Like the rest of the public I have been watching the coverage of the Newtown, CT rampage by a single 20 y.o. who is described as having had a mental disorder. Mental Health commentators have expressed many opinions about why this may have happened, why this individual in their terms “snapped”. Some, like a cautious psychiatrist that I heard during the day respond to Chris Matthews was reluctant to comment without having more information but he did, wisely in my opinion, emphasize that most schizophrenics were not violent. I think he was attempting to direct the audience away from a focus on diagnosis of an illness. Another expert attempted to link the murders of these children to the fact that this individual killed his mother and then wanted to kill those children because she held them as dear and important in her life (it turns out that his mother didn’t have any connection to the school, so out goes that speculation). The experts want to provide the public with the explanations that they desire, explanations that make an act of inexcusable and distressing violence seem more controlled because it can be understood.
Obviously we know that commenting on any individual who we haven’t evaluated clinically is asking for trouble because in some way it has to be irresponsible. Sure we can surmise that Adam L. was angry, violently angry but organized enough to methodically plan, take his mother’s guns and kill 26 people and then himself. This wasn’t a psychotic action by a disorganized person incapable of “opening a window before jumping through it”. We can probably agree, however, that this is a psychotic act of an individual who we would probably diagnose as psychotic but not necessarily give a specific DSM diagnosis. An immediate reaction on hearing about these murders is to assume the most severe of mental illnesses must have been causal but this would lead to affixing a diagnosis of one of the major psychiatric illnesses, because of the nature of the actions taken, something I would hope we could avoid doing.
But, what then can we contribute to the publics’ understanding as well as our own when there has been no diagnostic interview? An attempt to piece together Adam’s life story for its explanatory elements will undoubtedly occur and be followed by many mental health commentators. The explanations will be constructions that may or may not fit with this individual’s actual motives but still we remain in the arena of speculation. What we do have is our experience with patients who feel murderously envious of the lives of others in their surround, who feel cheated by an institution or a company, unfairly treated by a boyfriend or girlfriend, dissatisfied with the life that they are “forced to live”, furious at their therapist for not transforming their lives. In most if not all cases our ability to study cases of extreme envy or malignant narcissism is made possible because our clinical intuition and judgment allow us to correctly believe that analyzing these reactive states is !
not only safe but will help our patients cope with such feelings and fantasies, even reducing their potency in the long run. In essence,we see these kinds of feeling states in patients who will most probably never hurt a fly particularly if they are in intensive treatment where free expression of fantasies of retaliation is permitted.
However, there are individuals where the desire to make others suffer indelible pain, to put the mark of their rage on the world and to exit it in a blaze of glory, an act that will never be forgotten (or forgiven) but will burn in the memory of the public establishing for all to see that they weren’t going to take “it” anymore. It is this kind of isolated, enraged individual who has been involved in the repeated acts of mass murder that have stunned and distressed the public. I believe we can and should help by offering our view of the profile of individuals who commit this type of violence. The existence of adequate mental health facilities has little to do with the prevention of such catastrophic events because these individuals not only resist treatment but also are secretive and refuse to reveal much to those who evaluate or treat them. The murderous individual in Aurora, Colorado had been seeing a psychiatrist who was worried about his destructive fantasies, appare!
ntly so was he, but when she went to the Committee that evaluates dangerous patients it was decided that since he had withdrawn as a student it was no longer their responsibility to report him to the police!
We do have the ability to recognize the characteristics of individuals who are more likely to commit such acts of violence. Revenge against those leading “good and happy lives”, bitterness and implacable resentment of the limitations of their own life, coupled with an ego incapable of controlling the impulse to make others “regret” how they have ignored or injured them fuels a psychotic state that allows them to express their feelings with actions that cannot be ignored or recovered from by those who survive. Look what I can do to you, see what power to destroy you and myself, this is the pattern that we have seen over and over again. Of course the availability of assault weapons has much to do with the magnitude of these mass murders, the sheer numbers that a single individual can inflict in a very short period of time. The issue isn’t so much one of treatment availability but of sensible gun control of automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Let’s help the public not b!
elieve the explanations of the TV experts whose commentaries while at time creative are often misleading at best.
While we as psychoanalysts probably never see individuals who go on to be mass murders certainly we are closer to understanding the dynamics of destructive rage that combined with gun availability and homicidal and suicidal inclinations results in apocalyptic exist from the world. Understanding this phenomenon, the apocalyptic desire for an ending of life, may well be the best contribution that we can make. It may be imperfect of incomplete but at least it is true to the events that we have observed repeatedly, if from a distance far removed from our offices.
Henry J. Friedman