The link between serial killers and head trauma has been considered. It’s quite surprising how many of our most famous monsters have specific, identifiable head injuries.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s a factor. Just like, one among many.
I was confused by the wording of the OP: “abusive impulses." What does that mean? If I feel an urge to slap my kid, but I don’t do it, is that an abusive impulse? Just seems like an ill-defined concept.
I’m more worried about how you determine if a violent offender had a brain injury. You’re relying a lot, I bet, on them giving honest answers. How can you trust the answers from someone who might just be telling you what you want to hear, like Ted Bundy’s last minute confession that “porn made me do it”, which was complete BS.
It’s a problem with unconfirmed self-reporting in general. Studies based on surveys without confirmed diagnoses are inherently unreliable.
What % of cases of alleged traumatic brain injury had confirmed radiographic evidence of brain changes or clinical correlation suggesting significant trauma?
Might increased frequency of head injuries reported in violent criminals reflect increased incidence of neglectful/abusive parenting?
And if evidence of a prior head injury is taken as a mitigating factor in the case of a serial killer or rapist, should they receive lesser or no prison time as a result?
Actually, the print article I briefly referred to in my OP-- the one I read a long time ago, and have not been able to find again, by the psychologist who discovered that an alarmingly high number of men in prison (he didn’t study women, since prisons are segregated), got started on the path of investigation after a career as a clinical psychologist who had had several people come to him wanting to know about the “cycle of abuse” that was very much in the news.
If memory serves, this means he was a clinical psychologist in the 1980s, which tracks with the article being in print some time around 1997-2000, which is about when I remember reading it.
Anyway, this doctor (he had a PhD) had a few patients bring it up in therapy, and at least one person enter therapy because of it-- they were all people concerned about becoming abusers-- worried about becoming parents in the first place-- because they had been abused.
But they had cared for other people’s children, owned pets, and cared for them well, and were not people who got into bar fights or the like-- basically people with no inclination toward violence whatsoever.
This doctor started with looking at whether there was something especially triggering about one’s own child, but as he looked more and more at the question, he uncovered the head injury-abuse connection, and then looked further at criminal violence and head injury.
I really wish I could find this article again. Every now and then, I look around, and I think as more and more information goes online, something might pop up on Google, but not so far.
I think violent or aggressive are better words than abusive. Abusive is so context-dependant.
I think your urge to also your kid is a violent impulse. And because you have adequate impulse control, you don’t do it.
I have to think that every parent has wanted to slap their kid at least a couple of times. But some feel that more often, and some do it, while others refrain from doing so.
No, if they are too dangerous to allow them to go free, they should be imprisoned.
But as i said above, i don’t really like the idea of prison as punishment for moral failings. I’m on board with prison as a way to protect the rest of us, and with prison as an opportunity to rehabilitate people, so they can return to society. But an awful lot of violent criminals have something wrong with their brains. Some were beaten, some just lost the birth lottery. And yes, some made bad choices and could have made better choices. We don’t really know which are which.
Once I was a prospective juror for a criminal case, being questioned by the defense attorney. He asked all panel members which they felt should be the purpose of incarceration, punishment or rehabilitation.
Separation from society was not the answer he was looking for.
I don’t know if this is it, but could it be the article ‘damaged’ by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker? Or was it an actual medical journal article?
The thing is that a lot of these sorts of injuries and their pathologies are basically impossible to non-invasively image with today’s technology.
I mean, we can’t even diagnose Alzheimer’s disease or CTE through some sort of imaging with the current state of the art, and those are brain diseases with much more clear symptoms and brain changes than something much more nebulous like aggression, impulsivity, etc…
So they do their best with studies on veterans, former football players, etc… and for people who were known to have been diagnosed with head injuries in the past. It’s probably not too much of a lift to get parents to fill out questionnaires every so often at their PCP when their kids have been diagnosed with TBIs. I mean, if my kids had been injured like that, and their doctor had said “Hey- would you mind filling out questionnaires about their behavior every few years because we want to study the effect of traumatic brain injuries on behavior.”, we’d have happily done so.
The thing is, it’s not just childhood TBI that cause increased aggressiveness and impulsivity, it’s ones suffered as adults- look at veterans and other adults who suffer them and their behavioral changes. It’s just that when they’re kids, they have the potential to go off the rails earlier and further.
But it’s not a done deal. I mean, I had a pretty good concussion at 4 because I flew over a bike’s handlebars (it was 1977; nobody wore helmets) and another at 17 playing football. I didn’t turn out to be violent or impulsive; quite the opposite in fact.
No, but if you took a collection of 10,000 people who had never had a concussion or head injury, and a second group of 10,000 people who, like you, had 2 concussions, there would likely be higher rates of anti-social and criminal behavior in the second group. It wouldn’t be all of them, but the rates would be higher vs the first group.
Still leaving questions, including whether people prone to aggressive/heedless/violent behavior are also more likely to sustain head injuries as a result.
The control group in the experiment was people who had “experienced a lower limb fracture (with no TBI)”.
Are you saying that aggressive/headless/violent people are more likely to receive head injuries than lower limb fractures?
I’d bet that headless people are lots more likely to bump into things and injure their limbs.
I have no defence.
This is starting to feel like one facet of the free will debate…
If a head falls in a forest and no one else is around …
To really answer the debate you’d need to locate a cadre of people who suffered a concussion or TBI in early adulthood to midlife and who’d been fully law-abiding positively contributing citizens up to then. And a demographically equivalent control group up until the TBI who did not suffer injury.
Then follow them all for the next umpteen years to see whether / how violent behavior and criminality does or does not develop differentially in the damaged vs undamaged.
IMO that’s a small signal / large noise dataset.
The idea was that the people in the control group had all experienced some sort of accident with a serious injury needing treatment, in order to eliminate the possibility that violent or criminal behavior in the head trauma group was the result of PTSD, or displaced anger.
I have suffered a traumatic injury to my skull; i got myself run over by a car while attempting to cross a road. Skull fracture, left tibia and fibia broken, cracked shoulder blade, dislocated collar bone.
Anecdotal, I know, but my nascent criminality - mostly psychedelic drug use - only increased as I recovered.
(I do not personally see this as criminal, but most governments do. But they fed me pethedine in the operating theatre…)
I can see a possible route, but i can’t support it:
Head injury → opiate addiction → junkie
But mine was
Head injury → given opiates → back to being a psychonaut