Mass killers may not be so different from us
Most of them have no diagnosable mental illness — just the everyday stress, anger, jealousy and unhappiness the rest of us have
Most are just filled with hate and have access to deadly weapons
After a 21-year-old gunman massacred 22 people in an El Paso Walmart in Texas, United States, recently, President Trump declared that mass killers are “mentally ill monsters.”
It was a convenient — and misleading — explanation that diverted public attention from a darker possibility behind such unimaginable horror: The killer might have been rational, just filled with hate. It’s reasonable to think that anyone who guns down 22 human beings in cold blood must be deranged or de facto have a mental illness. But the truth about mass killers and the link to mental health is more complicated than that.
One of the largest studies of mass killers, conducted by Dr. Michael Stone and involving 350 people, found that only 20 per cent had a psychotic illness; the other 80 per cent had no diagnosable mental illness — just the everyday stress, anger, jealousy and unhappiness the rest of us have. Likewise, an FBI study of active shooters between 2000 and 2013 found that only 25 per cent had ever received a psychiatric diagnosis and just five per cent had a psychotic illness.
Still, the clear implication of these findings is that people in the grip of ordinary emotion are capable of carrying out heinous acts of violence; you don’t need to have a mental illness to be a “monster.”
We can’t know for sure whether the suspect in the El Paso killings, Patrick Crusius, was mentally ill without detailed knowledge of his personal and medical history. But his online writing suggests we should not be so fast to assume that he is. In a manifesto attributed to him, Crusius railed against immigration, described a plan to separate America into racially distinct areas and warned that white people were being replaced by foreigners. He said that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Rational person
To me, the statement appeared logical, coherent and not particularly rambling or delusional. Strikingly, the manifesto seemed to echo what Trump has been saying all along about immigrants.
Seen from this perspective, it is entirely plausible that the El Paso killer is a rational person who happens to be inspired by a hateful racist ideology. The scary truth is that ordinary human hatred and aggression are far more dangerous than any psychiatric illness. Just think of the many people driven to mass murder because they were fired by employers or dumped by girlfriends. In all likelihood, they were not mentally ill but simply full of rage — and well armed.
The notion that we can identify mass killers before they act is, as yet, an epidemiologic fiction. These individuals typically avoid contact with the mental health care system. Even if they didn’t, experienced psychiatrists fare no better than a roll of the dice at predicting violence. Other mass killers bear this out. Brendon Tarrant, who murdered 51 people last March in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, was found at trial not to be mentally ill. Rather, he was a white supremacist who planned his carnage for two years and was driven by an anti-immigrant and racist ideology similar to Crusius’s. And like Crusius, he believed in a white supremacist conspiracy theory called “the great replacement,” which posits that white Europeans, with the complicity of “elites,” are being replaced by non-European people through mass immigration.
Given the global resurgence of white nationalism and xenophobia in recent years, is it really surprising that a few individuals have responded to this climate of hate by violently channelling such ideas? After all, we are social animals who are easily swayed by our environment. And that environment is awash in rage these days.
What this suggests is that bolstering mental health programmes — while a worthy goal — will not solve our mass shootings epidemic.
This should scare the hell out of all of us. The next mass killer is out there — somewhere — watching very carefully what we say and do to one another. And he may be as sane as you or me.
80% of mass killers analysed in study had no mental illness