January 07, 2013
December 21, 2012
The Male Active Shooter—Bad Genes, Dangerous Chromosomes?
Continuing on with a series of parallels, today's blog suggests a possible Y Chromoome connection when talking about incidents like the recent Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Adam Lanza was a male, age 20. Is there a link here? Why do all mass shooters seem to be males? Anne Speckhard gives us her insight in today's guest blog:
Recently on CNN a Dr. James Fallon showed the brain scans of
psychopaths explaining that the amygdala, orbital cortex and other brain areas
of psychopaths are not showing as much activity as in so-called “normals”. Dr. Fallon went on to explain that genetic
combinations known to be associated with aggressiveness may be dangerous if
combined with brains that operate in this manner, but then surprisingly
admitted that one of the scans we were looking at was of his own brain and that
he also has the “bad genes” for aggression.
But Dr. Fallon is hardly a psychopath, (AP
Photo/LM Otero) and he is not telling us that a
predisposition to violence is genetically predetermined—only that psychopathic
brains do operate differently (according to brain scans) but others who have
similar “different” operating systems are not necessarily criminal
psychopaths. According to Dr. Fallon, it
takes a third ingredient—childhood abuse—to bring the whole thing together.
The other day, I received a blog post from a respected writer, Cara Hoffman, claiming that nearly all those who rape, carry out mass shootings and domestic assault against women carry a Y chromosome (http://www.carahoffman.com/blog.htm?post=888921) And Cara reminds us that looking into the psyches of violent males is a much-needed exercise if we want to put an end to such violence.
So is it a combination of bad genes and dangerous chromosomes that creates a foundation for mass shooters?
Cara’s comments made me reflect on the fact that in my past ten years studying and interviewing terrorists, and now in observing the latest investigative news as it unfolds on the Sandy Hook Elementary school shootings, I have never come across a female active shooter, the word experts in my profession use to label the person who goes on a shooting rampage with the intent to suicide or be killed in “death by cop”.
However, females do engage in terrorism. They strap on bombs and go into crowded marketplaces, theaters, restaurants and nightclubs to explode themselves. They also hijack planes, use rifles to shoot their enemies and place bombs for later detonation after they’ve slipped away, as well as engage in all the other roles of terrorism support, such as acting as couriers, fundraisers, propagandists and the like. But unlike many of the male suicide terrorists I’ve studied—particularly male Palestinians—who frequently pick up guns to go on a killing spree during which they intend to be killed, I’ve never come across a case of a female being an active shooter. When it comes to the school shooters here in the U.S. and abroad, none, to my knowledge, have been women.
Why is that?
Is active shooting—mass killing with a gun—just a male thing? And what makes a young man pick up a semi-automatic rifle and go on a shooting spree?
Terrorists are equipped by a group with a political goal, who have engaged and convinced him of a violent activity either through the bonds of brotherhood, ideology, or by playing upon any combination of his emotions relating to discrimination, marginalization, frustrated aspirations, humiliation, bereavement, traumatization – often from living in, or being shown extremely disturbing events from a conflict zone, and desire for revenge. He’s become a believer that political violence is the way to address his or other’s grievances. With a sending group whose ideology justifies killing civilians and some social support—either within the group itself or even more powerful, surrounding it, active shooting is glorified and allows him to make a violent choice.
Psychache, the term coined by suicidologist Edwin Shneidman who studied normal suicide, is the overwhelming psychic pain that propels normal people into seeking suicide as an escape. And I found the same extreme anguish in terrorists who suicide in the name of their group. From the group’s perspective, his psychic pain makes him a useful weapon to expend on behalf of their political cause. If he’s following the militant jihadi ideology, his group has convinced him that paradise is just a bullet away.
But what about the active shooter who acts alone and has no group, ideology or social support for his actions? Not living in a conflict zone, he can’t claim he’s razing down innocent children in revenge for the death of his own, that his home or resources have been taken from him, that he lives under occupation, or that he’s fighting for freedom by, as he may claim, the only means he has: attacking civilians. He is not suffering from active posttraumatic stress disorder, in which he experiences full sensory flashbacks of violent episodes that leave him in gut-wrenching agony, his heart aching with survivor’s guilt over having made it when others did not, his nerves frayed to their core with the constant coursing of neurotransmitters screaming out their painful message of high alert. He’s not in a war zone; he doesn’t have PTSD.
Or does he?
So easily in our culture, we forget that a lot of our children living right here in the U.S. grow up in active conflict zones. It’s just not a declared war. Instead it’s a tough neighborhood or maybe the carried memories of war far away, for refugees. Even many affluent homes are conflict zones to those trapped inside. Many homes, schools, churches, shopping malls. and neighborhoods are not the safe havens we wish them to be, but places where nice young boys get preyed upon by molesters, rapists and others who leave their young victim with a silent but throbbing scar on his soul. And if the child already has a genetic predisposition or an innate inability to process difficult emotions being victimized can leave him extremely vulnerable to acting out aggression. As Dr. Fallon warned—the perfect storm begins brewing.
