From thisWashington Post story on the CT school shooter:
*Another bizarre detail that has not been officially established and may or may not be significant: Lanza couldn’t feel physical pain, according to an AP report.
*
Would this be congenital insensitivity to pain, according to this wiki:
Or are there other conditions that can cause this?
Little has been mentioned about this in the news WRT the shooter. It’s pretty bizarre and rare, so it would seem newsworthy. Haven’t found any solid cite or reference.
The DSM IV-TR says that odd responses to sensory stimuli are among the possible associated features of autistic disorder, and lists high threshold for pain as an example.
I am going to WAG that (if there is any truth to this at all) it is not congenital insensitivity (which is a physiological thing), but one of these weird autistic things that mean that he does (did) not react normally to painful stimuli: something like not crying out or grimacing when in pain, and perhaps not making a normal amount of effort to get away from the cause. It is probably not that he does not feel pain, or even that it is not unpleasant to him, but that he somehow has not learned the normal human way to react to it. A lot of how we react to pain is essentially communicative, and it is human communication that autistics are messed up at. Certainly some autistic people have weird reactions to some types of physical stimulus. They may be very upset by things that don’t bother most people, but I think it can go the other way too.
Ah!
It didn’t occur to me that it may be linked with his (probable) autism. Googling it that way brings up all sorts of information on sensory dysfunction.
Based on this report it certainly sounds like Lanza suffered from congenital analgesia:
There’s no reason I can think of that an otherwise intelligent adult couldn’t cook his own food unless he was completely insensitive to pain and unable to recognize that his skin was burning when touching a hot stove.
If he’s autistic, he’s not an “otherwise intelligent adult” in the manner you indicate. What I’m saying is, dealing with cooking may be a part of the neurotypical world that he couldn’t handle.
I have heard motherly concerns from more than one woman that their kids or significant other weren’t able to make what they considered good food choices - as in wholesome or nutritious meals. This person obviously had problems - and it appears his mother may have as well.
I think it is more likely that his mother was over protective or concerned about his food choices - than he was physically unable to feel pain.
Hell I’ve known women that didn’t want their kid or sig other to cook just because they didn’t want to come home to a giant mess, so they would put stuff in the freezer for them.
There was an article in the Times Magazine a while back about a kid who could not feel pain. (Unless it was the New Yorker.) It was not associated in any way with autism, but it was a very dangerous condition, exactly because of things like touching hot pans and not realizing that the skin was burning. Without pain as feedback, a lot of these kids seriously injured themselves before they got old enough to understand the dangers.
Is there any overlap between an inability to feel physical pain and an inability to feel emotional pain? I have read the parts of the brain that process physical and emotional pain are connected together (the emotional pain centers were wired on top of the physical pain sensors) and doing things like taking tylenol help numb you to social pain.
So is it possible the kid also had trouble with feeling emotional pain or empathy for other’s emotional pain due to this condition?