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No, it is a legitimate mental illness.
I will lay a bet that if we were to perform a neuroimaging exam of this man’s brain, we would find a hypertrophic amygdala (which is the physical part of the brain that detects and classifies fear and threat responses) heavily primed to kick off a reaction in the limbic system. It’s a hair trigger over which you don’t have conscious control at that point. I will also guarantee he has a hypotrophied prefrontal cortex, which is the slower to react but more evolutionarily advanced part of the brain that’s supposed to keep all that stuff in check by asking “Is that what’s really happening?” and “What will happen to me if I do this?” There’s also a very solid chance we’d find evidence traumatic brain injury, with is present in 50%+ of persons in jail for violent crime and about 10% in the general population. We could do a blood work up, a DNA test, a psychological history, and so on.
We’re talking about structural, chemical, genetic, and psychological determinants. I don’t know how to classify that other than mental illness requiring treatment. I’m going to use a non-preferred term in its colloquial sense, but if a person is psychotic, you’re not going to punish them back to mental health.
Not everyone with mental illness is violent - almost none are. But people with these conditions are indeed mentally ill - it is a medical, not a moral condition - and until we approach it like that, we’re not going to be able to begin to address it.
I do not believe that we have free will, but I think in extreme cases like this you don’t even need to go that far. You’re no more going to fix a person like this morally than you’re going to cure epilepsy with an exorcism.
So you just used a whole lot of words why this dude might have mental illness after all.
Do you then also think that this is a totally cool and appropriate statement to make?
I just don't.
Yes, it is my educated opinion that this person, for the reasons I outlined at a pretty high level, has mental illness.
No, I do not think that the other person’s statement was totally cool. I agree with you that it was insensitive and dismissive. I want to make it very clear that I’m not trying to invalidate the reaction that kind of comment inspires.
What I am saying is that we do not do the fields of medicine, mental health, or criminal justice reform any favors if we try to take the stance that mental illness has no role to play in these kinds of incidents.
Look, I’m a researcher. One of my primary areas of research is studying how susceptibility to contagious ideas like these cluster in social networks and how they’re exploited by the viral contagion between individuals as pushed by their peers and mass/social media. I can get all into sigmoid transfer functions from opinions to behavior and how they’re left-shifted by predispositions.
But my main, ethical point is that this is a medical problem, and we need to treat it like one. None of that casts aspersions or makes any assumptions whatsoever about the vast spectrum that constitutes what we broadly and often erroneously term “mental health.” It just means that people need psychological and medical interventions rather than life in prison or the electric chair.
Thank you for making this point. I agree; we must view behavior like this as needing help.