Prompted by yet another mass shooting of random innocent victims.
We have more guns, by far, than any other country. And we have more gun deaths than any other country. And there is undoubtedly a correlation between those two facts.
But what I find more troubling is something that’s harder to measure: why do we have so many people – almost all of them young males – who feel compelled to pick up a gun and shoot strangers? Do they exist in other countries, but have more trouble finding a gun? Or is there something unique about the US?
Of course they exist in other countries. Look into the recent shootings, the gas attacks, and the stabbings (not to mention several millennia of civil violence). So, no, the US is not unique.
But yes, there is something about the US. Our overall culture is not defined by democracy but by individualism. It is very much a me, my, mine culture. And losers aren’t well tolerated. Nobody wants to come in second place. So if this is what I want, then I am a loser if I don’t force it onto everybody else involved.
I wouldn’t even refer to it as psychopathy. It’s a toxic culture.
I’d attribute it to a pretty ruthless culture - which shows up in things like brutally expensive healthcare, Hollywood “all about me” culture, more greed-selfishness promoting media, school bullying, Third World standard prisons, etc.
What surprises me is that you don’t see even more psychopaths per capita in places like China and India.
I don’t think we have more psychopaths, I think we have more selfish and narcissistic people because we have become a culture in which only the individual matters, such a cultural outlook creates a more normalized acceptance of narcissism and extreme self-interest. Psychopathy which is poorly understood and is probably at least somewhat a mixture of genetics and environmental factors in early childhood isn’t really required to be a violent, dangerous, or self-interested person.
I’d also note that mental illness is pretty seriously stigmatized in the U.S., and getting treatment for it can be challenging-to-impossible, especially if you don’t have health insurance.
The former may not necessarily make the U.S. significantly different from other developed Western cultures (I don’t know enough about how mental illness is viewed in, say, Canada or Europe), but the latter likely does make the U.S. an outlier.
Well, we are the third most populous nation, and the #1 controls it’s news. So we know only what China wants to tell us.
Not to mention, here in the USA we tend to get more USA news than international.
Maybe not as many, but the number of deaths seems much higher per episode. 2002 Gugarat riots= likely 2000 deaths. And I don’t remember hearing much about any of those.
I wouldn’t even put much, if any, of it on mental healthcare. There are plenty of countries with worse healthcare for mental illness that don’t have the same problem of mass shootings we do.
Apples and Oranges. While they are bad and totally condemnable incidents too, these examples are not Individual bad actors killing lots of other individuals.
FWIW I don’t think psychopathy explains most mass shootings. Psychopathy does correlate to a greater propensity for violence, but it is typically violence that is, in psychological research terms called “instrumental” violence. They use that term to mean violence designed to affect a specific goal that generally the psychopath views as a benefit to them.
Mass shooters while I don’t know that we have a good meta-study of their psychiatric diagnoses (many have a limited mental health record before the shootings and kill themselves at the end, so it makes it difficult to even get a diagnosis in many cases), often seem to have a cluster of other well known mental afflictions: schizophrenia, bipolar personality disorder, various variations of depression.
Psychopaths while they often will try to do things primarily to benefit themselves, do have poor impulse control as compared to non-psychopaths and that will lead them to commit impulsive crimes. However most mass shootings are not impulsive, they are almost always planned to some degree, and it would be unusual with a diagnosis of psychopathy to deliberately plan out a mass shooting, since even a basic consideration of the results would show that mass shooters never end up better off after their shootings than before, whether they end up dead or permanently imprisoned.
It found that only 25% had a confirmed mental health diagnosis. The breakdown of that 25%:
12 shooters had a mood disorder
4 had anxiety disorder
3 had a psychotic disorder
2 had a personality disorder
1 had an Autism spectrum disorder
FWIW psychopathy is a Personality Disorder in the DSM.
Mood Disorders which was the category with the largest number of shooters, are things like bipolar disorder, depressive disorders etc. Note that there were only 16 of 67 who had a diagnosis, and the total above is > 16, this is because all mental health diagnoses can co-occur with each other, so that means some portion of the 16 had multiple diagnoses, but the FBI doesn’t clarify the specifics.
The biggest mass casualty headline events usually involve killing others and suicide (or suicide by cop). This is not a typical pattern of behavior for a psychopath. Psychopaths have no concern for the welfare of others, but any violence is usually a means to a selfish end, they are not typically suicidal. But many/most of the “everyday” mass shootings of 3 or 4 people that don’t even make the headlines are probably not intended as suicides, so more of those perpetrators may be psychopaths. Psychopaths are certainly overrepresented among criminals in general.
However, most mass shooters do not have any serious mental illness.
…only 11% of all mass murderers (including shooters) and only 8% of mass shooters had a serious mental illness… The findings from this potentially definitive study suggest that emphasis on serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or psychotic mood disorders, as a risk factor for mass shootings is given undue emphasis, leading to public fear and stigmatization… These data suggest that other difficulties, such as legal problems, substance and alcohol use, and difficulty coping with life events seem more useful foci for prevention and policy than an emphasis on serious mental illness.
So I think as you say that “toxic culture” is probably much closer to the truth than attributing mass shootings to mental illness, at least in any clinical sense.
Just for clarification … in my OP I’m thinking specifically of the type of mass killing that involves random victims with no connection (or only a tenuous connection, like attending the same school) to the shooter: Las Vegas, Uvalde, Columbine, Buffalo, Highland Park. I am no psychologist but it feels like the motivation and pathology of these guys may be different from other mass murderers – perpetrators of gang violence, or the guy who kills his wife and all his in-laws – even though all are counted under the definition of “mass shooting”.
I think this indicates that we need a better definition of “serious mental illness”. Somebody who kills random strangers seems, by definition, not mentally sound.
My (naive, uninformed) impression is that we have a lot more mental healthcare available than we did in generations past, but that the supply hasn’t kept up with the demand.
If someone killed or seriously injured dozens of people for no reason with a knife, one by one, up close and personal, over the course of several hours, I would agree that this almost certainly implies serious mental illness.
But I think you have to consider the cultural context and the ease with which someone can obtain access to guns that allow quick and easy mass killing. When all it takes is buying a gun with no questions asked, then squeezing a trigger and firing into a crowd for 60 secs, I don’t think it requires mental illness. Why is it impossible that someone who is just highly stressed and angry and desperate could do this? It’s easy, and it’s all over before the horror and pain that you have caused have any impact.
This is the cultural context. Are the people in these Christmas cards mentally sound?
Whatever the analysis of their mental state, I think these people are less likely to be specifically psychopaths than an “ordinary” criminal who shoots 3 or 4 people without any concomitant suicidal intent.