Category: Social Psychology

NY Times: What are the real warning signs of a mass shooting?

A tree in the desert outside of Tamchy, Kyrgyzstan. 15 September 2007. Author: Vmenkov. Licensed under GNU FDL 1.2.

While some mass shootings are committed by people with diagnosed mental illnesses, a life crisis is a better predictor of violence, researchers say.

Selected excerpts:

…mental illness is not a useful means to predict violence. About half of all Americans will experience mental health issues at some point in their lives, and the vast majority of people with mental illness do not kill.

“Do you or do you not have a mental health diagnosis?” said Jillian Peterson, a co-founder of the Violence Project, a research center that has compiled a database of mass shootings from 1966 on and studied perpetrators in depth. “In many cases, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not the main driver.”

Instead, many experts have come to focus on warning signs that occur whether or not actual mental illness is present, including marked changes in behavior, demeanor or appearance, uncharacteristic fights or arguments, and telling others of plans for violence, a phenomenon known as “leakage.”

This focus is far from perfect — it can be exceedingly difficult to weed out serious threats from many more that are idle, impetuous or exaggerated. But the warning signs approach has benefits: It can work even when the mental health system does not, and it sidesteps the complaint that blaming mass shootings on mental illness increases negative attitudes and stigma toward those who suffer from it.

“When someone treats you like a person when you don’t even feel like a human, it’ll change your entire world.”

Aaron Stark. From “I was almost a school shooter,” TEDxBoulder, June 26, 2018.

Crisis can be triggered or exacerbated by mental illness, but also by loss of a job, a breakup, divorce, death or other events. The mother of the Parkland [Florida] gunman died three months before he carried out his attack at the high school, from which he had been expelled.

This suggests that potential violence can be averted. In a TEDx talk called “I Was Almost a School Shooter,” a man named Aaron Stark recounted how a friend’s simple invitation to watch a movie helped divert him from his plans. “When someone treats you like a person when you don’t even feel like a human, it’ll change your entire world,” he said.

In interviews with perpetrators, Dr. Peterson said, “We would always ask, is there anything that could have stopped you? And they would always tell us, yes.” She added, “I think one of them said probably anyone could have stopped me, but there was just no one.”

— from Dewan, S. (2022, August 22). What are the real warning signs of a mass shooting? The New York Times.

Read the full article

Kathryn Bond Stockton on gender and masculinity

“There are so many different things interacting with that thing we falsely isolate as ‘gender.’ What is the interaction of those elements that produces either a sense of ease, or a sense of concern and anxiety?

“Part of what we’re seeing in our culture is tremendous anxiety surrounding boys, young men, and I have to imagine that that doesn’t really end later in life. Sometimes later in life we all kind of get used to things and we chill. But I have a feeling that these things do remain of concern because they are so extremely bounded. And that’s where, if you watch something like Fight Club, or watch other cultural products, they get at the strange way that white men in particular sort of painted themselves into a corner. Masculinity becomes a whole series of things you can’t do.”

— from The Ezra Klein Show – Gender is complicated for all of us. Let’s talk about it. (2022, August 5). The New York Times.

Ezra Klein and Jenny Odell on taking our attention and technology seriously

People using phones whilst walking.
1 October 2018. Author: Rawpixel. Licensed under CC0 1.0.

“In ‘How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,’ [visual artist Jenny] Odell suggests that any theory of media must first start with a theory of attention. ‘One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious,’ she writes.

When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention — what we choose to notice and what we do not — are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention.

“I think Odell frames both the question and the stakes correctly. Attention is contagious. What forms of it, as individuals and as a society, do we want to cultivate? What kinds of mediums would that cultivation require?

“This is anything but an argument against technology, were such a thing even coherent. It’s an argument for taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken, for recognizing, as [media theorist Marshall] McLuhan’s friend and colleague John M. Culkin put it, ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter, they shape us.’”

— excerpted from Klein, E. (2022, August 7). I didn’t want it to be true, but the medium really is the message. The New York Times.