8 ms·

Stop Conflating Violence and Mental Illness

37 points by adrianhoward 14y ago

AskHugo 14y ago
Did anyone also notice that the mentally ill girl depicted drawing on the wall seems to be a Java programmer? She wrote things like "Math.pow(x, y)" and "function place row". Here's the image upside down: http://i.imgur.com/d095a.jpg http://i.imgur.com/d095a.jpg
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Quick google: https://www.google.com/search?q=BRICK_HEIGHT+bricknumber&nfpr=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=BRICK_HEIGHT+bricknumber&#38...
- mieubrisse 14y ago
  I was curious about that myself as well. It seems a rather odd choice if you're trying to imply lunacy.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Isn't it an inevitable consequence of being exposed to Java for too long? Just like: InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedState That's not part of a class API, it's a cry for help. Too cheap?
    - droithomme 14y ago
      Wow thanks, I had not seen that, but that's a real class name in com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus. "it's a cry for help" I'll agree with this.
      - olgeni 14y ago
        A real cry for help would have mentioned a couple of Factories at least.
  - ibisum 14y ago
    Some people think Java programmers are all insane, so the point wasn't lost on me. Context is everything - also, pay-rate probably has something to do with it.. ;)
  - DanBC 14y ago
    Why?
konstruktor 14y ago
One of the first things I, as a European, thought after hearing speculation on mental problems of the shooter was the following: If they just focus on the mental health issues on the shooter and start stereotyping, ostracizing and discriminating mentally ill people a bit more, maybe even with some law that limits their freedoms, people in the US will be able to avoid their two big taboo topics: Healthcare (and, by extension, taxes) and gun control. I would absolutely hate to be right on this one.
- eitland 14y ago
  HNers are mostly bright people. Right now there is a trending post on randomness and clusters on the front page and we mostly enjoy. Still why do we forget the science we are so proud of everything guns are mentioned? Why is there no similar outcry for stricter car control? That could really save a lot of innocent kids lives as well as making the lives of all kinds of criminals way harder. You'd also reduce the emissions of CO2 and the overuse of hydrocarbons. Since cars are bigger and mostly are used on roads collecting most of them should only take a few years. But nobody seems to be interested, why?
  - opminion 14y ago
    Cars are useful, to move people around, everywhere in the world. Guns are useful, to move people around, only in selected locations.
    - eitland 14y ago
      Buses are far more environmental friendly. And thanks for the downvotes. I expect the explanations to become visible soon and to be well grounded in sitee policies.
      - opminion 14y ago
        And thanks for the downvotes. I expect the explanations to become visible soon and to be well grounded in sitee policies. I do not know why you wrote that in your reply to my comment. I cannot downvote, nor would I have downvoted you if I could. If you have a grievance, please reply to the appropriate comment (or your own). Is there an "explanation" or "site policy" I need to refer to in relation to my comment? Otherwise, please do not target individual comments, unrelated to your grievance, it is quite rude.
lauraura 14y ago
It's been really depressing to see so many reactions to the shooting phrased in that way -- that the problem is mental illness or bad care of the mentally ill. Mentally ill people are already stigmatized enough as-is, despite the fact that they're far more likely to be murdered than to be murderers. People are already suggesting that the mentally ill be added to registries, much like the already-flawed sex offender registry. This isn't going to make life any better for the mentally ill, and certainly won't make anyone safer. It'll just make mental illness even more of a black mark on someone's record -- imagine being diagnosed for depression or autism once and never being able to hold a proper job again. People will be even more deathly afraid of being properly diagnosed and cared for, not the inverse.
mynameishere 14y ago
Stop conflating statistically insignificant incidents with reality. The Sandy Hook lunatic wasn't even as deadly as a slow weekend in Chicago. The only reason the occasionally mentally ill (you heard me) gunman gets press is because the UMC media can identify with the victims. The UMC media can also identify with the gunman. Unlike Chicago gangbangers, they've known such creepy kids back in high school.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
drivebyacct2 14y ago
>"When you think of mental illness, is this what you see?" asks artist Jennifer Mathis. Was I supposed to have? I certainly didn't. I imagined a lot of things, on a wide spectrum, but not that.
jacques_chester 14y ago
Hard policy is hard: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/12/19/so-sandy-hook/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/12/19/so-sandy-hook/ But simplifying is human nature. We'd be unable to make sense of the world otherwise (he said in a hilariously un-self-conscious way).
dschiptsov 14y ago
