This reminded me of a movie I was trying to find years ago. A friend had described it to me, but I couldn’t remember the name.
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This is scary.
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Go read your bible, it teaches you to kill your son if the voices in your head say so 
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Cue the “mental health” winger sidestep.
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If his children had serpent DNA it was from him, not her.
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Agreed. As long as there’s no QAnon “Free Our Nutty Supporter!” campaign, or chance of him being released, or any other shenanigans that would fill 24-hour news cycles or otherwise aggravate the public.
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"Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying"
— Iain Banks, 1954-2013
source:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/06/fuck-every-cause-that-ends-in-.html
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That brings up a question. These people seem to be coming out of the woodwork over the past couple years. Were they mentally unstable to begin with (and now acting on it) or are the conspiracy websites creating an instability in people? It’s out of control and getting worse.
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FWIW, as a younger person, I was very conspiracy minded. And it definitely reinforces and exacerbates pre-existing paranoia. Up to the point I was matching a lot of symptoms of schizo-affective disorder.
Eventually I ended up learning about applied critical thinking in school, and epistemology. That gave me the tools to dig myself out. I can’t imagine the millions of americans who didn’t have as good of an education I did.
I feel lucky.
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I think @RickMycroft was right about the lines being erased.
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Yay! He saved ussss.
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It’s only going to get worse. This is only slightly more bonkers than what the average Q-nut already believes, and they get drawn in deeper and deeper every day. Expect this to become as common as mass shootings soon.
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A few people have mentioned mental illness in posts, and I didn’t want to respond to them specifically, but I do want to say something about mental illness and violence that I think is important.
QAnon is a violent ideology. It calls it’s believers to violence, it suggests that violence will solve problems. QAnon supporters have been violent in the name of the ideology in the past.
It may be, given a deep dive into that particular person’s circumstance, that mental illness was an important cause of their actions, particularly if they were unaware of what they were doing when they did it.
But mental illness is not a dice game where the choices made by mentally ill people are determined at random. A very distressed person with a serious mental illness who is hallucinating or delusional might hide in a closet, they might walk around in a fugue, they might go cataonic, they might obsessively clean their apartment. If instead of any of the hundreds or thousands of other ways they could manifest their state they kill their family, it seems completely non-credible to me to blame the mental illness as the lone cause or even the most important cause.
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Thank you.
I did not click through to the article. Just the synopsis was enough to cause near-physical pain. So I don’t know if the article included specific information about whether this man had a diagnosis of mental illness.
If not, then there are a number of commenters on this topic who need to refresh their understanding of the Community Guidelines. If it was part of the article, I would agree with you @anon50609448 that it is still irresponsible to attribute his actions to mental illness. People who do this kind of thing are murderous assholes, whether they have mental illness or not; meanwhile people who have mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than not.
Perpetuating the stigma against people who have mental illness causes ongoing and very real harm. Why do people feel the need to keep doing this? What are they getting out of it?
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I believe it’s a self-referential form of “It can’t happen here.”
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Ugh. I remember early in the days of the Qanon movement a lot of apologists were saying stuff like “hey, I may not agree with all their conspiracy theories but at least they’re fighting to protect children!” Still waiting for those freaks to condemn child trafficker Matt Gaetz or do something to prevent horror stories like this one.
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I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that what people are “getting out of” attributing these atrocities to mental illness is trying to categorize the event in SOME remotely understandable way, in an attempt to prevent it from driving THEM mad. As opposed to just allowing it to be some completely random, malignant, unapproachable horror. I’ll go on a further limb to say I think most people reading and posting here “blame” the ugly souls who originate the Q-nut propaganda.
At a certain point, isn’t one of “society’s” primary requirements that we (generally) agree on some objective reality? And, not commenting on whether it’s right or just but, isn’t an individual’s refusal to go along with the generally accepted version of reality often a primary reason for categorizing that person as “mentally” ill? And, yes, “assholes”: hateful, awful people. But, really, you don’t think that someone that hateful, THAT delusional is NOT broken in some way? If you agree that they are broken, what do you suggest we call it? (Genuinely asking.) I guess also, I agree with you that, “mentally ill does not equal murderous”, but I myself and not at all certain that the equation does not work in reverse.
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This makes sense. I worked for years as a private investigator. I was submersed in a job that required me to sneak around doing surveillance on people at all hours, stealing people’s garbage in the middle of the night to sift for evidence, video-recording people doing horrible things, etc. It messed with my head and eventually had me wondering if people were doing surveillance on me. I was paranoid about any car that followed me for more than a few blocks. One of my fellow investigators was going through the same kind of paranoia. She was trying to sell her house but refused to let the realtor take photos of the inside. Some of our associates thought she was nuts but I understood what she was feeling because, mentally, I was losing my grip as well. Fortunately, I still had enough mental clarity to recognize that I needed a change of environment. As soon as I left that line of work I was able to bounce back surprisingly fast.
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Akin to glibly saying “well, it can’t get any worse,” when it always can, and often does.
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Yeah. My education is in IT, and I worked in the field for several years.
I nearly went into ITSec, but as I studied for it, I could feel my memtal health deteriorating rapidly.
A whole field dedicated to the feed and caring of professional paranoia.
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