Our peculiar sickness
There’s a really interesting book excerpt in the New York Times Magazine on the globalization of western-style mental illness. Most fascinating is the observation that mental illness is not constant across time and space. Different cultures have different kinds of mental illness, as do different periods of history.
If there is a manifestation of insanity peculiar to the west in the 20th-21st century, I wonder if it might be the phenomenon of public, apparently random shootings. Wikipedia has a list of all known school shootings around the world. Most took place in the west and appear to have started in the 1960s. Likewise, workplace shootings started in the 1980s in the west, which is how the expression “going postal” entered the vernacular.
I think authorities usually write these incidents off as “copycat” shootings – people imitating each other. But that just begs the question: How large a role does imitation plays in the manifestation of mental illness?
And why do the mental illnesses of so many westerners get expressed through random violence?
January 12th, 2010 at 20:55
When a grown man kills a bunch of defenseless people with a gun and then kills himself before he can be stopped/caught/punished, that is cowardice and evil, not mental illness at work.
To paraphrase Sheldon Koppel, labeling someone with a mental illness is at it s worst a form of social control. Today, it’s used for that, and as a way to make excuses for extremely terrible behavior. Koppel was right, and America is dead.
January 13th, 2010 at 08:13
I think it dates back before the 1960’s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvestre_Matuschka
January 13th, 2010 at 08:21
Yeah, it does. The Bremen school shooting took place in Germany in 1913.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremen_school_shooting
While I understand there are all sorts of problems with sampling and record keeping, it just appears to have picked up after the 60s, spreading like you might expect a disease to do. Also, I think it’s significant that it wasn’t till the 1980s that the figure of the crazy, disgruntled, gun-totting employee entered the popular imagination.
January 13th, 2010 at 10:08
I’m still not buying the spreading mental disease idea. I think its just werther effect where increased public knowledge is the issue.
Take a look at this:
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/medical/bioethics/nyspi/material/MediaContagionAndSuicide.pdf
Your thoughts?