The issue here is very general one. The so-called common sense held by wast majority is just plain wrong. It is a just a consensus by ignorant public, and have nothing to do with more or less accurate description of reality, leave alone explaining any particular event. This situation is so common, that people literally didn't know any better. Common sense about what things really are and how things works and why are naive oversimplifications and folklore at its best. Common folks have no clue how, say, financial instruments works, or what software engineering is about, or what is mental disorders and Autism in particular. But everyone are cock-sure that they have an opinion and their opinion is the most accurate description of the reality. 99% of these talks are naive but emotional nonsense. Guns are not the causes. It is the same stupidity as to blame the pain for the cancer. Blaming autistic traits as the causes of some particular acts of people who "seems like autistic" is just as stupid as to blame food for obesity. Yes, autistic individuals have much more pressure in society because they have very unpleasant, physical sensation of discomfort, comparable with pain or fear. We can do nothing with it, it just is. It is almost the same sense as of being overwhelmed by annoying, loud noise you have no means to escape. It might be caused by mere presence of noisy, loud, annoying, hyper-active, rude and selfish people, it might be just forced conversation or forced eye-contact - each autistic individual has his own sources of causes of overwhelming annoying pressure. It doesn't really matter how exactly it works, due to some inherent over-sensitivity of Amigdala or due to dis-balance in production or metabolism of some neuro-chemical substance, it doesn't really matter. The matter is that life is much less pleasant task if you are one of us. The most interesting part is that most of autistic people don't even realize that they are somehow different from others, and that not everyone share the same feelings of being overwhelmed. It is very difficult realization, which requires lots of knowledge and intelligence. You're, of course, heard of it many times, but you probably thought that it is not about you. So, like it or not, the cancer is society. It is that simple. How people threat each other (let alone how they threat Asperger and autistic individuals) is the cause of most troubles. Just what people are in general. The bell-curve is very real thing, and so-called ordinary people, en mass, is by no means a nice thing. I do not try to say that this particular shooter deserves any mercy or special consideration. He is just like a sick animal - everything is too late. All I'm trying to say that do not talk about things you have no clue about. You may hear some shit about ASDs and event felt something like being overwhelmed by stress or depressed, but some people live all their lives under a constant pressure, source of which they didn't realize, having no idea that it is not the world around that is wrong. World is the same for everyone. The hell is other people, you like it or not. Especially for autistic people. Some idiots used an analogy with rabies, but, no. There are no microbes that produce toxins that rewires your brain so you have no control over it, so, you are not responsible for your actions. This is an instance of that naive oversimplification nonsense. It is all mental, and it accumulates in fullness of time, as chronic depression or constant agitation does. By the way, most of accompanied mild, non-organic mental disorders go together. If you have physical discomfort being forced to deal with people, you likely have the whole bunch of personality disorders in their mild form. They are just artificial names of the same thing - consequences, effects, reactions to an overwhelming pressure. btw, that illustration in original posting, with a girl in a corner is a good illustration of a common misconception.)) 1. Autism is mostly boy's disorder. That picture is about clinical depression, which is women's trait, and it is just being shut in oneself. 2. To depict autistic narrowed focus, the corner must be not of a closed room, but something of a ruin, with no other walls or ceiling around, with all the world all around, but a boy didn't notice.
Vivtek 14y ago
"Autistic Americans"? Does the nationality of an autistic person have an effect on their autism?
- cbhl 14y ago
  In some sense, yes -- Autism is characterised (in part) by difficulty with "normal" social interactions, which can (and do) vary from nation to nation.
- lhnn 14y ago
  Perhaps the discussion is centered around America.
aes256 14y ago
Although people suffering from mental illnesses may statistically be more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent acts, the disproportionate focus on the latter is not unwarranted. People are afraid of unpredictability. They are afraid of irrational people doing irrational things, and many people with mental illnesses behave irrationally. That's the long and short of it. That said, we ought to be careful in making ex post diagnoses of mental illness as a means of coming to terms with a tragedy. It is merely a figment of the collective imagination that a person of sound mind would not consciously take the lives of many others.
- woofnbark 14y ago
  Conflating predictability with rationality appears to be a common failing amongst the supposedly sane. Just look at the hysteria that flares up every time an event like this occurs. Guns are bad, gunmen are mad. Unless they're police or military, in which case they're obviously in perfect mental health and heroes to boot. Very rational.
yyyytttt 14y ago
Let me play devil's advocate. From what she's saying I'm drawing the conclusion that mental illness correlates with drug use which correlates with violence. The prevalence of mental illness in the population is small, so the proportion of the mentally ill among violent criminals is also small, but if mental illness is a predictor of violence then being more aggressive about institutionalizing the mentally ill would provide society a better return on investment with respect to preventing violence than policies aimed at the general population (such as gun control).
- DanBC 14y ago
  Mental illness is not a predictor of violence. We're not just interested in the proportion of people with mental illness in the population of violent criminals. We are also interested in the proportion of violent criminals in the population of people with a mental illness. We find that very few people with a mental illness are violent. We find that people with mental illness are far more likely t be the victim of violent crime than the perpetrators of violent crime.
