Jasmine McLendon Instructor: Malcolm Campbell English 1102 24 March 2014 How Society Creates Monsters Out of the

Mentally Ill Does an individual who suffers from a mental illness snap only because of their condition, or is it the inordinate amount of pressure society puts on them that triggers their condition to its highest point causing them to snap? According to Merriam-Webster, snapping means to pass from one form, state, or level to another. Are these people really evil mass murderers whose only purpose is to kill, or has society shaped them into the murderers they became? Societys pressures can include family problems, school problems, peer problems, and problems within themselves. After several years of seeing mass murders and significant events on the news, I have come to the conclusion that this is a serious topic. People need to be made aware of this topic in order to avoid certain situations that could lead to a person with a mental illness snapping. According to John Fund, an American political journalist, in the National Review, a study by Mother Jones magazine found that at least thirty-eight of the sixty-one mass shooters in the past three decades displayed signs of mental health problems prior to the killings. What is a mass murderer? The free dictionary by Farlex defines a mass murderer as, a person who kills several or numerous victims in a single incident or a serial killer. So in all reality, those who kill many at a time are mass murderers but we have to look at why they did this and the pressure that was placed upon the individual such as a mental illness. 79% of recent mass shootings since 2011 attributable to history of mental illnesses (Fusion Center). Out of 14 mass shooting incidents that

occurred between 2011 and 2013, only three of the murderers had no history of mental illness (Fusion Center). According to the National Institute of Mental Health, research has shown that mental disorders are brain disorders. Evidence has shown that they can be related to changes in the anatomy, physiology, and chemistry of the nervous system. When the brain is unable to effectively coordinate the billions of cells in the body, many aspects of life can be affected. A gene is a segment of DNA that contains codes to make proteins and other important body chemicals. DNA also includes information to control which genes are expressed and when, in all the cells of the body. Throughout our lives, genes can be affected by the environment. In medicine, the term environment includes not only our physical surroundings but also factors that can affect our bodies, such as sleep, diet, or stress. After reading this paragraph, center your focus on the terms environment and stress because these key words support the claim that pressures/stress present in ones environment can highly impact the brain. On July 20, 2012, James Eagan Holmes, dressed in tactical clothing, entered a movie theatre and killed twelve people and injured seventy others using tear gas grenades and multiple firearms. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disorder that affects about 1.1% of the U.S. population eighteen and older in a given year. People who suffer from this disease are often paranoid and they hear voices. Also, according to Time Health & Family, people with schizophrenia are nearly twenty times as likely to kill as people unaffected by the disease. He was also diagnosed with dysphoric mania. This mental illness consists of major depression alternating with episodes of hypomania. Dr. Arnold L. Lieber, MD., a psychiatrist who studies the bipolar spectrum of mental illnesses, says that These

patients are frequently resistant to standard antidepressant therapies, and sometimes their conditions are worsened by drug treatment with antidepressants. Aurora had been suffering from major stress due to his studies at the University of Colorado. According to Ann Coulter, an American conservative social and political commentator, writer, syndicated columnist, and lawyer, news reports and court filings document that Holmes told his psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, that he fantasized about killing "a lot of people," but she refused law enforcement's offer to place Holmes under confinement for 72 hours. Fenton ended up dropping Holmes as a patient, the university asked him to leave campus after threats he had made, and people who knew he was troubled just pushed him away. So do we blame Aurora for his actions, or do we blame the pressures society overwhelmed him with and the conditions he suffered from due to his mental illnesses? On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza shot twenty children and six adult staff members in a mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He had also killed his mother before leaving his home to commit the mass murder. Lanza then killed himself. The twenty year old suffered from Aspergers Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism. This mental illness can lead to difficulty interacting socially, repeated behaviors, and clumsiness. According to his biography, his classmates described him as fidgety and deeply troubled. Could family issues such as his parents divorce years before have caused the disease he suffered with to worsen, or was he just a young kid who allowed stress to cause him to kill? On September 14, 1989, in Louisville, Kentucky, Joseph T. Wesbecker entered his former workplace and killed eight people and injured twelve before committing suicide. Wesbecker suffered from maniac depression, a bipolar disorder in which a person has periods of depression, and periods of being extremely happy or being cross or irritable. The disease is also

characterized by pathological mood swings from mania to depression. Wesbecker went through a divorce and bitter battle over custody of his two sons. He lost the battle which pressured him even more than what was already on him. He had admitted himself to hospitals to seek psychiatric treatment. After his job was sold and the management changed, he complained about stress and undue pressure. He grew hostile towards the new management and complained many times but was declined. He began buying several weapons some of which he used in the mass murder. Do we blame Wesbecker for his actions, or do we blame the family and job issues he faced that may have triggered his mental illness to reach a whole different level? On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, shot and killed thirty-two people and wounded seventeen others in two separate attacks at the university before committing suicide. Cho suffered from anxiety disorder, a mental health condition in which a person is often worried or anxious about many things and finds it hard to control this anxiety. Virginia Tech was prohibited from being told about Cho's mental health problems because of federal privacy laws. According to the Mental Encyclopedia, stress is caused by an existing stress-causing factor or stressor while anxiety is stress that continues even after the stressor is gone. Cho had received therapy and special education due to his condition. He was also ordered to attend treatment. Even with treatments and therapy, Cho still managed to commit a mass murder. So do we fault him, or the conditions that go along with anxiety? In the United States, there are people who dont believe that societys pressures cause the mentally ill to snap. They believe that the mentally ill are born with a mind of violence and that mass murder is something that is going to happen regardless. According to Harvard Medical School, Public opinion surveys suggest that many people think mental illness and violence go hand in hand. In 2006, a national survey found, that 60% of Americans thought that people with

schizophrenia were likely to act violently toward someone else, while 32% thought that people with major depression were likely to do so. After reading a fact sheet from the Mental Health Reporting, I found that the vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent. "People with psychiatric disabilities are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent crime (Appleby, et al., 2001). People with severe mental illnesses, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or psychosis, are 2 times more likely to be attacked, raped or mugged than the general population (Hiday, et al.,1999). Also, in todays society, the public is misinformed about the link between mental illness and violence. Harvard Medical School reports that investigators found that people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia were more likely to a modest but statistically significant degree to commit assaults or other violent crimes when compared with people in the general population. Differences in the rates of violence narrowed, however, when the researchers compared patients with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia with their unaffected siblings. This suggested that shared genetic vulnerability or common elements of social environment, such as poverty and early exposure to violence, were at least partially responsible for violent behavior. Doesnt this prove that the mentally ill are not born violent but what they are exposed to in their environment is what causes them to snap? I argue that we should not fault the mass murderer but the pressure placed upon them that contributes to the mental illness that they are already trying to cope with. Yes, they are born with genetic mutations, but research has shown that there is no direct link between mental illness and violence. The evidence proves that environmental issues and what the individual is exposed to--in many cases societys pressuresis what causes their violent acts. We can also blame those who knew that these individuals were on the verge of snapping but did not take major actions that could have avoided the mass murders. If more people in the U.S. are not made

aware of this, they will continue to stigmatize and brush off the things that contribute to a person with a mental illness snapping because they think treatment and therapy will solve the problem when from what we have seen so far, is not the case.