Is it simply cultural norms dictating what constitutes a mental illness? I wonder why wanting to kill yourself signifies a mental disorder and that person isn’t capable of rational decision making but wanting to kill others is considered a moral issue rather than a mental one.
My guess is that there’s a stigma with mental health and sympathy. Most mental illnesses get less sympathy than physical ones but a mentally ill person who is a killer would garner little to none from most people. The idea of retribution is deeply embeded in the minds of people and many don’t like to consider a killer as being driven by mental illness because they think it’s being too soft on them.
Because generally (and very simplistically) I like myself, because I am me and if I didn’t I would change me, and all of those other people in the world are divided amongst people I hate, tolerate, am neutral about, somewhat like, like, respect, and love.
If I kill those people I hate, that is a moral failure and needs to be harshly punished, but one that human beings understand as rational. If I kill myself, then that is all kinds of fucked up because I am the baseline of what my worldview should be and should be the “love” part of it.
Not all killers are “insane”, but insanity and diminished responsibility or mental illness are, in fact, recognized defenses against the charge of murder, depending on the jurisdiction. But, certainly, merely being a psychopath does not automatically imply you are not capable of intentionally committing crimes.
I honestly think it’s more pragmatic than philosophical. They want to be able to intervene and lock people up in both situations. In the case of suicide, no one’s classically constituted rights to self and property are being violated (the person committing suicide having obviously consented to themselves), and so the only way to go at it is to invalidate that consent by treating suicide as something that no one could sanely consent to.
Disclaimer: I’m a psychiatric-rights activist and harshly critical of all involuntary psychiatric treatment, including incarceration in a locked facility. I disagree with the notion that no one whose mind makes sense could wish to be dead and support the right of people to commit suicide, although, as Judi Chamberlin once said, “Your right to commit suicide doesn’t give you the inviolable right to do so in my living room”.
It’s also very hard to kill yourself for personal gain, or because of other base motives, like avoiding being caught in some unsavory activity, revenge, and so on.
We are probably talking past each other. The word “rational” has many meanings. But, the very, very simple version is that we base what we like or dislike based upon our own worldview. So if I kill someone that is opposite of my worldview, then (and I will again state that it is completely unacceptable to do this, morally, and legally wrong) it is at least understood to have some sort of rationality.
But if you kill yourself, then that means you hate yourself. Which is at its base level, very fucked up. You hate yourself based upon what? The moral value that you apply to yourself which you don’t subscribe to which you accepted for yourself in judgment of yourself which means you do subscribe to?
I understand that medical professionals far more qualified than me can make a good distinction and explanation of my description, but that is the base level which is why people differentiate between the two and why it might be “rational” to a layman to kill an enemy but completely irrational to commit suicide.
I don’t think all that many people think the person wishing to commit suicide when faced with a painful terminal illness is being irrational. But anyone who has had to deal with someone who had extreme swings of mood and temperament knows that we are not rational all the time, and that deciding to commit suicide when in one of these things is not a rational act.
There’s clearly a cultural aspect as some countries e.g. Japan have or had a very different framing of suicide.
And in the West, killing yourself to save other lives, for example, would be commended and not given the label “suicide”.
So it’s also partly an issue of semantics; if you’re killing yourself for some reason that most people in society would consider justified, we don’t call that suicide.
The OP makes an assumption that homicide is not generally treated as a mental issue, but actually it is. That’s why there are legal degrees of murder, manslaughter, (and insanity, which DPRK mentions above), etc., which shape sentencing. Those distinctions all clearly revolve around the mental condition of the accused person.
The OP used the term “mental illness” and most of the time “mental condition” means almost the same the same thing. The differences between various types of homicide are based on “culpable mental state” as defined by law, an altogether different concept. Culpable mental states include “intentionally”, “knowingly”, “recklessly” and “acting with criminal negligence”. Those states are not referred to as illnesses or conditions and are not static for even a few minutes - I can do something recklessly at 10:00 and then do something intentionally at 10:05.
As far as “suicide” goes, some situations are defined as “not suicide” such as sacrificing your life to save others and others may be seen as “suicide” but also a situation where a rational person made the choice to say overdose on pain medication rather than endure a slow and painful death and we even don’t call it “suicide” when someone engages in a risky without intending to die, so we really do take mental state into account - not every one who engages in an action likely to cause their death is seen as mentally ill.
Because we want murderers put in prison for a very long time or even executed. If they were declared mentally ill, then they could get out of the hospital, when they convinced one doctor that they were better.
And for most people suicide is unthinkable, so anyone that takes their own life must have a mental illness, so if they try and fail, they need mental help.
The concept that murder is just as crazy as suicide is a modern invention.
Conceivably, the modern view is more accurate. Conceivably, the modern view is divorced from our evolution and nature and simply a call to transhumanism. Conceivably, medicines for mental illness should be classified as a sort of early version of attempts at transhumanism.
I suspect that those are all true, it’s just subjective which will appeal to you most.
During the Napoleonic wars, most officers (who didn’t die of disease) died from duels. One assumes that duels were seen as being an inherent component of human nature. “Boys gotta fight.”
Certainly, in history, it would be hard to make the argument that our ancestors believed anything other than that it was natural and appropriate to go out and kill other people regularly. They even differentiated between murder and killing.
One might even note that, in modern day, we still differentiate between murder and killing.
In a world where soldiers get paid to do what they do, and murderers go to jail, it’s probably unreasonable to say that we should view murder to be the same as suicide.
I would say it is natural to see more murders than suicides in nature. Suicide tends to impede survival. Survival is often the reason for murder, at least in the mind of the murderer.
Along with what others have said, I think the implicit assumption is that harming others may come out of natural motives, such as self-defense, but harming oneself is inherently illogical in the minds of many (unless it’s something like self-euthanasia when facing terminal illness, or suicide when facing endless torture by the enemy.)
While it is true that some murders are from sane but evil motives, I don’t believe that they all are, and that some that have insane motives aren’t classified as insane by the law. For example, I don’t think many serial or spree killers are sane. I think the reason they are still classified as sane is that classifying them as insane leads to some uncomfortable places.
If serial killers were considered insane, we would still have to lock them up forever, as it is probably incurable, and we can’t release them without killing people. However, this would clash with with the view that prison partially exists to punish those who chose evil actions - part of the reason that legally classified insane criminals are sent to mental hospitals instead of prisons.
There is a lot of overlap between criminal behavior and things like mental illness and ACE (adverse childhood experience).
A sizable number of people in prisons have cluster A & B personality disorders, lead poisoning, a history of head trauma, a history of traumatic childhood events, etc. So lots of people do treat crime as a social issue rather than just an individual issue.
So if someone commits homicide, its probably a result of either a neurological health issue, traumatic background, and/or being born in a bad environment for the most part.
We generally consider suicide, or attempted suicide, as a mental issue except in desperate cases, in which it’s clear that the person has only terrible options otherwise.
We don’t generally consider murder or attempted murder as a mental issue, even in cases in which the murderer both had other options and stood a pretty good chance of making their own life much worse by committing murder.
The 20 year old who kills themselves out of a possibly temporary despair about how their life is going is considered mentally disturbed. The one who for similar reasons kills somebody else in a holdup or a street fight is generally considered to be a criminal responsible for their actions.
Society doesn’t even generally consider it a mental issue when somebody murders their own children – at least not if the murderer is male (women who kill their children, at least the ones who do it without the assistance of male partners, often are considered to be mentally disturbed). I can’t think of much that goes more against theories of what ought to be evolutionary beneficial, or “natural”, than murdering one’s genetic children.