In a television interview Thursday, during which he responded to the killings in San Bernardino, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan asserted, “What we have seen—and a common theme among many of these mass shootings—is a theme of mental illness.” In the context of the slaughter in southern California, Ryan’s remark was an utter non-sequitur. (It was a bit like those Democrats who call for gun control measures after mass shootings that would do nothing to prevent the attacks they are ostensibly designed to respond to.) While it’s too early yet to determine the motive for Wednesday’s shooting, it simply beggars belief that the husband and wife who perpetrated the attack were both mentally ill.
But blaming the “mentally ill” for atrocities—particularly large-scale assaults—is a common tactic these days. Seemingly any time there is a mass shooting in America (and they are occurring with alarming frequency these days), before the perpetrator is even arrested or killed, people are quick to label him “mentally ill.” The absence of normative language—when was the last time a mass shooter was called cruel, or wicked?—is notable, and frankly wrongheaded.
For while in some cases notorious killers are clearly sick, the urge to blame any and all mass killings on “mental illness” amounts to scapegoating an already stigmatized group. As a literature review from the Treatment Advocacy Center points out, not only is it the case that “most acts of violence are committed by individuals who are not mentally ill,” but also that “most individuals with serious mental illness are not dangerous.” Indeed, being a young male and abusing alcohol or drugs are higher risk factors for exhibiting violent behavior than is mental illness. In the 1990s, Jeffrey Swanson, a Duke psychiatrist, tracked ten thousand people, both healthy and mentally ill, and found that mental illness was a factor in only 4 percent of all violent acts they committed. And as the New Yorker reported in 2014,
Nevertheless, the urge to medicalize malevolence is widespread. Secretary of State John Kerry, who boasts exactly zero medical or psychiatric training, has diagnosed ISIS as “psychopathic”—a genuine mental illness, as laid out by the DSM. But it’s highly implausible, to say the least, that more than 100,000 mentally ill people have banded together to form a semi-functioning state replete with tax collection, courts of law, and a bona fide foreign policy. The policy implications of labeling ISIS mentally ill are troubling as well. If ISIS fighters are all just sick, after all, it’s downright immoral to kill them. In Kerry’s constellation, they would need to be met with pills and treatment, not force.
Ultimately, the urge to attribute “mental illness” to any and all cases of cruelty, barbarity, and viciousness betrays a shallow understanding of human nature and history. It would be comforting, in a way, if the Goths, the Huns, and Nazis had all been “mentally ill.” But the reality of humanity is actually more troubling than that. The capacity for great cruelty resides in many who are of perfectly sound mind.
