
Stop Conflating Violence and Mental Illness - adrianhoward
http://m.xojane.com/issues/for-the-last-time-stop-conflating-violence-and-mental-illness
======
lauraura
It's been really depressing to see so many reactions to the shooting phrased
in that way -- that the problem is mental illness or bad care of the mentally
ill. Mentally ill people are already stigmatized enough as-is, despite the
fact that they're far more likely to be _murdered_ than to be murderers.

People are already suggesting that the mentally ill be added to registries,
much like the already-flawed sex offender registry. This isn't going to make
life any better for the mentally ill, and certainly won't make anyone safer.
It'll just make mental illness even more of a black mark on someone's record
-- imagine being diagnosed for depression or autism once and never being able
to hold a proper job again. People will be even more deathly afraid of being
properly diagnosed and cared for, not the inverse.

------
konstruktor
One of the first things I, as a European, thought after hearing speculation on
mental problems of the shooter was the following: If they just focus on the
mental health issues on the shooter and start stereotyping, ostracizing and
discriminating mentally ill people a bit more, maybe even with some law that
limits their freedoms, people in the US will be able to avoid their two big
taboo topics: Healthcare (and, by extension, taxes) and gun control. I would
absolutely hate to be right on this one.

~~~
eitland
HNers are mostly bright people. Right now there is a trending post on
randomness and clusters on the front page and we mostly enjoy. Still why do we
forget the science we are so proud of everything guns are mentioned?

Why is there no similar outcry for stricter car control? That could really
save a lot of innocent kids lives as well as making the lives of all kinds of
criminals way harder.

You'd also reduce the emissions of CO2 and the overuse of hydrocarbons.

Since cars are bigger and mostly are used on roads collecting most of them
should only take a few years.

But nobody seems to be interested, why?

~~~
lutze
I'm not sure what your point is, because cars are already very heavily
regulated?

To drive a car you need to pass a competency test, as well as be insured
against accidents. Your right to drive can also be revoked if at any time you
demonstrate that you can't operate one safely.

So uh, yeah. I agree with you, lets do guns like cars!

~~~
yummyfajitas
If we regulate guns like cars, then:

Anyone who passes a simple safety test (simple enough that the bulk of the
population has little problem with it) can purchase a firearm and use it
(subject to safety regulations) in public.

With or without a license you can own and use a gun on private property.

There are certain quality regulations on cars/guns which apply to using them
outside private property (i.e., if it's likely to burst into flames, you can't
take it onto public roads).

There is no federal regulation, except for rules saying that a license in one
state is valid in all other states (i.e., a Texas CCW license works in NY).

This sounds like exactly what the NRA regularly lobbies for. The only people
who will argue against your proposal are gun control advocates (e.g.,
Bloomberg).

~~~
lutze
I think you might be taking my analogy a little far there.

I wasn't suggesting a straight find/replace of car with firearm...

~~~
yummyfajitas
I was just pointing out what regulating guns like cars actually means.

If you actually don't want to regulate guns like cars, but instead want far
more draconian regulations, why not just clearly state that?

------
SethMurphy
HN is the last place I would look for real understanding and incite on the
affect of mental illness on our society.

HN is the first place I would look to see part of the problem and
misconceptions about mental illness.

It seems the mental health of our country is failing as a whole. As the
symptoms accumulate, in time, there will probably be a disease or syndrome
named after it, with a little pill to "cure" it.

I have other opinions, but they are just that, opinions and as such I won't
pollute HN with my ignorance. I prefer to judge myself (as part of this
country's failing mental health) and not others I know little about.

Let's get back to tech, a topic where our opinions are more informed and the
facts more easily understood.

------
mynameishere
Stop conflating statistically insignificant incidents with reality. The Sandy
Hook lunatic wasn't even as deadly as a slow weekend in Chicago.

The only reason the occasionally mentally ill (you heard me) gunman gets press
is because the UMC media can identify with the victims. The UMC media can also
identify with the gunman. Unlike Chicago gangbangers, they've known such
creepy kids back in high school.

------
kephra
Even more important is to stop branding people as mental ill!

Mental illness in our system is defined like we are all chicken. We are
defined healthy if we lay an egg every day, have clean feathers and don't pull
feathers of other chicken in our cage. But not the chicken are insane. The
system is insane!

And the system became worse over the time. A lot of more people are now
declared mental ill, then ever before. Especially children and the fear of the
parents are exploited by doctors and pharmacy. Pharmacy drugs only try to hide
the symptom, and often fail in even this. The result is more likely a drug
addicted kid, who will later visit the doctor again, and again, like a junky
visiting his heroin dealer.

------
aes256
Although people suffering from mental illnesses may statistically be more
likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent acts, the disproportionate
focus on the latter is not unwarranted.

People are afraid of unpredictability. They are afraid of irrational people
doing irrational things, and many people with mental illnesses behave
irrationally. That's the long and short of it.

That said, we ought to be careful in making ex post diagnoses of mental
illness as a means of coming to terms with a tragedy. It is merely a figment
of the collective imagination that a person of sound mind would not
consciously take the lives of many others.