SethMurphy 14y ago
HN is the last place I would look for real understanding and incite on the affect of mental illness on our society. HN is the first place I would look to see part of the problem and misconceptions about mental illness. It seems the mental health of our country is failing as a whole. As the symptoms accumulate, in time, there will probably be a disease or syndrome named after it, with a little pill to "cure" it. I have other opinions, but they are just that, opinions and as such I won't pollute HN with my ignorance. I prefer to judge myself (as part of this country's failing mental health) and not others I know little about. Let's get back to tech, a topic where our opinions are more informed and the facts more easily understood.
michaelochurch 14y ago
People tend also to conflate mental illness with "things I don't like". For example, when the Sandy Hook shooting happened, people were saying, "What a whackjob", before they even knew who the perpetrator was, as if it were like "What an asshole". (Yes, I agree that he's an asshole, but no, I don't see reason to believe that he's literally the victim of a head injury.) It does seem likely that the man was mentally ill, but that's not all of the picture. The vast majority of people with mental illness would never do something like this, and not all mass murderers are mentally ill. In fact, as far as I know there are only two mental illnesses that positively correlate with violence. One is severe drug addiction, which is a different class of problem, and the other is psychopathy, and people with the latter tend to be above-average in social development, which is why Ted Bundy was so effective: he killed about 40 people before he was finally caught. We've seen this equation of displeasure with mental illness in the fallout as well. The NRA are referred to as "crazy gun nuts". Well, they're not actually "crazy". They hold strong ideological beliefs that we dislike, and they're almost certainly wrong (in that the benefits of ubiquitous AK-47s do not compensate for the drawbacks, because the probabilities associated with the events that would make then beneficial are ridiculously low). They're not the same thing. These radicals are dangerously wrong and I'm glad they're on the fringe, but they're not "crazy". I also take umbrage against the attempt to explain away evil using mental illness. It's like people don't want to admit that bad people or evil exist. Hitler was crazy, Adam Lanza was crazy, Ted Bundy was crazy. Well, I have no idea if they were mentally ill. They were, however, evil. Evil exists. It probably doesn't have a metaphysical platonic form (a Satan) and there's no evidence that it has any supernatural presence but, in the practical real world we live in, evil's a real thing. It's a part of our story as humans. You can't understand what we, as a species, are if you leave it out. In fact, to the extent that evil and "insanity" correlate, I would argue that the causal direction goes the other way: people who do evil things, especially if they're rewarded and become powerful, warp over time and eventually go nuts. It's not the other way around. Mental illness is painful and horrible and sometimes it makes people do harmful things but it does not make people evil. Killing 28 innocent people, mostly children, for no reason is evil. Adam Lanza may have been mentally ill but he was also an evil piece of shit.
kephra 14y ago
Even more important is to stop branding people as mental ill! Mental illness in our system is defined like we are all chicken. We are defined healthy if we lay an egg every day, have clean feathers and don't pull feathers of other chicken in our cage. But not the chicken are insane. The system is insane! And the system became worse over the time. A lot of more people are now declared mental ill, then ever before. Especially children and the fear of the parents are exploited by doctors and pharmacy. Pharmacy drugs only try to hide the symptom, and often fail in even this. The result is more likely a drug addicted kid, who will later visit the doctor again, and again, like a junky visiting his heroin dealer.
jcfrei 14y ago
the author appears to be really upset about the current debate in the US about mental illness. and I don't see why. the article goes on a long rant about how we should separate mental illness and violence, yet no half-way knowledgeable person would assume a mentally illness person to be automatically violent. why is the author so strongly trying to prove a moot point? you can't argue away the fact that most (if not all) mass shooting in recent history have been conducted by mentally ill people and mental illness is a major factor when individuals commit such crimes. the author just messes around with statistics and appears to forget about causation and correlation - it's obvious that the majority of mentally ill people doesn't exercise violence - yet the ones who did were in most cases mentally ill. we're trying to find a way to prevent these shootings. and we need to ask ourselves how we, as a society, treat mentally people - not because 50% of them might be violent, but because 0.0001% are. what we really need to do is starting to make a more distinctive diagnosis of what the actual mental illness was and don't just conflate all forms of schizophrenia with psychosis, bi-polar mood and depression disorder, etc. under mental illness. and a last remark on statistics (and sampling bias), and I believe we can all agree that: P(violent|person is mentally ill) ~ P(violent|person is not mentally ill) however (and I believe this is the source of the discussion, correct me if I'm wrong): P(person is mentally ill|violent) >> P(person is not mentally ill|violent)
nerdfiles 14y ago
@see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570

