Would it maybe be even more accurate to say that you are unaware whether the recorded evidence suggests that the average person was less concerned about violent crime as a social problem? I somehow doubt you’ve been reading through the old newspapers and personal correspondence that would give you ready knowledge on this issue.
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NPD is not simply “being an asshole”, and grouping it with chronic depression does make an amount of sense.
It wasn’t recognized as a mental illness until quite recently, hence the past tense in my comment.
Until quite recently, it was regarded as normal but unpleasant human behavior. The same is true for many currently recognized “mental illnesses” covering a startlingly broad segment of the US population.
If you’re going to attribute any crime committed by someone with NPD, ODD, ADHD, etc. to “mental illness” then we may as well save ourselves a couple decades, conclude that all crime is de facto proof of mental illness, and diagnose and commit anyone caught committing a crime.
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Technically, its not a “mental illness” per se, its a “personality disorder” the distinction is fine, but one responds to medical treatment and one does not, I’ll let you guess which. And it was deemed such in the 60s, so not so recent to be sure, but older than I am.
That said, I agree with you. (Nice to see you again!)
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Thanks for the corrections.
I guess my earlier comment should have criticized @caze for conflating personality disorders with mental illness in general.
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I’m not equating all kinds of ideology with all kinds of mental illness though. In fact, I’ve been at pains to stress in pretty much every post I’ve made in this thread that I’m not doing that. So I’m not grouping those things together at all (aside from the fact that they all belong to a wide spectrum of abnormal human behavior, but I’m not saying they are equivalent).
I’m also not assuming that any ideologically motivated killing is primarily the result of mental illness, even if there might be some background level of delusional belief in most ideologues who kill people. And I definitely believe that there’s a difference between mental illness that removes the capacity for telling right from wrong, and other forms.
In some cases the ideology could be prime causative factor in the mental illness, in other cases the illness might come first and latch onto some aspect of society to find expression. Or it could be a combination of the two.
In a lot of these mass shooting cases recently there seems to be a clear trend of mental issues from a young age, they’ve found a means for violent expression via various ideologies in certain cases (Rodger certainly and maybe Roof too - we’ll have to see what more information comes out in his trial), and no particular ideology in others (Holmes and Lanza for example).
A personality disorder is a specific class of mental illness.
I think there are good reasons to be skeptical of many aspects of the official “mental illness” ontology, this one especially.
Perhaps, and certainly with respect to treatment (where over medication may make the problems worse).
I disagree. I don’t think you made a very good case that Roof was mentally ill, or that his crime should be treated as the result of mental illness. I don’t think you’ve done a very good or thorough job making the relevant distinction.
I see a lot of very worrying conflation between ideology, criminality, and mental illness in this thread – not just you, but you really do seem to be contributing by not at least acknowledging the possibility that Roof’s killings were more the result of ideology than mental illness.
And, again, blaming “mental illness” for mass killings or any other kind of violent crime is pretty suspect to begin with.
With respect to Roof, as I’ve already said, we’ll know more as more information comes out during the trial. I think there’s enough information already there to suggest it may have played a part, but I’ll defer final judgement until he’s been assessed and we’ll see what they have to say about him in more detail. And regardless, the ideology certainly played a part, whether it was the prime causative factor in the actual attack remains to be seen.
I see a lot of very worrying conflation between ideology, criminality, and mental illness in this thread – not just you, but you really do seem to be contributing by not at least acknowledging the possibility that Roof’s killings were more the result of ideology than mental illness.
And, again, blaming “mental illness” for mass killings or any other kind of violent crime is pretty suspect to begin with.
I don’t think I’m conflating anything, I’m aware of where the boundaries are, you just seem to be getting bogged down in semantics.
I wonder if the mental illness thing is a bit of a red herring. Our mode of identifying mental illness is behavioural. So naturally if someone is going and shooting up a movie theatre we are going to find some kind of mental illness that fits, because we all agree that behaviour seems crazy. We understand the motives of people who kill for money and for revenge - their behaviour is bad but we don’t necessarily want to put it in the “mental illness” box.
I mean, they could just add, “Movie Theatre Shooting Disorder” to the DSM with the criteria of “Shot one or more people in a movie theatre” and bang all the movie theatre shooters are mentally ill. It doesn’t actually tell us anything about them or about what we could do to have there be fewer of them.
I think that almost everyone I’ve ever met has had delusions of one sort or another (a belief that they continue to belief despite evidence to the contrary). A substantial portion of people are ready to be violent in the right situation. If there were a particular set of characteristics that these shooters shared - ones that could be identified based on objective criteria - then we could study those characteristics and see whether people with them had a tendency towards violence or mass killing, and if so, whether there were treatments to assist with that.
But pointing out that they were all mentally ill doesn’t tell us anything more than pointing out they were all between 5’7" and 6’4" (if they were, I have no idea). Unless MTSD is actually a thing, and not a construct of our brains trying to make patterns, the mental illness angle is a dead end.
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I don’t know if it is a red herring or not, even those who need help, only a small fraction of them are violent. So to try to portray people with mental illness as dangerous isn’t fair.