~~~
woofnbark
Conflating predictability with rationality appears to be a common failing
amongst the supposedly sane.

Just look at the hysteria that flares up every time an event like this occurs.
Guns are bad, gunmen are mad. Unless they're police or military, in which case
they're obviously in perfect mental health and heroes to boot. Very rational.

------
AskHugo
Did anyone also notice that the mentally ill girl depicted drawing on the wall
seems to be a Java programmer? She wrote things like "Math.pow(x, y)" and
"function place row".

Here's the image upside down: <http://i.imgur.com/d095a.jpg>

~~~
mieubrisse
I was curious about that myself as well. It seems a rather odd choice if
you're trying to imply lunacy.

~~~
jiggy2011
Isn't it an inevitable consequence of being exposed to Java for too long?

Just like:
InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedState

That's not part of a class API, it's a cry for help.

Too cheap?

~~~
droithomme
Wow thanks, I had not seen that, but that's a real class name in
com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus.

"it's a cry for help"

I'll agree with this.

~~~
olgeni
A _real_ cry for help would have mentioned a couple of Factories at least.

------
jcfrei
the author appears to be really upset about the current debate in the US about
mental illness. and I don't see why. the article goes on a long rant about how
we should separate mental illness and violence, yet no half-way knowledgeable
person would assume a mentally illness person to be automatically violent. why
is the author so strongly trying to prove a moot point? you can't argue away
the fact that most (if not all) mass shooting in recent history have been
conducted by mentally ill people and mental illness is a major factor when
individuals commit such crimes. the author just messes around with statistics
and appears to forget about causation and correlation - it's obvious that the
majority of mentally ill people doesn't exercise violence - yet the ones who
did were in most cases mentally ill. we're trying to find a way to prevent
these shootings. and we need to ask ourselves how we, as a society, treat
mentally people - not because 50% of them might be violent, but because
0.0001% are.

what we really need to do is starting to make a more distinctive diagnosis of
what the actual mental illness was and don't just conflate all forms of
schizophrenia with psychosis, bi-polar mood and depression disorder, etc.
under mental illness.

and a last remark on statistics (and sampling bias), and I believe we can all
agree that:

P(violent|person is mentally ill) ~ P(violent|person is not mentally ill)

however (and I believe this is the source of the discussion, correct me if I'm
wrong):

P(person is mentally ill|violent) >> P(person is not mentally ill|violent)

------
jacques_chester
Hard policy is hard: <http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/12/19/so-sandy-hook/>

But simplifying is human nature. We'd be unable to make sense of the world
otherwise (he said in a hilariously un-self-conscious way).

------
Vivtek
"Autistic Americans"? Does the nationality of an autistic person have an
effect on their autism?

~~~
cbhl
In some sense, yes -- Autism is characterised (in part) by difficulty with
"normal" social interactions, which can (and do) vary from nation to nation.

------
yyyytttt
Let me play devil's advocate. From what she's saying I'm drawing the
conclusion that mental illness correlates with drug use which correlates with
violence. The prevalence of mental illness in the population is small, so the
proportion of the mentally ill among violent criminals is also small, but if
mental illness is a predictor of violence then being more aggressive about
institutionalizing the mentally ill would provide society a better return on
investment with respect to preventing violence than policies aimed at the
general population (such as gun control).

~~~
DanBC
Mental illness is not a predictor of violence.

We're not just interested in the proportion of people with mental illness in
the population of violent criminals. We are also interested in the proportion
of violent criminals in the population of people with a mental illness. We
find that very few people with a mental illness are violent. We find that
people with mental illness are far more likely t be the victim of violent
crime than the perpetrators of violent crime.

------
dschiptsov
The issue here is very general one. The so-called common sense held by wast
majority is just plain wrong. It is a just a consensus by ignorant public, and
have nothing to do with more or less accurate description of reality, leave
alone explaining any particular event.

This situation is so common, that people literally didn't know any better.
Common sense about _what things really are and how things works and why_ are
naive oversimplifications and folklore at its best.

Common folks have no clue how, say, financial instruments works, or what
software engineering is about, or what is mental disorders and Autism in
particular. But everyone are cock-sure that they have an opinion and their
opinion is the most accurate description of the reality.

99% of these talks are naive but emotional nonsense. Guns are not the causes.
It is the same stupidity as to blame the pain for the cancer. Blaming autistic
traits as the causes of some particular acts of people who "seems like
autistic" is just as stupid as to blame food for obesity.

