but are nonetheless populated by prejudice... you know prejudice that word that implies a pre-judgement is in place to guide thinking

Mental illnesss accounts for less than 5% of social violence but 40% of the stories in the media about mental illness link violence and mental illness. Does that really seem fair and balanced, not to mention reflective of reality????????

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160606200849.htm

about the dangerousness of the mentally ill. Those myths shouldn't be the basis for default fingerpointing

Which is not to say that a person with a mental disorder couldn't do a violent act, but there should be care employed in the use of the broad brush to reinforce stereotypical thinking.

BTW, according to Skinner, the new rules for DU are intended to protect the mentally ill from stereotyped bigotry against mental illness.

has them for more than several decades waiting for someone to try to come and take their guns.

The narratives in the aftermath of killings have regular repeating themes, one of them is the search for causation, and it's typical for the narratives to make the perpetrators more 'them-like' than 'us-like.

It is of course supported by retrospective/backwards and selective, one could say cherry-picked search for information guided/influenced by prejudices which direct what is acceptable to the narrative and what isn't. Mental illness is broadly misunderstood and misrepresented in these narratives.

That's why the AP developed new formal style guidelines about reporting on mental illness which narrative writers should probably at least peruse if not follow: http://www.nab.org/ok2talk/documents/MHSA-002TeamUpReportingStyleGuide_Web(er)1.3.pdf

like saying because a person eats a piece of fruit they buy into the notion that all fruit is healthy because some nutritionist said so. Extreme, but you get the point.

which is the point about prejudice and stereotypical thinking about the dangerousness and, as discussed in replies below, the incompetence of persons with mental illness.

I don't think that is unusual, unnatural or out of the ordinary. Why would people be initially rational about something which is immediately emotionally troubling?

Nonetheless we need to appreciate how it effects us, how it can bend society not to be better, but to be more anxious and willing to erect barriers to healthy understanding and downstream not result in a truly safer society.

The primary psychological post-trauma need that demands attention is existential safety of us and people most like us. As minutes and hours stretches out into days the post-traumatic narrative turns to reduction or elimination of similar general threat(s) and their specific threatening components. At some late point anxiety and worry is exhausted and the arousal to deal with the anxiety abates, but the education of the event remains, waiting to be evoked when the protective lesson learned is needed.

In the immediate aftermath, people generally yearn for post-trauma narratives that quench anxiety. It follows that individuals so involved would yearn for narratives that address their specific personal anxieties. And that need in turn demands information that can define the threat in a manner that allows a person to resolve cognitive dilemmas about the risks they face.

That process cannot avoid and will engage pre-existing beliefs and personal propensities relative to their fears. It seems to do so in a manner that mostly reinforces the pre-existing beliefs and personal propensities that emerge in traumatic arousal. One person may blame a religion they see as 'other', another person may feel less protected by others and buy a gun, others may see guns as the thing to be feared.

It's the reinforcing of overly broad pre-existing prejudices that make me anxious. The turning of blameand concern to the violent propensities of mental illness, which is a very common feature of post-trauma narratives, is built upon misunderstanding and prejudice. The narrative broadcasts the seeds not so much of future safety but future prejudice which will be actualized as discrimination.

It happens insidiously, often cloaked as a gift of great advice, in venues in which it's unexpected to emerge. Here is a recent example from my life.

Rather than listening to the political harangues of left as well as right talk-radio, I work listening to a background music that is, according to the broadcaster's self-description family friendly, and suitable for work everywhere FM radio. It's a station widely played in offices and listened to by office workers, many of whom are women and mothers. The Monday after the Orlando massacre the female DJ turned her attention to a family issue... she promised her show would have a segement that addressed the question 'What do we tell the children in the wake of the barrage of news from Orlando?' To provide assistance with that she invited into her broadcast a personal friend who was/is an occupational therapist (not a child psychologist or a mental health professional of any type). She asked her friend directly--what should we tell the children about such an event? Without hesitation the occupational therapist friend said to every person listening within the 7800 square mile broadcast range of FM 98 that "children should be told that sometimes people are sick and do bad things".

Now if you had told the morning DJ as she sat down at her console that during her workday she was going to be instrumental in indoctrinating children with irrational fear of mental illness and persons with mental disorders, I am sure she would have called you a liar.

But that's the way prejudice is spread and reinforced in our culture. It isn't harmless, it's prejudicial. The discrimination generated by that stigma unfairly puts serious limitations on people's opportunities to overcome their challenges and reach for their fullest realization of life possible.

