone like that must inherently be mentally ill. The media's position is untenable. If your definition of mental illness doesn't include adolescents who want to murder their peers, then it's defective by design. Your first link doesn't address mass shooters. The second one (written by an "enterprise reporter" and quoting from forensic psychiatrists) draws an astonishing distinction between "mental illness" and "sociopathy or antisocial disorders" (!), and defines most mass shooters as sociopathic and therefore not mentally ill. I don't know how anyone could read that article and be convinced by it. I should note that forensic psychiatrists are by far the most conservative (not in the political sense) practiciners in their field, a shocking number of them are quacks, they often have little experience treating patients, and they tend to believe in more black-and-white/"predictive" (and excessively confident) theories, suitable to their role in courtrooms. Under the old-school DSM mindset, if you're not diagnosed with anything, you are defined as healthy. That type of thinking will never allow us to truly address society's emotional health. Emotional health is a spectrum; we're all at varying degrees of emotional health, and the average (i.e. "normal") person is significantly emotionally unhealthy. Any reform that aims to genuinely improve society's emotional health has to move beyond the old model; and in any model of emotional health (where low self-esteem, social anxiety, low emotional self-awareness, attachment disorders become part of the picture), any shooter would be defined as severely emotionally ill; moreover, any reform that aims to detect attachment issues, low self-esteem and more, early on in life, in a systematic way, would prevent most (if not all) of these shootings from happening.
• SamuelAdams 4y ago
  This is also in the article - does no one read past the first three paragraphs? Media reports often assume a binary distinction between mild and severe mental illness, and connect the latter form to unpredictability and lack of self-control. However, this distinction, too, is called into question by mental health research. To be sure, a number of the most common psychiatric diagnoses, including depressive, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders, have no correlation with violence whatsoever.18 Community studies find that serious mental illness without substance abuse is also “statistically unrelated” to community violence.40 At the aggregate level, the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts—only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness.41,42