Yes, autistic individuals have much more pressure in society because they have
very unpleasant, physical sensation of discomfort, comparable with pain or
fear. We can do nothing with it, it just is. It is almost the same sense as of
being overwhelmed by annoying, loud noise you have no means to escape.

It might be caused by mere presence of noisy, loud, annoying, hyper-active,
rude and selfish people, it might be just forced conversation or forced eye-
contact - each autistic individual has his own sources of causes of
overwhelming annoying pressure.

It doesn't really matter how exactly it works, due to some inherent over-
sensitivity of Amigdala or due to dis-balance in production or metabolism of
some neuro-chemical substance, it doesn't really matter. The matter is that
life is much less pleasant task if you are one of us.

The most interesting part is that most of autistic people don't even realize
that they are somehow different from others, and that not everyone share the
same feelings of being overwhelmed. It is very difficult realization, which
requires lots of knowledge and intelligence. You're, of course, heard of it
many times, but you probably thought that it is not about you.

So, like it or not, the cancer is society. It is that simple. How people
threat each other (let alone how they threat Asperger and autistic
individuals) is the cause of most troubles. Just what people are in general.
The bell-curve is very real thing, and so-called ordinary people, en mass, is
by no means a nice thing.

I do not try to say that _this particular shooter_ deserves any mercy or
special consideration. He is just like a sick animal - everything is too late.
All I'm trying to say that do not talk about things you have no clue about.
You may hear some shit about ASDs and event felt something like being
overwhelmed by stress or depressed, but some people live all their lives under
a constant pressure, source of which they didn't realize, having no idea that
it is not the world around that is wrong.

World is the same for everyone. The hell is other people, you like it or not.
Especially for autistic people.

Some idiots used an analogy with rabies, but, no. There are no microbes that
produce toxins that rewires your brain so you have no control over it, so, you
are not responsible for your actions. This is an instance of that naive
oversimplification nonsense. It is all mental, and it accumulates in fullness
of time, as chronic depression or constant agitation does.

By the way, most of accompanied mild, non-organic mental disorders go
together. If you have physical discomfort being forced to deal with people,
you likely have the whole bunch of personality disorders in their mild form.
They are just artificial names of the same thing - consequences, effects,
reactions to an overwhelming pressure.

btw, that illustration in original posting, with a girl in a corner is a good
illustration of a common misconception.))

1\. Autism is mostly boy's disorder. That picture is about clinical
depression, which is women's trait, and it is just being shut in oneself.

2\. To depict autistic narrowed focus, the corner must be not of a closed
room, but something of a ruin, with no other walls or ceiling around, with all
the world all around, but a boy didn't notice.

~~~
nerdfiles
I wasn't going to respond to this article, or even read it, or even really
acknowledge the HN culture anymore on account of gems like this, but in all
honesty: SRSLY?

___Autism is mostly boy's disorder. That picture is about clinical depression,
which is women's trait, and it is just being shut in oneself.___

The loaded _gender-nomenclature_ of this patriarchal, advanced-capitalist
polyarchy has become so freaking thick that I would find it laughable if
scientific literature (STEMers) even distills 5% of it from shared knowledge
100 years from now.

___In a similar vein, Baron-Cohen and Hammer (1997) argued that, whereas
individuals with autism have extreme “male brains,” with better spatial skills
than social skills, those with Williams syndrome show the reverse pattern and,
as such, may be characterized as having extreme “female brains.” ___ \--
[https://sites.google.com/site/drjonbrock/publications/the-
ot...](https://sites.google.com/site/drjonbrock/publications/the-other-end-of-
the-spectrum-social-cognition-in-williams-syndrome)

Now looking at your statement, we have terms like "boy's disorder" contrasted
with "women's trait".

What are you talking about? With Williams Syndrome we have "female brains" so
with every reason to believe that they are alone in clinical depression. That
is, by your grammar of reasoning. But what is more?:

___This view of Williams syndrome and autism as diametric opposites has,
however, proven to be somewhat simplistic (Tager-Flusberg, Plesa-Skwerer, &
Joseph, 2006). Despite their sociable and empathetic personalities,
individuals with Williams syndrome are often reported as having high levels of
social anxiety (Dykens, 2003; Udwin, Yule, & Martin, 1987). Children with
Williams syndrome typically prefer adult company to mixing with their own age
group, and have great diffi culty making and sustaining friendships (Einfeld,
Tonge, & Florio, 1997; Rosner, Hodapp, Fidler, Sagun, & Dykens, 2004; Udwin et
al., 1987). The two disorders also overlap clinically.___ \--
[https://sites.google.com/site/drjonbrock/publications/the-
ot...](https://sites.google.com/site/drjonbrock/publications/the-other-end-of-
the-spectrum-social-cognition-in-williams-syndrome)

So what are you, in factual terms, please, sir, saying? What is going on here,
where your post ranks highest, and you have express'd what seems to be
unessential and obfuscating sexist language, in such a way as to talk about
what is clinical; and current research says, quite simply, and quite exactly
the opposite of what you theorize on with false knowledge; if indeed they
clinically overlap, that is?

