Here are a few commentaries that I came across that seemed worth noting:
Colorado shooting suspect appears in court dazed, silent
Many mass murderers are driven by anger over a rejection, bullying or perceived mistreatment, said Harry Croft, a San Antonio psychiatrist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder. Hatching and executing a plan may give them a sense of power and control. "When all is said and done, and he sits in jail and looks at the rest of his life being over, the power is gone," Croft said.
James Holmes Not Faking Emotions In Court Say Top Experts
“James looked as if he was trying to wake up from a nightmare,” Dr. Carole Lieberman tells us. “But every time he opened his eyes, he realized the nightmare was real. This confusion is typical of people who have immersed themselves in fantasy media violence and are having trouble getting back in touch with reality.”....We also spoke with Dr. Gardere who says that although James seems to be exaggerating, it’s because he is “emotionally exhausted.”
What does the James Holmes video tell us?
It would be very helpful to see the full video (and I would hope ABC would release more than just this tiny clip). Based on what we have here, though, Holmes “research” involving “illusions that allow you to change the past” and his interest in differentiating internal versus external experience suggests he’s (already?) entertaining the process of retreating into the mind in a fantastical way for the purpose of revising what has come before. From just what we know already (including Holmes’ state of mind as reported by the gun club owner in Colorado in this NYT article), we’re in symptomatic territory already.
The common motive of a mass shooting attacker: immortality
Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist who is chairman of The Forensic Panel, a practice in New York City, has worked on mass-shooting cases for many years and shared some general thoughts about these kinds of incidents:
“Mass shooting cases have the common motive of an attacker seeking immortality. Each of the attackers have different degrees of paranoia and resentment of the broader community. Some are so paranoid that they’re psychotic. Others are paranoid in a generally resentful way but have no significant psychiatric illness. But you have to hate everyone in order to kill anyone. The threshold that the mass shooter crosses is one in which he decides that his righteous indignation and entitlement to destroy is more important than the life of any random person that he might kill.”
“This is why mass shooting are invariably, invariably carried out by people who have had high self esteem. They are people who had high expectations of themselves. It’s not at all surprising to hear about these crimes in people who either valued their own intelligence or their own career prospects at one time.”
“They’re people who are unfailingly unable to form satisfying sexual attachments and their masculinity essentially gets replaced with their fascination for destruction.”
“The overwhelming majority of folks who do this are male because of how, in our culture, masculine identity is so closely tied to the capacity to destroy.”
Making Sense of the Senseless
Professor Jack Levin at Northeastern University, studied numerous cases of mayhem that had occurred over a thirty-year period. He noticed common characteristics and motivational themes in all of them: 1. They all had experienced ongoing disappointment in life; 2. They all isolated themselves from the comforting support system of family and friends; 3. They all perceived themselves as victims of unfairness and undeserved mistreatment; 4. They justified the murder of those people “responsible” for their lot in life. To them, payback is everything – even that directed at society, in general. 5. Those that did not kill themselves or set themselves up for “death by cop,” willingly surrendered themselves because they had accomplished their mission of punishing society and exercising the power to inflict misery on others.
Recognition Through Violence
Opinion: Don’t Jump to Conclusions About the Killer
Audiences are never surprised by the journal of Mr. Harris. It’s hate-hate-hate all the way through. He was a coldblooded psychopath, in the clinical use of that term. He had no empathy, no regard for human suffering or even human life.
Mr. Klebold’s journal is the revelation. Ten pages are consumed with drawings of giant fluffy hearts. Some fill entire pages, others dance about in happy clusters, with “I LOVE YOU” stenciled across. He was ferociously angry. He had one primary target for his anger. Not jocks, but himself. What a loathsome creature he found himself. No friends, no love, not a soul who cared about him or what became of his miserable life. None of that is objectively true. But that’s what he saw.
It’s a common high school malady, taken to extremes. Psychologists have a simple term for this state: depression. That surprises a lot of people. Depressives look sad, but that is the view from the outside. Of course they’re sad; they’ve probably gone their entire day getting berated relentlessly, by the single person in the world whose opinion they hold most dear — themselves.
Psychologists describe depression as anger turned inward. When that anger is somehow turned around, and projected outward, watch out.
