Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms

Or could have just built a bomb out of fertilizer or household cleaners like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev or Eric Rudolph or Ted Kaczynski or Tim McVeigh or…

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Forced citizenship is also slavery. Everybody has a right to secede.

They can leave the country, no problem. But the country stays here.

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Some people choose to be mentally ill (ETA: indoctrinate themselves into ideation which may trigger acting upon homicidal ideation caused by an underlying schizophreniform disorder). They find a hate group, they indoctrinate themselves, they parrot the rhetoric, they reinforce the ideation equivalent to the ideology apparent in the group, they find a home in that stream of consciousness and they amplify it for effect.

Holier than thou, pious one-upmanship, keeping up with the Joneses, these are not mental illnesses (ETA but rather psychosis inducing factors which may be attributed in some cases to an underlying factor) on the order of the shock of schizophrenia.
(ETA: What I am referring to is) It a chosen mental construct which may denote a(ETA: n underlying) form of mental illness (ETA: disorder) associated with some types of violent behaviour but it is not necessarily a disconnection with the minds ability to encapsulate reality.

But once that ideological mode has taken hold and has been culturally reinforced by the chosen community, the inability to see the hole in your reasoning, the confabulation of excusatory modes of thought, the reinforcement through periods of self questioning, here is the blurred line, leaking into insanity.

And then the defeated but congratulatory trudge into madness, the precipitous over reaction, falling into hatred, the strongly reinforced self-talk that screams for action and for actualisation. (ETA: Entelchy, I suppose)

Sure, I can see it being defined as a mental illness (in some cases), but it is of a kind that (ETA: can constitute being) is chosen and deliberately self-reinforced. Many people are indoctrinated into modes of thought and do not become violent when others within the fold do, so perhaps there is some other, underlying, catalysing mental factor already within those people.
However, I suspect that it constitutes something along the lines of a gross amplification of memetic self-defence mechanisms, and very different, if not totally and completely, from the kinds of mental illness that people who literally have no choice in the matter suffer from.

ETA: many ETAs

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Thanks for your carefully thought and and well reasoned response.

Here, I’ll have a go:

waytoosnarkyinreplytosnark.gif

Or perhaps I’m to imagine that the girl is choosing to headbutt the table?

I find it difficult to imagine a better response to what seems to be a failure to read the OP.

That snark is uncharitable, given that I’d just penned a carefully thought out and well reasoned post on this upthread.

You’re welcome to all of the armchair opinions you can muster, but when you are out of step with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, The US Surgeon General, and the National Institute of Mental Health (in addition to the researchers from Vanderbilt and Duke that I’ve already posted in this thread), I will politely ask that you bring some sources to the table if you don’t want me to headbutt it.

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I had focused on the parts you highlighted but am reading through it now. In the meantime, perhaps you would be so kind as to point out where I had said something table-headbutt-worthy?

In reading and being edited whilst I go along

Yet surprisingly little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes.

So my thought about ideological enabling is not relevant because…

A thought occurs to me whilst I’m poring over this, when I say mental illness is inherent in the unthink associated with ideological indoctrination, do you disagree with my calling that and specifically that ‘mental illness’?

I’d rather appreciate you making some kind of effort to criticise the ideas I presented before I go and dig up references which may not be relevant to your ‘criticism’. At the moment, I am arguing against a table headbutt gif. And that can mean so many different things. Uncharitable snark aside.


Perhaps in his specific case there is something wrong with his brain but that doesn’t speak to the process of indoctrination that hinges upon making use of the perceptual and ideative holes in reasoning which enable indoctrination. Which I also point out (that if it does constitute mental illness) is of a different variety to schizophrenia and is more along the lines of inability to focus on modelling reality accurately.

You guys can chime in and help me unpack the criticism at any time, otherwise I’m going to have to impute it, perhaps inaccurately, through interpreting what you’ve already written and not to the table head-butt gif, which as far as I know is predicated on a misunderstanding of a (perhaps over-amplified) idea that I presented.


In doing some reading perhaps I should have used the term ‘psychosis’ in place of ‘mental illness’, or more specifically “psychoses related to schizophreniform disorder and schizophrenia” for homicidal ideation (look up the links yourselves if you care to this feels like getting blood from a stone from my perspective).

