> I'm curious why you think he was clearly suffering from mental illness. Because psychopathic behavior is classified in our society as a personality disorder?

> I'm curious why you think he was clearly suffering from mental illness. Because psychopathic behavior is classified in our society as a personality disorder? > Did he leave a long broken worded diatribe full of references to imaginary voices and animals? Did he have a recorded history of increasingly frequent or intense mental breakdowns? No, but he did write a > 2,500 word manifesto (I'm not linking sources, this is all on Wikipedia) justifying his actions and stating that he knew what he was planning to do was morally and socially wrong and that the people he intended to hurt were innocent. He confided in friends, over a full week before he carried out his plans, what his plans were. That seems to me a cry for help by any standard. > Certainly just because someone commits mass murder does not mean they are 'insane'. They can merely be evil. And that certainly stops the conversation and limits us from beginning to understand what is going on that is causing psychopathic behaviors to manifest. Calling it "merely evil" is dismissive. I'm much more interested in trying to understand what the hell is happening in our society by exploring the mental illness angle since it is grounded in medical science and not some nebulous "evil" or "insane." edit/ I'd also like to say, I don't think it is minimizing mental illness to call mass murderers mentally ill. My own brother is diagnosed schizoaffective and I don't consider him a potential or future mass murderer just because of his health issues. That would be ridiculous.