Adam Lanza was intelligent, shy, nerdy, genius, goth, quiet, remote, socially awkward. He probably suffered from Asperger syndrome and some psychiatric disorders! If the US had strict gun control laws, Adam wouldn’t have been able to get his hands on guns so easily. And if the US had universal health care system, Adam wouldn’t have been left untreated.
In the age of citizen journalism I await blogs from the surviving children before making comments on the Connecticut incident. The Beslan incident in the Caucuses was the iconic massacre of schoolchildren, and
it appears that no one has learned either from this vicious enterprise, nor the almost daily attacks on schoolgirls in the benighted regions that wish to establish the divine califate on earth. Guns are part of politics in many countries and we also have to remember Turkish teachers killed by Kurdish vigilantes in any balanced discussion of schoolroom violence.
Please don’t do this. “Most likely he suffered from Asperger syndrome!” –No. Please, just no. This is an armchair diagnosis from third-hand accounts of someone you don’t know, and you are slapping a stereotype label on him; the incidental, innocent bystanders who are harmed by this, are the people who actually have a diagnosis of Aspergers, but would no more go out and kill people than you or I would.
You’ve just said to the world, “here is someone who just killed a bunch of kids, because he was shy and quiet and awkward he was probably JUST LIKE THESE PEOPLE HERE”, and now everyone gets to stare at the people with Aspergers and wonder when they’re going to start killing.
You are spreading a facile stereotype that hurts real people in real ways.
A couple of things you should read:
http://paulacdurbinwestbyautisticblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/mother-with-asperger-syndrome-grieves.html
http://www.emilywillinghamphd.com/2012/12/autism-empathy-and-violence-one-of.html
…Your main point, that easy access to mental health services might help us all a lot more than easy access to guns, is not wrong, but you are supporting it in a very wrong way.
We can not deny that some mentally ill people become violent sometimes. Can we? I have no intention to put them down. Do you have any idea why a 20-year-old boy should kill so many people including himself? Please enlighten me.
Kate Donovan explains more eloquently than I could.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/ashleymiller/2012/12/14/when-you-tie-shootings-to-mental-illness/
We can not deny that some mentally ill people become violent sometimes.
Here’s a clue … Asperger’s syndrom is NOT a mental illness.
“Do you have any idea why a 20-year-old boy should kill so many people including himself? No, and neither do you.
Of course mentally ill people become violent sometimes.
So do mentally healthy people, and there are rather more of them.
You made two empirical claims in your blog post: Adam Lanza had Asperger’s or a psychiatric disorder, and his mental health was the cause of his violence. You have not provided any evidence for either claim, merely speculations and harmful stereotypes. I expected better.
Honestly, why is it so hard for people to accept that sometimes nice White boys do bad things? Why must we instantly invent a membership in a marginalized group for them, and blame their crimes on that marginalized identity?
As to the cartoon: it’s easier to buy a gun than a car. Does it logically follow that pedestrians are more likely to become spree killers than drivers are?
Anyone who thinks that he has a right to shoot people is what you might call ‘fucked up in the head’ by definition, but that is not the same thing as mental illness or developmental disorder. There are many other things that can cause people to develop and hold outrageous beliefs and carry out horrible acts including nationalism, fascism, communism, religion and artificial experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment.
So there is some understanding of why men and women believe outrageous things and carry out horrible acts in groups. We don’t yet know why men (and never women) do it on their own, or with at most one other male accomplice, but if men who don’t have mental illness or developmental disorders can carry out these things in groups then what’s to say they couldn’t do it alone?
Maybe there’s an analogy to be made. Maybe these men indoctrinate themselves in some sort of deranged personal belief system that allows and compels them to murder people. Maybe women never do it because women are never allowed to stray from society for long enough to have time and space to develop a such a belief system.
I don’t know why he did what he did.
Neither do you.
A couple of things I do know, however:
Aspergers isn’t a mental illness. It’s a developmental disorder which makes it difficult for people to perceive or interpret social cues.
Aspergers is NOT significantly associated with criminal violence. Far from it.