Dylan Klebold was an extreme and rare case. A vast majority of depressives are a danger only to themselves. But it is equally true that of the tiny fraction of people who commit mass murder, most are not psychopaths like Eric Harris or deeply mentally ill like Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech. Far more often, they are suicidal and deeply depressed.
http://forensicpsychologist.blogspot.com Aurora massacre: To speak or not to speak?
Monday, July 23, 2012
Sunday, July 22, 2012
psychology/motives
1. For understanding Holmes’ actions/psychology, I think this dissertation on Columbine is useful.
e.g. an excerpt:
”Ultimately Eric and Dylan create and share a mutually destructive worldview, a malignant psychic process that leaves them outside of consensus reality, but desperate to connect to someone somehow. By connecting with each other, the shooters feed each others delusions, creating an ideal supportive environment for the development of the idea that these two are chosen, divine, and predestined to wreak havoc on those around them.….
In reality, mass murder is a road that usually ends in isolation, incarceration and eventually execution. However in Eric and Dylan’s fantasy, mass murder leads to true love, happiness, and international fame.”
2. A random bit: Earlier, Holmes had been “heavily involved in his local Presbyterian church” and he might have visited a local church weeks before his shooting spree.
3. A few relevant bits about the general characteristics/motives of mass murderers. They’re often acting out of resentment. Some comments by Jack Levin, a criminologist with expertise in mass murderers, might fit in this case: “In almost every case the motive is revenge….Usually the killer has suffered from some catastrophic loss; it could be a girlfriend, a loss of a place in the university—assuming he’s a student or faculty. Either way, in his eyes, it’s catastrophic. It’s the trigger, the catalyst, what pushes him over the edge....Usually the final straw sets in motion the planning stages. Sometimes the catastrophic losses occur months before the shooting. It’s a precipitant that triggers the planning stage.” (But I’ll note that some of Levin’s other generalizations don’t seem to fit here). I’ll also note that the list of “Characteristics of Mass Murderers” on this slide (of this presentation) seems to fit Holmes extremely well. Another critical feature is that mass murder killings frequently/typically have a copycat element; mass murderers are frequently obsessed with (one or more) prior mass murder cases.
4. This video on key characteristics of mass murderers is worth watching. The San Diego psychiatrist being interviewed points out that Holmes, who grew up in San Diego, would likely have been affected by the 2001 Granite Hill and Santana High School mass shootings (Holmes would have been 13 at the time) – i.e. that those San Diego mass shootings would have left an impression.
Moreover, Columbine High School is only about 12 miles from where Holmes was living in Aurora. Moreover, the Columbine shooting, which occurred on April 20, 1999, was heavily in the news this year around the anniversary of the event. There were stories that a miniseries was being made about the Columbine shootings - articles such as “The Columbine Effect: Why Hollywood Is Keeping The Story Alive”. Columbine High School was put on lockout due to a bomb threat four days before the shooting anniversary. Etc. I doubt that the stories about the Columbine anniversary escaped Holmes’ attention, and this was occurring coincident with his academic meltdown and only weeks before he began purchasing guns and ammo. And, like Klebold and Harris, Holmes attempted to use explosives in addition to guns (rigging his apartment).
5. So I’m pretty convinced that Columbine and the San Diego shootings were influences. A few additional thoughts – but they’re much more speculative. I came across this posting by “Jimbo” from Colorado at a “High School Memes”“Make Your Own Meme” site for Columbine High School – a South Park-based graphic stating “If you didn’t want to get shot in the face you shouldn’t have bullied a psychopath”. However, “Jimbo” is a common moniker and it could even be an allusion to the South Park character Jimbo Kern – so my instinct is that it’s probably NOT by a post by James Holmes.
