11/17/2017 Are Mass Murderers Insane? Usually Not, Researchers Say - The New York Times
Are Mass Murderers Insane? Usually Not,
Researchers Say
By BENEDICT CAREY NOV.8, 2017
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An investigator examining the front door of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs in Texas on Lesothoman November 10, 2017
Tuesday. While the gunman, Devin Kelley, was reported to have spent time in a mental hospital, experts | would argue that all mass murderers are insane
say most killers in mass shootings are motivated by ideology or grievance rather than mental illness. regardless of whether ‘they hear voices’ or not. The
‘Scott Olson/Getty Images fact of the matter is that something
Erick November 10, 2017
The GOP is determined to blame everything and
If what people do is any reflection of who they are, then Devin P. Kelley, everyone except the guns and ease of availability to
E access guns. The answer is right there.
who slaughtered 26 churchgoers on Sunday in Texas, surely was a a 2
madman. DTOM November 10, 2017
‘Once we accepted the murder of 20 young children
. . at Sandy Hook Elementary without making any
Before the atrocity, he had attempted to sneak weapons onto an Air adjustments to our gun laws regarding weapons.
Force base after making death threats to his superiors, according to a
local police report. In 2012, he had escaped from a mental hospital in
New Mexico to which he had been sent after assaulting his wife and
SEE ALL COMMENTS
fracturing his stepson’s skull.
A video of the church killing reportedly shows Mr. Kelley working his
way methodically through the aisles, shooting some parishioners, even
children, at point-blank range.
“T think that mental health is your problem here,” President Trump told
reporters on Monday.
It is true that severe mental illnesses are found more often among mass
murderers. About one in five are likely psychotic or delusional,
according to Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia
University who maintains a database of 350 mass killers going back
more than a century. The figure for the general public is closer to 1
percent.
But the rest of these murderers do not have any severe, diagnosable
disorder. Though he was abusive to his wife, Omar Mateen, who killed
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11. di \taL ill html 1/4
11/17/2017 Are Mass Murderers Insane? Usually Not, Researchers Say - The New York Times
49 people in an Orlando nightclub, had no apparent serious mental
illness. Neither did Stephen Paddock, who mowed down 58
concertgoers from a hotel window in Las Vegas.
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Ditto for Dylann Roof, the racist who murdered nine African-American
churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015, and Christopher Harper-
Mercer, the angry young man who killed nine people at a community
college in Oregon the same year.
Nor does anything in these criminals’ history — including domestic
violence, like Mr. Kelley's — serve to reliably predict their spectacularly
cruel acts. Even if spree killers have committed domestic violence
disproportionately more often — and this assertion is in dispute — the
vast majority of men who are guilty of that crime never proceed to mass
murder.
Most mass murderers instead belong to a rogue’s gallery of the
disgruntled and aggrieved, whose anger and intentions wax and wane
over time, eventually curdling into violence in the wake of some
perceived humiliation.
“In almost all high-end mass killings, the perpetrator’s thinking
evolves,” said Kevin Cameron, executive director of the Canadian
Center for Threat A and Trauma
“They have a passing thought. They think about it more, they fantasize,
they slowly build a justification. They prepare, and then when the right
set of circumstances comes along, it unleashes the rage.”
This evolution proceeds rationally and logically, at least in the
murderer’s mind. The unthinkable becomes thinkable, then inevitable.
Researchers define mass killings as an event leaving four or more dead
at the same place and time. These incidents occur at an average of about,
one a day across the United States; few make national headlines.
‘At least half of the perpetrators die in the act, either by committing
suicide (Mr. Kelley is said to have shot himself in the head) or being
felled by police.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11 d tatiliness. html
11/17/2017 Are Mass Murderers Insane? Usually Not, Researchers Say - The New York Times
Among the psychotic, he counts Jared Loughner, the Arizona man who
shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, and 18 others in
2011. By most accounts, including his own, Mr. Loughner was becoming
increasingly delusional.
Adam Lanza, who in 2012 killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary
in Newtown, Conn., exhibited extreme paranoia in the months leading
up to his crime, isolating himself in his room.
But what to make of John
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not overtly psychotic, as far
as anyone knows, and this
is far more typical of the
men who commit mass
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“The majority of the killers
were disgruntled workers
or jilted lovers who were acting on a deep sense of injustice,” and not
mentally ill, Dr. Stone said of his research.
In a 2016 analysis of 71 lone-actor terrorists and 115 mass killers,
researchers convened by the Department of Justice found the rate of
psychotic disorders to be about what Dr. Stone had discovered: roughly
20 percent.
The overall rate of any psychiatric history among mass killers —
including such probable diagnoses as depression, learning disabilities
or A.D.H.D. — was 48 percent.
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11/17/2017 Are Mass Murderers Insane? Usually Not, Researchers Say - The New York Times.
About two-thirds of this group had faced “long-term stress,” like trouble
at school or keeping a job, failure in business, or disabling physical
injuries from, say, a car accident.
Substance abuse was also common: More than 40 percent had
problems with alcohol, marijuana or other drugs.
Looking at both studies, and using data from his own work, J. Reid
Meloy, a forensic psychologist who consults with the F.B.I., has
identified what he believes is a common thread: a “paranoid spectrum,”
he calls it.
At the extreme end is full-on psychosis of the Loughner variety. But the
majority of people on this spectrum are not deeply ill; rather, they are
injustice collectors. They are prone to perceive insults and failures as
cumulative, and often to blame them on one person or one group.
“If you have this paranoid streak, this vigilance, this sense that others
have been persecuting you for years, there’s an accumulation of
maltreatment and an intense urge to stop that persecution,” Dr. Meloy
said.
“That may never happen. The person may never act on the urge. But
when they do, typically there's a triggering event. It’s a loss in love or
work — something that starts a clock ticking, that starts the planning.”
Mental health treatment might make a difference for the one in five
murderers who have severe mental disorders, experts say. Prevention is
also possible in a few other cases — for instance, if the perpetrators
make overt threats and those threats are reported.
But other factors must be weighed.
“In my large file of mass murders, if you look decade by decade, the
numbers of victims are fairly small up until the 1960s,” said Dr. Stone.
“That’s when the deaths start going way up. When the AK-47s and the
Kalashnikovs and the Uzis — all these semiautomatic weapons, when.
they became so easily accessible.”
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‘A version of this article appears in print on November 9, 2017, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the
headline: Are Mass Murderers Insane? Usually Not, Researchers Say,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11 d tatiliness. html