And just as with “mentally healthy” people, the level of violence this shooter displayed is completely inconceivable, and outwith the scope of anything they would be capable of.
There are some forms of psychosis or mental disorder which can, under certain circumstances and in association with certain personalities and socioeconomic levels, be associated with criminal violence (for example, clinically diagnosable psychopathy; and violent personality disorders in which participation in violence is actually a diagnostic criterion!). But we have no evidence that Lanza was associated with any of these; this is back to armchair diagnostics based on ignorance and guesswork. And the clear majority of criminals, even murderers, even mass murderers, are actually just “ordinary” people.
However, for most forms of developmental disability and mental illness there is a far greater and clearer association with sufferers being the target of violence — and this generally from people who have no diagnosis of “mental illness.”
So, pretty much what everyone else here is telling you.
I can’t add much more. The other people here have said everything I would have wanted to say, and better.
I owned guns growing up, I went target shooting, and I never entertained the notion to turn it on a fellow human being. The problem isnt the gun. Non-universal health care is a start on issues to tackle, any ideology that encourages abuse and domination of your fellow human being, and women’s equality(or more accurately the lack therof) Gun violence is merely on form of violence. I suspect measures against guns would result in increases of other forms of violence.
You can suspect that, but there was apparently no rise in compensatory violence in Australia after they banned semi-automatic rifles. http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/08/20/aler.ahq013.abstract, which I found referenced in this Slate article: http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2012/12/16/gun_control_after_connecticut_shooting_could_australia_s_laws_provide_a.html.
I don’t think anyone argues that taking away guns is a panacea, but equally it’s hard to see how a single individual could do the same kind of damage with the same ease without easy access to weapons with a high rate of fire (not impossible, of course).
I think the t-shirt slogan we need here is ‘Guns don’t kill people; people kill people … but guns make it much, much easier for people to kill people’.
As someone with bipolar disorder- another of the illnesses people have been leaping to label him with before any information is in- I’d like to thank you for making this post one of the first responses.
Above is in response to Lynne, not Taslima.
“Adam Lanza was intelligent, shy, nerdy, genius, goth, quiet, remote, socially awkward.”
Please google Columbine goth myth.
Please just google anything for once in your life.
Note that Taslima gives several characteristics of this person and you pick out goth. Why not nerdy or remote?
It is unfortunate habit of people to read more into things than may be warranted, as in correlation may not = causation. We need to be sensitized to saying things that may not be what we mean, but we also need to recognize that we can be oversensitized.
It depresses me a bit the extent to which misleading urban legeneds continue to exist about Columbine, particularly after the publication of the excellent book ‘Columbine’ by Dave Cullen.
Thanks, Taslima, for helping to propagate the myth that people with Asperger’;s are isolated loners who kill.
http://autistwriter.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/did-you-doubt-it-for-a-second/
We don’t actually know anything about this man except for comments from people who are filtering their memories through cultural expectations and prejudice. And if he was autistic, the one thing that is absolutely true is that it was society’s treatment of him that caused this.
You have contributed to the othering and bullying that people like me face every day. You are one of those people that makes me view society as inherently unsafe for me.
Thanks.
Pot, meet kettle.
The simple words “may have contributed” need to be expressed in this and any similar context. You don’t know for certain, either.
Excellent point, tielserrath. Religious fundies are always going on and on about how being gay supposedly causes someone to commit suicide and nonsensical crap like that, when it’s society’s treatment of these people that leads them to do it. Unfortunately, what we have here is have a self-proclaimed social justice advocate, perpetuating myths that do a lot of harm to a lot of innocent people, just as religious fundies perpetuate myths about LGBT people.
We don’t know whether the killer was autistic or not. If he was, then he must have had some really horrific experiences to do what he did, because autism would make a person less likely to do what he did, not more likely.
Mass murderers like Adam Lanza do have mental problems. Usually they have cluster-B mental illness or are psychotic. It’s possible they have Asperger at the same time, but it’s not because they have Asperger that they do these killings, they have more serious mental problems.
Citations, please 🙂
Howard Unruh, the first American mass murderer was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, found insane and sent to a psychiatric hospital where he spent the rest of his life.
