Part of the reason our public discussion of public mass
shootings in the US tends to devolve into arguments that we should just “Keep
the guns away from the crazies!” is that we have a poor collective
understanding of what mental illness actually is.
“Mental illness” is, technically speaking, psychiatric
diagnosis, and psychiatric diagnosis is, in this part of the world, determined
by the DSM-5 The DSM-5 is a diagnostic manual created by the American
Psychiatric Association, and the diagnoses therein are based on descriptions of
symptoms that tend to cluster together.
Whether a person has these symptoms is determined by
self-report (often on a simple form) and observed behavior.
There is no blood test to determine mental illness, and the
brain imaging studies that have been done so far aren’t definitive. If that
seems surprising, consider that describing Picasso’s Guernica in terms of it
being made of certain tones of oil paint on canvas won’t help you understand
the Spanish Civil War, fascism, or cubism, for that matter, nor will it help
you understand Picasso’s peculiar genius.
There is some preliminary association between these observed
behaviors and reported states with certain genetic profiles, but there’s little
understanding of the epigenetics involved (why people with the same genetic
profile can have very different psychological experiences).
And none of this stuff matches exactly with what people
actually experience when they’re suffering psychologically or going through
extreme states of mind.
In other words, mental illness is descriptive, no
prescriptive; the idea that we can just screen somebody and divine the next
ticking time bomb is a convenient Hollywood plot device, not reality.
There’s little daylight between the notion that people “just
snap” and “start shooting” and the idea of demon possession. What’s compelling
about this
Vanderbilt report is that it begins to see what leads to public mass
shootings as something that’s probably complex, that is, like so many human
behaviors, a cultural and “biopsychosocial” experience, not a simplistic bit of
myth.