37 points by adrianhoward 14y ago

Did anyone also notice that the mentally ill girl depicted drawing on the wall seems to be a Java programmer? She wrote things like "Math.pow(x, y)" and "function place row". Here's the image upside down: http://i.imgur.com/d095a.jpg http://i.imgur.com/d095a.jpg

drivebyacct2 14y ago
Quick google: https://www.google.com/search?q=BRICK_HEIGHT+bricknumber&nfpr=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=BRICK_HEIGHT+bricknumber&#38...
mieubrisse 14y ago
I was curious about that myself as well. It seems a rather odd choice if you're trying to imply lunacy.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Isn't it an inevitable consequence of being exposed to Java for too long? Just like: InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedState That's not part of a class API, it's a cry for help. Too cheap?
  - droithomme 14y ago
    Wow thanks, I had not seen that, but that's a real class name in com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus. "it's a cry for help" I'll agree with this.
    - olgeni 14y ago
      A real cry for help would have mentioned a couple of Factories at least.
- ibisum 14y ago
  Some people think Java programmers are all insane, so the point wasn't lost on me. Context is everything - also, pay-rate probably has something to do with it.. ;)
- DanBC 14y ago
  Why?

konstruktor 14y ago

One of the first things I, as a European, thought after hearing speculation on mental problems of the shooter was the following: If they just focus on the mental health issues on the shooter and start stereotyping, ostracizing and discriminating mentally ill people a bit more, maybe even with some law that limits their freedoms, people in the US will be able to avoid their two big taboo topics: Healthcare (and, by extension, taxes) and gun control. I would absolutely hate to be right on this one.