Laurie DannThe only American female mass murderer, had mental problems and was seeing a psychiatrist before her murders .
Cho, the Virginia Tech killerwas found mentally ill and in need of hospitalization in 2005 because he was imminent danger to himself or others but he was not sent to a psychiatric hospital and we know what happened after.
Ander Breivikwas diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.
I’m reading forums for people with mental problems, and people with cluster-B mental illness refuse to admit they have mental illness and are very good at hiding it to other people so the forums for Cluster-B people are full of ordinary people (usually women because most people who have Cluster-B mental problems are men) who live with them. That’s one of the reason these people are difficult to spot : the only people who knows about their mental illness are their relatives.
Of course mentally ill people become violent sometimes.
So do mentally healthy people, and there are rather more of them.
Do you have any evidence that mentally ill people are MORE violent than mentally healthy people? A few isolated anecdotes don’t count. Do you have any STATISTICS comparing the two groups?
I do.
“The majority of crimes are not committed by people with psychiatric illness, and multiple studies have proven that there is very little relationship between most of these diseases and violence. The real issue is the fact that people with mental illness are two and a half to four times more likely to be the victims of violence than any other group in our society.”
So you’re perpetuating a stereotype that further discriminates against an already marginalized group.
The article agree with what I’ve said :
I didn’t said that all people with mental problems I said there’s a minority of people among them who are violent.
And it’s true that the vast majority of mass murderers have mental problems :
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/20/mass-murderers-unlike-serial-killers-are-hard-to-profile.html
What denominator are you using to go from four examples to the claim that mass killers “usually” have a particular type of disorder?
1: Planned, premeditated violence is not an aspect of autism. Stop demonizing autistic people. You’re perpetuating an ignorant, harmful, ableist stereotype of a vulnerable group people that includes some of my best friends. On this blog network, I expect better.
2: The best available research cannot determine whether mentally ill people are more likely to be violent than those without mental illness. This makes it very likely that they’re not more violent on average than those without mental illness.
What you’re exhibiting is a rather exemplary case of circular reasoning: Mentally ill people are violent! This person did something violent! He must’ve been mentally ill because mentally ill people are violent! And that’s, quite frankly, bullshit. Evil and violence are independent of mental illness.
Read this. There’s more where that came from if you actually give a shit about correcting bigoted misconceptions imposed by our society.
If people are interested, here’s some real information to counter this bigoted tripe.
Some more.
And some more.
If you don’t understand why this man killed children and teachers and subjected others to a nightmare, Taslima, that’s fine. That’s good, in fact. I don’t either and I honestly don’t want to. It hurts me too – just like all of the other neurodivergent people I know, who are just as disgusted and horrified and bewildered as you are. Be a better skeptic: if you don’t know, say “I don’t know.” Autism is not an explanation and Autistic people are not your scapegoats.
I’ve already written this twice above: Just because Taslima mentioned a [probable] developmental disorder and [probable] psychiatric illness, doesn’t prove causation.
Your [this is plural – to most of the respondents who appear to be all worked up about this] probable overreaction is noted.
I believe that is plausible that his isolation, due in part to his plausible Asperger’s syndrome may have contributed to some other disorder that was a causitive factor in this rampage. We may not ever know more.
We know it doesn’t. Taslima is the one who implied that it does, and we’re trying to counteract that harmful myth.
http://timetolisten.blogspot.com/2012/07/open-letter-to-media-in-wake-of-aurora.html
Thanks for being part of the problem. We really appreciate it.
Previous commenters have already pointed out the awful damage done by propogating myths, and the utter lack of evidence that mental illness played a part.
I’d like to point out that painting those who need mental health care as gangly, nerdy types with overbites as this cartoon does is just horrible. Please remove that terrible comic.
@Taslima,
I thought the bloggers at FTB were supposed to be skeptics, so why are you regurgitating the same hurtful crap that the press has been spewing? As far as I know, people with Asperger’s are actually LESS likely to commit murder than neurotypical people are, so whatever led him to do this must have been especially extreme.
This was written yesterday, by someone with Asperger’s. If you care at all about the truth, you should read it and some of the other articles people have linked you to.