~~~
drequivalent
With all the respect to gender equality supporters (to which I count myself),
why so much butthurt?

~~~
nerdfiles
What does this have to do with gender equality? I'm talking about his
"theorizing" and his "nomenclature". I am talking about his method and his
"grammar." I am talking about the future state of existing true statements
that may exist in our scientific literature in "the next 100 years." I am
dealing with Popperian-style skepticism; this is philosophy of science.
Please, understand. I want sense, from nonsense. That is a big issue to me,
essentially since I just read his post with
<http://antijingoist.github.com/AlphaSymbolic/>. And quite frankly, I'm not
happy about it. All I see is a logical paradox. A sequence of linguistic
markers, and his paradoxical blobs of AlphaSymbolic text is way to clear to
me. It's way too eerily clear.

Please see <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-paraconsistent/>.

This human man is clearly using language in a way that is expected and fits
along a normalized pattern that suggests "rational." However, his theorizing
immediately leads to "explosion"; so it is a matter, then, of what content
quantities of his exist which, in principle, say nothing. How much of any of
this paradoxical language exists? And how did we get to a point in society
where what he says passes off as passively authoritative? -- What are we
filling the Internet with? -- Ultimately, when I reflect on Godel's proof,
Candor's diagonalization, it all becomes too clear that our Western society is
intolerant to difference; and this can undermine scientific progress.

I am concern'd with consistency and the stress of things like general internet
ecologies (and hypermedia applications) on organic cognitive systems (like
us). Because, quite simply, What is going on here? What is he talking about?
Is it informational? Operational? Pragmatic? Dogmatic?

What does his content and its ilk engender in terms of rational, dialectical
discussion with no obvious linguistic glitches that mislead and misinform.

------
michaelochurch
People tend also to conflate mental illness with "things I don't like". For
example, when the Sandy Hook shooting happened, people were saying, "What a
whackjob", before they even knew who the perpetrator was, as if it were like
"What an asshole". (Yes, I agree that he's an asshole, but no, I don't see
reason to believe that he's literally the victim of a head injury.) It does
seem likely that the man was mentally ill, but that's not all of the picture.
The vast majority of people with mental illness would never do something like
this, and not all mass murderers are mentally ill. In fact, as far as I know
there are only two mental illnesses that positively correlate with violence.
One is severe drug addiction, which is a different class of problem, and the
other is psychopathy, and people with the latter tend to be above-average in
social development, which is why Ted Bundy was so effective: he killed about
40 people before he was finally caught.

We've seen this equation of displeasure with mental illness in the fallout as
well. The NRA are referred to as "crazy gun nuts". Well, they're not actually
"crazy". They hold strong ideological beliefs that we dislike, and they're
almost certainly _wrong_ (in that the benefits of ubiquitous AK-47s do _not_
compensate for the drawbacks, because the probabilities associated with the
events that would make then beneficial are ridiculously low). They're not the
same thing. These radicals are dangerously wrong and I'm glad they're on the
fringe, but they're not "crazy".

I also take umbrage against the attempt to explain away evil using mental
illness. It's like people don't want to admit that bad people or evil exist.
Hitler was crazy, Adam Lanza was crazy, Ted Bundy was crazy. Well, I have no
idea if they were mentally ill. They were, however, evil. Evil exists. It
probably doesn't have a metaphysical platonic form (a Satan) and there's no
evidence that it has _any_ supernatural presence but, in the practical real
world we live in, evil's a real thing. It's a part of our story as humans. You
can't understand what we, as a species, are if you leave it out. In fact, to
the extent that evil and "insanity" correlate, I would argue that the causal
direction goes the other way: people who do evil things, especially if they're
rewarded and become powerful, warp over time and eventually go nuts. It's not
the other way around. Mental illness is painful and horrible and sometimes it
makes people do harmful things but it does not make people evil. Killing 28
innocent people, mostly children, for no reason is evil. Adam Lanza may have
been mentally ill but he was also an evil piece of shit.

------
drivebyacct2
>"When you think of mental illness, is this what you see?" asks artist
Jennifer Mathis.

Was I supposed to have? I certainly didn't. I imagined a lot of things, on a
wide spectrum, but not that.

------
nerdfiles
@see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570>