eitland 14y ago
HNers are mostly bright people. Right now there is a trending post on randomness and clusters on the front page and we mostly enjoy. Still why do we forget the science we are so proud of everything guns are mentioned? Why is there no similar outcry for stricter car control? That could really save a lot of innocent kids lives as well as making the lives of all kinds of criminals way harder. You'd also reduce the emissions of CO2 and the overuse of hydrocarbons. Since cars are bigger and mostly are used on roads collecting most of them should only take a few years. But nobody seems to be interested, why?
- opminion 14y ago
  Cars are useful, to move people around, everywhere in the world. Guns are useful, to move people around, only in selected locations.
  - eitland 14y ago
    Buses are far more environmental friendly. And thanks for the downvotes. I expect the explanations to become visible soon and to be well grounded in sitee policies.
    - opminion 14y ago
      And thanks for the downvotes. I expect the explanations to become visible soon and to be well grounded in sitee policies. I do not know why you wrote that in your reply to my comment. I cannot downvote, nor would I have downvoted you if I could. If you have a grievance, please reply to the appropriate comment (or your own). Is there an "explanation" or "site policy" I need to refer to in relation to my comment? Otherwise, please do not target individual comments, unrelated to your grievance, it is quite rude.

lauraura 14y ago

It's been really depressing to see so many reactions to the shooting phrased in that way -- that the problem is mental illness or bad care of the mentally ill. Mentally ill people are already stigmatized enough as-is, despite the fact that they're far more likely to be murdered than to be murderers. People are already suggesting that the mentally ill be added to registries, much like the already-flawed sex offender registry. This isn't going to make life any better for the mentally ill, and certainly won't make anyone safer. It'll just make mental illness even more of a black mark on someone's record -- imagine being diagnosed for depression or autism once and never being able to hold a proper job again. People will be even more deathly afraid of being properly diagnosed and cared for, not the inverse.

mynameishere 14y ago

Stop conflating statistically insignificant incidents with reality. The Sandy Hook lunatic wasn't even as deadly as a slow weekend in Chicago. The only reason the occasionally mentally ill (you heard me) gunman gets press is because the UMC media can identify with the victims. The UMC media can also identify with the gunman. Unlike Chicago gangbangers, they've known such creepy kids back in high school.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

drivebyacct2 14y ago

>"When you think of mental illness, is this what you see?" asks artist Jennifer Mathis. Was I supposed to have? I certainly didn't. I imagined a lot of things, on a wide spectrum, but not that.

jacques_chester 14y ago

Hard policy is hard: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/12/19/so-sandy-hook/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/12/19/so-sandy-hook/ But simplifying is human nature. We'd be unable to make sense of the world otherwise (he said in a hilariously un-self-conscious way).

dschiptsov 14y ago

The issue here is very general one. The so-called common sense held by wast majority is just plain wrong. It is a just a consensus by ignorant public, and have nothing to do with more or less accurate description of reality, leave alone explaining any particular event. This situation is so common, that people literally didn't know any better. Common sense about what things really are and how things works and why are naive oversimplifications and folklore at its best. Common folks have no clue how, say, financial instruments works, or what software engineering is about, or what is mental disorders and Autism in particular. But everyone are cock-sure that they have an opinion and their opinion is the most accurate description of the reality. 99% of these talks are naive but emotional nonsense. Guns are not the causes. It is the same stupidity as to blame the pain for the cancer. Blaming autistic traits as the causes of some particular acts of people who "seems like autistic" is just as stupid as to blame food for obesity. Yes, autistic individuals have much more pressure in society because they have very unpleasant, physical sensation of discomfort, comparable with pain or fear. We can do nothing with it, it just is. It is almost the same sense as of being overwhelmed by annoying, loud noise you have no means to escape. It might be caused by mere presence of noisy, loud, annoying, hyper-active, rude and selfish people, it might be just forced conversation or forced eye-contact - each autistic individual has his own sources of causes of overwhelming annoying pressure. It doesn't really matter how exactly it works, due to some inherent over-sensitivity of Amigdala or due to dis-balance in production or metabolism of some neuro-chemical substance, it doesn't really matter. The matter is that life is much less pleasant task if you are one of us. The most interesting part is that most of autistic people don't even realize that they are somehow different from others, and that not everyone share the same feelings of being overwhelmed. It is very difficult realization, which requires lots of knowledge and intelligence. You're, of course, heard of it many times, but you probably thought that it is not about you. So, like it or not, the cancer is society. It is that simple. How people threat each other (let alone how they threat Asperger and autistic individuals) is the cause of most troubles. Just what people are in general. The bell-curve is very real thing, and so-called ordinary people, en mass, is by no means a nice thing. I do not try to say that this particular shooter deserves any mercy or special consideration. He is just like a sick animal - everything is too late. All I'm trying to say that do not talk about things you have no clue about. You may hear some shit about ASDs and event felt something like being overwhelmed by stress or depressed, but some people live all their lives under a constant pressure, source of which they didn't realize, having no idea that it is not the world around that is wrong. World is the same for everyone. The hell is other people, you like it or not. Especially for autistic people. Some idiots used an analogy with rabies, but, no. There are no microbes that produce toxins that rewires your brain so you have no control over it, so, you are not responsible for your actions. This is an instance of that naive oversimplification nonsense. It is all mental, and it accumulates in fullness of time, as chronic depression or constant agitation does. By the way, most of accompanied mild, non-organic mental disorders go together. If you have physical discomfort being forced to deal with people, you likely have the whole bunch of personality disorders in their mild form. They are just artificial names of the same thing - consequences, effects, reactions to an overwhelming pressure. btw, that illustration in original posting, with a girl in a corner is a good illustration of a common misconception.)) 1. Autism is mostly boy's disorder. That picture is about clinical depression, which is women's trait, and it is just being shut in oneself. 2. To depict autistic narrowed focus, the corner must be not of a closed room, but something of a ruin, with no other walls or ceiling around, with all the world all around, but a boy didn't notice.