So I will cheerfully redact my cross-proliferation of the ideas underlying ‘mental illness’ and instead go with the more accurate representation (which I thought I had done at least some work in presenting in the rest of my comment) to: “ideologically enabled homicidal ideation perhaps caused by an underlying schizophreniform disorder.”

Better?

Or shall I go and look for my own headbutt gifs? Because failing to summarise your critique and then responding to a slightly reflective snarky response with comments about uncharitable snarkyness is really what I’ve come to expect from the environment (and you in gosh-darnit particular @funruly ) here.

Taking a break to drink 10 coffees and do some boxcercising, that’ll calm me down. :wink:

Now, that’s unfair, I don’t even own an armchair. Couch opinions is all I got.

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ok.

There’s already a number of reasonable definitions of the conditions that represent the set known as “mental illnesses” that can serve as a starting point for common ground: DSM. NAMI. Wiki. WebMD.

I can’t readily map “unthink associated with ideological indoctrination” to any known variety of “mental illness,” so I don’t know how to answer.

If you think it’s a version of paranoia or thought disorder, then say so.

If you think it’s novel, then share a link to research that supports the discovery of a new mental illness.

Schizophreniform…interesting choice. Except the etiology of that is considered to be stress-diathesis, and not, as you said, choice.


Enough where we disagree about where the data supports our suppositions. Let’s talk about where we might agree!

I’d say this otherwise - Perhaps as a result of his indoctrination he saw the world from his filter bubble which prevented him from modelling reality accurately.

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I made some edits, no doubt whilst you were writing…

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you were supposed to be boxercising.

I am punching the keys rather hard :smile:

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I am going to beddy-bye. Catch you on the flip side.

OK, so apparently the literature takes pains to differentiate between mental illness and (potentially homicidal) psychotic ideation, which may or may not be caused by an underlying mental disorder.

My mistake entirely, I should have been more thorough with the terms being used.

Niiiight night.

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I’ve never understand that kind of flawed logic excuse making.

Obviously there is a reason we’ve made making bombs is illegal, and working with explosives requires a license, and explosive materials have to be kept locked up!

No one goes around arguing that people should be allowed to make bombs to kill people because if we stopped them from doing that they’d probably just go get a gun, but gun people make this exact type of argument.

Just because people can find other ways to kill people doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put some rational safety checks on some of the easier more obvious ones, especially the ones that have little to no legitimate application other then the purpose of destruction and killing.

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The more I read the more I am confounded.

There does appear to be some cross-definition wherein disorders are sometimes referred to under the umbrella term of Mental Illness.

I should have been more specific in calling what I was referring to as a form of psychosis, leading to homicidal ideation, reinforced by the mental attitudes and processes presented by ideological indoctrination.

But there does appear to be some pathway to the homicidal actions borne of such ideation which a person with mental illness may be attracted to. Now, this of course, does not mean that people who commit violent acts are necessarily mentally ill, or even that they suffer from a mental disorder on the level of ideative misrepresentation.

But there does appear to be a worryingly blurry line delineating the mental constructs which in some cases may inform homicidal behaviour from mental illness (or the associated disorders) itself.

The OP and the linked article take pains to criticise the wrote attribution of violent behaviour to mental illness but it strikes me that this is not a flat-out contraindication of causation. Rather a cautionary reprimand to make a clear delineation of the factors involved in causing the behaviour.

Which may very well include the amplification (but not the outright creation) of mental disorders caused by indoctrination into potentially destructive ideation.

But what does ideology do to a persons mind when they are so indoctrinated? Can indoctrination into forms of homicidally amplified ideation cause psychoses?
Or is the very indoctrination process founded on an already existent disorder which makes the person more open to acting upon those forms of ideation?

I am reminded of the idea that cannabis does not cause mental disorders but can amplify already existent issues.

Is that where these ideas lead?

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That’s because it’s based on two distinct assumptions. If you accept both, it’s perfectly sound logic. If you reject one or both assumptions, then obviously it doesn’t hold water.

The first assumption is that committed or desperate people will do things the hard way if they can’t do it the easy way.

The second assumption is that there is a compelling interest in having the easy way available for other, unrelated reasons. You clearly don’t accept that assumption. I do.

The “flawed logic excuse making” I’ve never been able to understand is the one that says “Gee, if the guy who wanted to kill people just hadn’t been able to get a gun, then he would have stopped wanting to kill people.”

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