Last night, I actually saw a tweet from ABC, announcing that he might have had OCD, as though that was actually important. Seriously? What behaviors did he keep repeating? Did he wash his hands a lot? Did he check, double-check, and triple-check his alarm clock every night? Did he take a shower every time he pooped? Oh, yeah! Real sign of a killer right there! They should have locked him up after he straightened one too many crooked paintings! Sure, he might have had OCD, and he might have had Aspergers, but that doesn’t mean jack shit. People with Aspergers feel just as much empathy as others, if not more so. Don’t let the lack of expression fool you.
Aspergers doesn’t make people kill, any more than being a woman makes a person irrational. Please stop contributing to both stereotypes.
Asperger’s? Seriously?
What a bigoted post. What distracts people from access to mental health care isn’t guns (not that I like guns) but the stigma of being seen as mentally ill. A stigma which you are contributing to, right now, with this post.
I’ve personally known two people with Asperger’s (or rather, who I knew had Asperger’s.) One was a student I taught science to in a public school – he was better behaved than most of the class, always worked hard, and loved zoology. The other is my best friend, who has more than once put himself in danger to protect innocent people from violence. In other words, these are people who have much more in common with the victims of this attack than its perpetrator.
For that matter, I’m learning disabled and mentally ill, and I love my teaching job. Some of my students are about the age of the victims in this attack, and if something like this threatened my kids, I hope I would have the courage and loyalty to do what those teachers did.
I come from Connecticut. My response to seeing my first headlines about this tragedy was “Oh, no, was it the school where my sister teaches? Was it the school I went to? Did someone I love just die?” (Fortunately for me, the answers to those questions all turned out to be “no.”) I came here to read more about a tragedy that literally hit close to home. Instead, I – and my friends, and my students – were blamed for it. I’m not coming back here except to read your retraction and apology for this post.
Most killers on earth are having no mental illness. They are just cruel, selfish, bad. I know. But some people who kill happen to be mentally ill. It seems you guys do not want to admit it. I still can’t forget how Ibn Warraq, my author friend’s mentally ill son Raphael stabbed his own mother to death. No, I did not blame Raphael’s illness. I blamed his parents for not helping him when he needed their help and I blame his doctors who discharged him from the clinic without properly assessing his mental health.
I said Adam might had psychiatric disorders, my guess was based on the comments made by the people who knew him. If I say the killer is mentally ill, it does not mean that I am trying to say all mentally ill patients kill. Like if I say the killer is a singer, I do not try to say all singers are killers.
In my post I have not criticized people who are mentally ill, I criticized the USA for not having universal health care and for not banning guns.
Congrats on not understanding statistics.
95% of homicides: Committed by people who aren’t mentally ill.
Which you’d know, if you read the link so helpfully provided to you 4 times.
Yes, yes, I know, you BELIEVE in your HEART OF HEARTS that mental illness causes the majority of violence. But that doesn’t mean anything here in realityland, where 5% is vastly smaller than 95%.
Should I congrat you for not reading my comment before replying? My first sentence is, ‘most killers on earth are having no mental illness’. You just repeated what I said. Thanks.
Listen, if you have to put a sentence in at the start of your post as a don’t-call-me-out-as-bigoted disclaimer, that’s a real good sign you should stop and rethink what you’re about to say.
If someone said, “most women on earth are responsible people” and then spent the rest of their post slut-shaming and arguing for restrictions on abortion, and shut down criticism by saying they weren’t talking about most women, they were talking about the rare exceptions that pop abortions like candy, you wouldn’t let that fly, would you?
You’re doing the same thing with a different bigotry.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Read. The words. That are written in our posts.
We know that some people who do violent things have mental illness. That does not make it okay to conflate violent assholes with those who are mentally ill. Which is what you’re doing.
People who are mentally ill are at worst no more likely to commit violence than those who are not mentally ill.
And yet, you’re sitting here going, “Well, he was mentally ill. That matters.”