Vivtek 14y ago

"Autistic Americans"? Does the nationality of an autistic person have an effect on their autism?

cbhl 14y ago
In some sense, yes -- Autism is characterised (in part) by difficulty with "normal" social interactions, which can (and do) vary from nation to nation.
lhnn 14y ago
Perhaps the discussion is centered around America.

aes256 14y ago

Although people suffering from mental illnesses may statistically be more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent acts, the disproportionate focus on the latter is not unwarranted. People are afraid of unpredictability. They are afraid of irrational people doing irrational things, and many people with mental illnesses behave irrationally. That's the long and short of it. That said, we ought to be careful in making ex post diagnoses of mental illness as a means of coming to terms with a tragedy. It is merely a figment of the collective imagination that a person of sound mind would not consciously take the lives of many others.

woofnbark 14y ago
Conflating predictability with rationality appears to be a common failing amongst the supposedly sane. Just look at the hysteria that flares up every time an event like this occurs. Guns are bad, gunmen are mad. Unless they're police or military, in which case they're obviously in perfect mental health and heroes to boot. Very rational.

yyyytttt 14y ago

Let me play devil's advocate. From what she's saying I'm drawing the conclusion that mental illness correlates with drug use which correlates with violence. The prevalence of mental illness in the population is small, so the proportion of the mentally ill among violent criminals is also small, but if mental illness is a predictor of violence then being more aggressive about institutionalizing the mentally ill would provide society a better return on investment with respect to preventing violence than policies aimed at the general population (such as gun control).

DanBC 14y ago
Mental illness is not a predictor of violence. We're not just interested in the proportion of people with mental illness in the population of violent criminals. We are also interested in the proportion of violent criminals in the population of people with a mental illness. We find that very few people with a mental illness are violent. We find that people with mental illness are far more likely t be the victim of violent crime than the perpetrators of violent crime.