We need narratives that help us deal with trauma, narratives that help protect ours, our families' and neighbors' futures in a way that is honest and open to all the possible origins and causes of horrible human behavior that can and will come to our awareness. But we don't need nearly so much the broad brushed stereotypes that exploit misunderstanding, and reinforce fear that mislead our own behavior.

and take people with them. And for some all it takes is a recruiter who knows how to help the suicidal shift all their misery onto others.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/opinion/what-drives-suicidal-mass-killers.html?_r=0

ISIS appeals to people who feel unloved, who believe that they are not valued as they should be, who think their brilliance is not celebrated (they are smarter than everyone else, they believe), who think they are misunderstood by family, by society, who cannot fit in, who cannot adapt to work or cultural demands, who are horrible Muslims (but might feel guilty about it), who want some kind of "clean slate" or "redemption," and who are so angry, depressed, and feeling hopeless like they can never resolve their internal issues, that they are ready to burst. ISIS -- or DAESH, more appropriately -- gives them the purpose and suggests the methodology.

They're like that awful teen girl in the news recently, telling that poor kid to kill himself, egging him on....

Gee, if you didn't have to blow yourself up, wouldn't you agree it is a good idea to crush these infidels, here?


They get them to agree with that, they encourage them to take that on as a task, then they work on the "HOW" they might achieve that goal. Once the marks (and that is what they are, suckers) learn about how swell paradise is, they might be less resistant to martyrdom--especially when they see the upbeat glorification of other losers in multi-page glossy magazine articles, schmucks just like themselves.


The recruiting process will talk about martyrdom in a lighthearted way, like it's going to the prom, or something. They don't push religious DETAILS, but they do offer wholesale forgiveness to fuck-ups and even more if they achieve their martyrdom over Ramadan.

It's a process--they pick, pick, pick away at weak-minded, confused people, with a combination of amusing snark, affirmations that if they feel "X" way they are smarter than anyone else, and they create an environment where the disaffected want to hang out so they can have their attitudes confirmed.

They are diabolically clever in identifying and appealing to them.

Look at the shoe bomber--what a piece of work HE was!!

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that suicide terrorists are rational political actors, while suicidal rampage shooters are mentally disturbed loners. But the two groups have far more in common than has been recognized.

snip

In fact, we should think of many rampage shooters as nonideological suicide terrorists. In some cases, they claim to be fighting for a cause — neo-Nazism, eugenics, masculine supremacy or an antigovernment revolution — but, as with suicide terrorists, their actions usually stem from something much deeper and more personal.

There appears to be a triad of factors that sets these killers apart. The first is that they are generally struggling with mental health problems that have produced their desire to die. The specific psychiatric diagnoses vary widely, and include everything from clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder to schizophrenia and others forms of psychosis. The suicide rate was 12.4 per 100,000 people in the United States in 2010 (the highest in 15 years). Suicide is relatively rare, but it is rarer still in most Muslim countries. This is a very limited pool from which most suicide terrorists and rampage shooters come.

The second factor is a deep sense of victimization and belief that the killer’s life has been ruined by someone else, who has bullied, oppressed or persecuted him. Not surprisingly, the presence of mental illness can inflame these beliefs, leading perpetrators to have irrational and exaggerated perceptions of their own victimization. It makes little difference whether the perceived victimizer is an enemy government (in the case of suicide terrorists) or their boss, co-workers, fellow students or family members (in the case of rampage shooters).

The key is that the aggrieved individual feels that he has been terribly mistreated and that violent vengeance is justified. In many cases, the target for revenge becomes broader and more symbolic than a single person, so that an entire type or category of people is deemed responsible for the attacker’s pain and suffering. Then, the urge to commit suicide becomes a desire for murder-suicide, which is even rarer; a recent meta-analysis of 16 studies suggests that only two to three of every one million Americans commit murder-suicide each year.

The third factor is the desire to acquire fame and glory through killing. More than 70 percent of murder-suicides are between spouses or romantic or sexual partners, and these crimes usually take place at home. Attackers who commit murder-suicide in public are far more brazen and unusual. Most suicide terrorists believe they will be honored and celebrated as “martyrs” after their deaths and, sure enough, terrorist organizations produce martyrdom videos and memorabilia so that other desperate souls will volunteer to blow themselves up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/opinion/what-drives-suicidal-mass-killers.html?_r=0

Add to that the TENSION that is created when a person's actions, beliefs, or feelings do not meet the standards of their culture, or the expectations of their family/peers, and that article is a well-rounded meal.

and an unacceptable level of surveillance of private citizens. And implementing those tactics as a "solution" would have to assume that it could be done with competence to make a real difference. I'm not at all confident of that assumption. And I don't think Americans would stand for it.

Long term, of course, we need to treat mental illness better, raise children to not see violence as a solution to their problems, and add some tweaks to gun safety regulations that would somewhat inhibit access to guns for people who don't really have their shit together. (Let me know when we have a plan to do all that.)

Like natural disasters, drunk driving, and plain old human error accidents, these things are going to happen. We may have to accept that there will be some level of mass violence in our society.

forms (against the mentally ill) are tolerated and even encouraged.

Either bigotry is wrong all the time or its never wrong.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/125910848#post3