JonS pointed out a quadruple increase in mass shootings since the 70s. And IIRC they dismantled the not very good but still there mental hospital system in the 80s. I think we definitely need to look at providing that service again. As understand it, the long term chronic homeless problem usually has mental illness involved. And I have seen more than one shooting where cops, who aren’t really trained to deal with crazies that well, have shoot or hurt people who aren’t all there.
Still this is a weird, touchy subject. Not everyone who NEEDS help will seek it. The Newtown shooter clearly needed help, but the person closest to him was not only blind to his problems, but enabled him. Though I think at one point she did try to get him help, but with out success.
Though we clearly need an outlet for people who need help. I think most of us know of someone who is literally crazy and there isn’t anything we can really do for them.
I hate when people pull this trick.
Sometimes, semantics are bullshit or a diversion. But do you know what “semantics” actually means?
From wikipedia:
“Semantics (from Ancient Greek: σημαντικός sēmantikós, “significant”)[1][2] is the study of meaning”
Am I getting bogged down in semantics? Yes, absolutely, in the sense that I care what words mean and how they are used because I believe this has an effect on how people think about and therefore act in the world. What you seem to mean by “getting bogged down in semantics” is, in my view, a completely reasonable thing to do: try to clarify the language being used so that we don’t accidentally, say, cause an automatic subconscious association between the millions of non-violent sufferers of mental illness and a piece of human trash like Dylann Roof.
Fuck.
What I see in discussions like this (including your comments) is shit like “it’s not a gun problem, it’s a mental illness problem” or “it’s not a racism problem, it’s a mental illness problem.”
I have no problem with a nuanced discussion of how someone’s mental illness might have contributed to a crime that was committed, but the sort of dichotomous thinking highlighted above is both bullshit and dangerous.
The problem with nuanced discussion is that it requires paying attention to the meanings of the words you’re using, AKA semantics.
Fuck.
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Your comments in this thread have all been awesome.
Just emphasizing that.
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So what’s mental illness? An opportunity for a psychologist to heal a broken mind, or a pretext to lock up individuals for “precrime”? I’ve read accounts of the glorious era before Reagan era setbacks closed down the mental hospitals. They’re pretty awful.
If all these shooters who decided to kill had a diagnosable, treatable and perhaps even curable mental illness in common, that’s one thing. But if it’s a blithe dismissal of these individuals as nuts, who deserved to treated as less than fully human before these incidents, that’s quite another.
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Yes I do know what semantics mean, and you obviously don’t know what the common complaint about it refers to, it’s not simply that you’re too concerned with meaning. It’s a failure to grasp the logical content of an argument based on the meaning of specific words being used (or the believed meaning, for example you incorrectly believed “personality disorder” to be different class of problem to “mental illness”, despite this not being the case definitionally).
The context of my argument should be clear given the various clarifications I’ve given at various points, and yet you still manage to distort my argument by returning to the same points.
As to whether our little discussion here will cause in the wider world an automatic subconscious association between millions of non-violent sufferers of mental illness and a piece of human trash like Dylann Roof, well that’s a pretty strong claim to make, you’d really need to back that up with something. It’s certainly not an association that exists in my head, or your head, and hopefully not in the people reading these posts as long as they’ve been paying attention to what I’ve been saying (probably regardless of whether they’re paying attention actually).
Fuck indeed.
What I see in discussions like this (including your comments) is shit like “it’s not a gun problem, it’s a mental illness problem” or “it’s not a racism problem, it’s a mental illness problem.”
You failures at reading comprehension are not my problem. In my first post in this thread that mentioned mental issues I stated that sane gun control would probably stop mass shootings (whether sane gun control is a political possibility in America right now is another question). Of course that would still leave the problems of mental health and racism just as they are, and the same could be said of tackling only part of the problem where those two issues are involved in an incident (or any other complex issue).
I have no problem with a nuanced discussion of how someone’s mental illness might have contributed to a crime that was committed…
yeah, I’m not so sure on that one…
I wonder if the mental illness thing is a bit of a red herring. Our mode of identifying mental illness is behavioural. So naturally if someone is going and shooting up a movie theatre we are going to find some kind of mental illness that fits, because we all agree that behaviour seems crazy. We understand the motives of people who kill for money and for revenge - their behaviour is bad but we don’t necessarily want to put it in the “mental illness” box.
If the only identifiable abnormal behavior was the shooting incident then you’d certainly have a point, but since it rarely is, you don’t.
But there are plenty of things that people view as absolute truths… who gets to decide which one is a mental illness?
Maybe, maybe not. Is calling an ideology like white supremacy a mental illness going to do anything other than stigmatize the mentally ill and hide the roots of white supremacy anyway? Like I said, sure you think the guy is delusional, but drop him even 40 or 50 years in the past (or in some communities today) and he’s just spouting good old fashioned common sense among many people. Was his ilk delusional then? Or does it only become a delusion once you change common sense in a society…
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You’re right. What we should do is amend the Constitution to remove the right to bear arms and then pass a series of laws about what tests and such you need to pass in order to be allowed to get a firearm license.
Of course, a certain percentage of America would go ape shit and threaten to use their guns on any government official that attempted to enforce these changes, even if legally passed, so we won’t do it.