However – somewhat more interesting. There’s a strong association between the Joker and “Columbine”. Supposedly, Paul Dini was originally going to call Harley (the Joker’s girlfriend) “Columbine”. And there’s a great deal of Batman fan fiction in which Columbine is the Joker’s paramour (e.g. here). There’s even a MySpace page for “Miss Columbine” (excerpt: ”Columbine Jones is Harley Quinn's split personality but when Joker pushed her off of a 6 story high building something in Harley snapped. When she woke up in the hospital (not Akham for once.) she knew something had changed because in the room Harley didn't wake up. Columbine did….”). All of this apparently originates from reference to Italian comic theater – Harley Quinn is a play on Harlequin,whose lover is Columbine.
e.g. an excerpt:
”Ultimately Eric and Dylan create and share a mutually destructive worldview, a malignant psychic process that leaves them outside of consensus reality, but desperate to connect to someone somehow. By connecting with each other, the shooters feed each others delusions, creating an ideal supportive environment for the development of the idea that these two are chosen, divine, and predestined to wreak havoc on those around them.….
In reality, mass murder is a road that usually ends in isolation, incarceration and eventually execution. However in Eric and Dylan’s fantasy, mass murder leads to true love, happiness, and international fame.”
2. A random bit: Earlier, Holmes had been “heavily involved in his local Presbyterian church” and he might have visited a local church weeks before his shooting spree.
3. A few relevant bits about the general characteristics/motives of mass murderers. They’re often acting out of resentment. Some comments by Jack Levin, a criminologist with expertise in mass murderers, might fit in this case: “In almost every case the motive is revenge….Usually the killer has suffered from some catastrophic loss; it could be a girlfriend, a loss of a place in the university—assuming he’s a student or faculty. Either way, in his eyes, it’s catastrophic. It’s the trigger, the catalyst, what pushes him over the edge....Usually the final straw sets in motion the planning stages. Sometimes the catastrophic losses occur months before the shooting. It’s a precipitant that triggers the planning stage.” (But I’ll note that some of Levin’s other generalizations don’t seem to fit here). I’ll also note that the list of “Characteristics of Mass Murderers” on this slide (of this presentation) seems to fit Holmes extremely well. Another critical feature is that mass murder killings frequently/typically have a copycat element; mass murderers are frequently obsessed with (one or more) prior mass murder cases.
4. This video on key characteristics of mass murderers is worth watching. The San Diego psychiatrist being interviewed points out that Holmes, who grew up in San Diego, would likely have been affected by the 2001 Granite Hill and Santana High School mass shootings (Holmes would have been 13 at the time) – i.e. that those San Diego mass shootings would have left an impression.
Moreover, Columbine High School is only about 12 miles from where Holmes was living in Aurora. Moreover, the Columbine shooting, which occurred on April 20, 1999, was heavily in the news this year around the anniversary of the event. There were stories that a miniseries was being made about the Columbine shootings - articles such as “The Columbine Effect: Why Hollywood Is Keeping The Story Alive”. Columbine High School was put on lockout due to a bomb threat four days before the shooting anniversary. Etc. I doubt that the stories about the Columbine anniversary escaped Holmes’ attention, and this was occurring coincident with his academic meltdown and only weeks before he began purchasing guns and ammo. And, like Klebold and Harris, Holmes attempted to use explosives in addition to guns (rigging his apartment).
5. So I’m pretty convinced that Columbine and the San Diego shootings were influences. A few additional thoughts – but they’re much more speculative. I came across this posting by “Jimbo” from Colorado at a “High School Memes”“Make Your Own Meme” site for Columbine High School – a South Park-based graphic stating “If you didn’t want to get shot in the face you shouldn’t have bullied a psychopath”. However, “Jimbo” is a common moniker and it could even be an allusion to the South Park character Jimbo Kern – so my instinct is that it’s probably NOT by a post by James Holmes.
However – somewhat more interesting. There’s a strong association between the Joker and “Columbine”. Supposedly, Paul Dini was originally going to call Harley (the Joker’s girlfriend) “Columbine”. And there’s a great deal of Batman fan fiction in which Columbine is the Joker’s paramour (e.g. here). There’s even a MySpace page for “Miss Columbine” (excerpt: ”Columbine Jones is Harley Quinn's split personality but when Joker pushed her off of a 6 story high building something in Harley snapped. When she woke up in the hospital (not Akham for once.) she knew something had changed because in the room Harley didn't wake up. Columbine did….”). All of this apparently originates from reference to Italian comic theater – Harley Quinn is a play on Harlequin,whose lover is Columbine.
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