First off all, we don’t know that. Second of all, the mental illnesses and developmental disabilities (note: Autism =/= a mental illness – different things, and equating them is like saying being gay is the same thing as being a woman) he may have had are associated with a reduced chance of committing premeditated violence like this. Thirdly, people with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities are stigmatized as violent and dangerous. Even though they’re no more so in general than the rest of the population.
And you’re perpetuating the stigmatization by trying to imply (spuriously) that any mental illness or developmental disability he may have had explains his violence, and he shouldn’t have had guns because of said mental illness or developmental disability. Which is bullshit, and is the bigoted harmful crap we’re calling you on.
Let’s play word-substitution of stereotypes, mmkay?
“Most child molesters on earth are not gay. They are just cruel, selfish, bad. I know. But some people who molest kids happen to be gay.”
Do you get it now? What you’re doing is just as wrong – factually and ethically – as trying to equate being gay with being a child molester. People with mental illnesses are not more likely to commit violence than people without mental illnesses. People with the developmental disability in question are actually less likely to commit violence than people without the developmental disability in question.
But you’re trying to paint them as scary monsters who shouldn’t be trusted. And that is not fucking okay.
I know enough about mental illness (I have psychological problems, people in my family had mental illness and I’ve read a lot about it) to know that all mental disabilities are not the same and that there are people with mental disabilities who can be more dangerous (for them and other people) than ordinary people are. Giving them access to guns is irresponsible.
Having mental illness is not the same thing as having a different gender or a different sexual orientation, you cannot equate the two.
NO. STOP.
Stop trying to other us. And stop trying to equate mental illness and mental disability—they aren’t the same thing and they don’t work the same way.
This goes for Taslima too. STOP trying to other us, us with mental illness, stop trying to tell us that you know us better than we know ourselves, stop trying to tell us you know what’s best for us, stop trying to say that you know the outcome better than we do. You have a psychological disorder yourself? Stop othering yourselves! Don’t you get that that’s exactly what you’re doing here? Just like the media is doing so lovingly at the moment.
Equating mental illness with violence is othering us. You say, “oh, he must have had a personality disorder!” First of all, there is no actual information about what he may or may not have been dealing with. Unless a psychiatrist or psychologist who worked with him while he was alive gives us a diagnosis, we will NEVER know. You and I are not qualified to predict what he may have had; we have no information, and we are not mental health professionals. End of.
But what you’re really saying is, “Oh, he must have been a freak.” He couldn’t have been just like us. He couldn’t have been One of Us. He had to be something else, there had to have been something wrong with him. Here’s the reality: he is dead. And we will never know the truth about whether he really had a mental illness or a mental disability. And by saying, “he must have been mentally ill!”, what you’re really doing is erasing all of that terribly responsibility that society feels in the wake of this tragedy. That maybe it was us, and not just him. That maybe, instead of this being an isolated incident, it’s a growing trend. You give people the pass to feel like it’s not their responsibility to fix it, because he was ill, because he was a freak and probably would have done it anyway.
I’m here to tell you that the vast majority of people with mental illness are not dangerous or violent. Saying “I’ve read about it on the internet!” does nothing. You need a psychology degree for a reason. Leave the diagnosing and the med-dispensing and the risk assessment to the professionals. You don’t know what you’re talking about, so PLEASE, stop talking about it.
Inasmuch as people with mental illnesses are stigmatized and demonized for something beyond their control by a society that’s bigoted against them, they can be equated. Inasmuch as harmful and patently untrue stereotypes exist about people with mental illness just as exist about people who are gay and people who are not cis dudes (which I presume is what you mean by a ‘different’ gender), they can be equated. Inasmuch as our society creates a system wherein they’re othered and discriminated against and then blames them for the outcome of said system, they can be equated. Which is my point.
Yeah, there are mental illnesses that are associated with an increased risk of violence. But there’s a hell of a lot more that are not. And there’s also the elephant in the room that roughly 25% of people have a mental illness, yet 95% of murders are committed by people who are not mentally ill. And there is the fact that if you look at mental illness as a whole, people with mental illness are no more likely to commit acts of violence than those without mental illnesses.
So, no, I’m not going to give Taslima or anyone else here a pass on ableist bigotry. Fuck that.
I’ve very sorry for your friend’s family and their loss.