SethMurphy 14y ago

HN is the last place I would look for real understanding and incite on the affect of mental illness on our society. HN is the first place I would look to see part of the problem and misconceptions about mental illness. It seems the mental health of our country is failing as a whole. As the symptoms accumulate, in time, there will probably be a disease or syndrome named after it, with a little pill to "cure" it. I have other opinions, but they are just that, opinions and as such I won't pollute HN with my ignorance. I prefer to judge myself (as part of this country's failing mental health) and not others I know little about. Let's get back to tech, a topic where our opinions are more informed and the facts more easily understood.

michaelochurch 14y ago

People tend also to conflate mental illness with "things I don't like". For example, when the Sandy Hook shooting happened, people were saying, "What a whackjob", before they even knew who the perpetrator was, as if it were like "What an asshole". (Yes, I agree that he's an asshole, but no, I don't see reason to believe that he's literally the victim of a head injury.) It does seem likely that the man was mentally ill, but that's not all of the picture. The vast majority of people with mental illness would never do something like this, and not all mass murderers are mentally ill. In fact, as far as I know there are only two mental illnesses that positively correlate with violence. One is severe drug addiction, which is a different class of problem, and the other is psychopathy, and people with the latter tend to be above-average in social development, which is why Ted Bundy was so effective: he killed about 40 people before he was finally caught. We've seen this equation of displeasure with mental illness in the fallout as well. The NRA are referred to as "crazy gun nuts". Well, they're not actually "crazy". They hold strong ideological beliefs that we dislike, and they're almost certainly wrong (in that the benefits of ubiquitous AK-47s do not compensate for the drawbacks, because the probabilities associated with the events that would make then beneficial are ridiculously low). They're not the same thing. These radicals are dangerously wrong and I'm glad they're on the fringe, but they're not "crazy". I also take umbrage against the attempt to explain away evil using mental illness. It's like people don't want to admit that bad people or evil exist. Hitler was crazy, Adam Lanza was crazy, Ted Bundy was crazy. Well, I have no idea if they were mentally ill. They were, however, evil. Evil exists. It probably doesn't have a metaphysical platonic form (a Satan) and there's no evidence that it has any supernatural presence but, in the practical real world we live in, evil's a real thing. It's a part of our story as humans. You can't understand what we, as a species, are if you leave it out. In fact, to the extent that evil and "insanity" correlate, I would argue that the causal direction goes the other way: people who do evil things, especially if they're rewarded and become powerful, warp over time and eventually go nuts. It's not the other way around. Mental illness is painful and horrible and sometimes it makes people do harmful things but it does not make people evil. Killing 28 innocent people, mostly children, for no reason is evil. Adam Lanza may have been mentally ill but he was also an evil piece of shit.

kephra 14y ago

Even more important is to stop branding people as mental ill! Mental illness in our system is defined like we are all chicken. We are defined healthy if we lay an egg every day, have clean feathers and don't pull feathers of other chicken in our cage. But not the chicken are insane. The system is insane! And the system became worse over the time. A lot of more people are now declared mental ill, then ever before. Especially children and the fear of the parents are exploited by doctors and pharmacy. Pharmacy drugs only try to hide the symptom, and often fail in even this. The result is more likely a drug addicted kid, who will later visit the doctor again, and again, like a junky visiting his heroin dealer.

jcfrei 14y ago

the author appears to be really upset about the current debate in the US about mental illness. and I don't see why. the article goes on a long rant about how we should separate mental illness and violence, yet no half-way knowledgeable person would assume a mentally illness person to be automatically violent. why is the author so strongly trying to prove a moot point? you can't argue away the fact that most (if not all) mass shooting in recent history have been conducted by mentally ill people and mental illness is a major factor when individuals commit such crimes. the author just messes around with statistics and appears to forget about causation and correlation - it's obvious that the majority of mentally ill people doesn't exercise violence - yet the ones who did were in most cases mentally ill. we're trying to find a way to prevent these shootings. and we need to ask ourselves how we, as a society, treat mentally people - not because 50% of them might be violent, but because 0.0001% are. what we really need to do is starting to make a more distinctive diagnosis of what the actual mental illness was and don't just conflate all forms of schizophrenia with psychosis, bi-polar mood and depression disorder, etc. under mental illness. and a last remark on statistics (and sampling bias), and I believe we can all agree that: P(violent|person is mentally ill) ~ P(violent|person is not mentally ill) however (and I believe this is the source of the discussion, correct me if I'm wrong): P(person is mentally ill|violent) >> P(person is not mentally ill|violent)

nerdfiles 14y ago

@see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570