I’m even sorrier that you have hijacked their tragedy and turned it into a weapon against an already marginalized group in society.
Your ruthless insensitivity is perpetuating a hateful and hurtful stereotype. Myself and others have already left plenty of evidence explaining this. It is your choice whether you use your voice to make the world a better place, or a worse one. So far, you have chosen worse.
“Adam Lanza was intelligent, shy, nerdy, genius, goth, quiet, remote, socially awkward. He probably suffered from Asperger syndrome or some psychiatric disorders!”
I’m sorry, but the latter part of this statement is just ill-informed speculation. While I’m not a goth or a genius, I can certainly identify with the other traits listed as attributable to Adam Lanzer to varying degrees. I was labelled as possibly having Aspergers Syndrome by my ex-wife just because I’m introverted! These sorts of statements trotted out after this sort of tragic event are becoming the norm, but usually from the sensationalist media – see the James Holmes shooting coverage. You’ve fallen into the same trap.
I don’t even know where to begin with this. You don’t see how people will read your post — and now your reply — and assume that anyone with autism is more likely to murder, when the exact opposite is true?
I never heard of you until today, and this is definitely not a good first impression.
I find myself forced to agree with the general flow of comments here. Very bad form, Taslima. You’re helping propagate the ‘trenchcoat mafia’ myths. You remember them, right? All the laws descending form them that make life even more miserable for everyone who doesn’t quite ‘fit in’?
This facile take on the event insults a lot of people, including many of your commenters, including me.
Thank you for perpetuating the idea that as someone with social anxiety and ADD, who cannot easily relate to others and often avoids other people, I should be feared.
Thank you, for giving people a reason to tease me more, to make me more self conscious, and more likely to hide from society.
Thank you for giving other people a reason to treat me like I’m a time bomb, instead of a person who would rather do something to make them smile (if only I could approach them) than hurt them.
Thank you for implying that people who are different, people with mental illnesses, or people with similar disorders are dangerous and the only people capable of committing murders.
Thank you for excusing mentally healthy people of their crimes by saying they must have a mental illness rather than seeing them for what they are.
Taslima – Please read this:
The Intricate Link Between Violence and Mental Disorder
http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=210191
Conclusions Because severe mental illness did not independently predict future violent behavior, these findings challenge perceptions that mental illness is a leading cause of violence in the general population.
This reminds me of when Fox anchors in particular go out of their way to mention that the suspect leaving the scene of some crime was black. What, we’re not suggesting that black people are criminals! We’re just mentioning that he was black even though it has nothing to do with the events, jeez!
Just a quick comment on universal health care. Living in Canada where we do have universal health care I can say it is not a total panacea that ensures all people with mental illness will get the treatment they need. There are lots of people who need the care that have slipped through the cracks and end up living on the streets etc. In part this is due to cuts in funding and other factors.
In a couple of extreme cases, such as the beheading that occurred on a Grayhound bus a few years ago, we still see that very sick people will commit acts of violence if they are not getting proper care.
” If the US had strict gun control laws, Adam wouldn’t have been able to get his hands on guns so easily.”
This is misleading at best. The current firearms laws in the US prevented him from acquiring firearms legally. He had to steal them.
Stop perpetuating the myth that just anyone can walk into a gun store and get a weapon regardless of their background. A felony conviction or proof of mental unsuitability will prevent a person from purchasing a firearm, just as it did with Adam Lanza.
It’ll come down to his relationship/attachment with his primary caregiver – Always does –
“Other criminologists such as Jonathan Pincus and Dorothy Otnow Lewis believe that, although it is the interaction of childhood abuse and neurological disturbances that explains murder, virtually all of the 150 murderers they studied over a 25-year period had suffered severe abuse as children. Pincus believes that the only feasible remedy for crime would be the prevention of child abuse.[22]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_model_of_mental_disorders
That’s easy to say now that we know that the father was mostly absent and the mother was a prepper and a gun nut. But does it hold for most of the other shootings in the US and around the world?
It also seems reasonable on the face of it that a boy having an absent father and no other present male care giver could increase the chance of harmful expressions of masculinity, but is that actually the case?