And boys are taught from early on to be silent about their bad experiences. Just this year one grown man I was working alongside suddenly blurted out to me that he’d been raped in the men’s room as a young boy. I was amazed at his courage to tell and asked him how long he’d carried it as a secret. How many men carry such a deep secret buried inside?
When we are wondering if it’s something about chromosomes or bad genes, let’s not forget to wonder what does watching a father hit his mother do to a young boy trying to grow into manhood? It is totally emasculating and confusing; he doesn’t know who to identify with: his strong father who is beating the crap out of his mother or his mother who he wishes to save at an age when he finds he is as powerless as her in the face of his father’s violence. Ultimately, the victims of domestic violence, assault and molestation suffer the same symptoms as someone coming from a war zone: constant painful flashbacks, painful bodily arousal, guilt, anger, shame—all forms of devastating and psychologically overwhelming psychic pain. We underestimate how many young boys are raped and how many grow up in violent neighborhoods and homes. And guess what? Certain brain areas in traumatized people don’t light up on brain scans the same way they do in normals. So is it bad genes, deficient chromosomes or the experiences of young men in our society that is the problem? Or the combination of all three?
When a young boy is carrying traumatic experiences on his soul, what is he to do with it? The anger boiling inside, the shame seeping into every crevice of his cells, the complete powerlessness to address it because “boys aren’t supposed to cry” and men don’t get raped or assaulted, and the message that you must be powerful and act like a man, are too strong to override to find help.
And after blocking any normal expression of trauma or grief for those who have been wounded, what do we model to our young men about solving problems? There’s the video game that trains him for steady dopamine hits, doling out the pleasure neurotransmitter every time he “lights someone up”. And we know that when dopamine is engaged to internally medicate painful experiences, there’s no end to the addictive need, causing the brain to require more intense hits of the same experience to give the same level of dopamine high. We know many of our youth are hooked on violent computer games. And then there’s the movies and television shows that glorify the violent gun-toting hero who solves all his problems and expresses all his emotions with a gun. Most boys who watch violent movies and play these games don’t ever act out on these models, and most who are abused keep the abuse sealed painfully inside—but the rare one that snaps—given the ready availability of assault weapons in this country—cause unbelievable carnage.
Girls who grow up with violence don’t have these models. They are allowed to cry and to ask for help. And we know from research looking at young girls’ responses to trauma compared to boys, that girls are much more likely to dissociate whereas boys are more likely to act out. The latest active shooter we are being told already suffered from a mental disorder – Asperger Syndrome – that alone should not have led to violence. However we are also being told he emerged from playing video games, to smash his hard drive up before he shot his divorced mother and going on his killing rampage. For me there’s a possible message in that—and it’s not about bad genes or the Y chromosome.
Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatr at Georgetown University Medical School. She is the author of Talking to Terrorists: Understanding the Psycho-Social Motivations of Militant Jihadi Terrorists, Mass Hostage Takers, Suicide Bombers & “Martyrs”. Her book can be found on Amazon.
For more information Anne please see her website: www.AnneSpeckhard.com
December 20, 2012
What Makes an Adam Lanza?
Given the recent Sandy Hooks Elementary School shootings, I wondered about the differences and parallels between mentally disturbed individuals (clear mental health issues) vs. serial killers (brain trauma and/or abuse) vs. terrorists (like suicide bombers). I am particularly interested in the call for gun control, in this case and cases that are similar in nature. I am not convinced this is (AP Photo/Jessica Hill) gun control issue. Maybe Adam would not have killed had he not had immediate access to guns, but would that have deterred him completely or would the thing that snapped inside him act out in other horrific ways? Read Anne's blog post below - I look forward to your comments.
What Makes an Adam Lanza?
Adam Lanza was not a terrorist in the strict definition of the word: he had no political cause, but he terrorized a community and a nation and committed a heinous crime, reminding many of the Beslan School hostage-taking in which three hundred and thirty innocents were killed.
I've been studying terrorism for ten years–interviewing terrorists, their family members and close associates, and their hostages – including those held in Beslan – and I find there are a lot of parallels between terrorism and mass shooting sprees. For one, terrorists are made, not born. The same is true for mass shooters.
In the case of terrorism, I found that there is a "lethal cocktail" of terrorism that takes vulnerable individuals and moves them along the terrorist trajectory to enact violence. A vulnerable terrorist recruit rarely acts alone; they need a group, an ideology and social support to propel them into violence. The group equips them, the ideology justifies violently killing civilians and social support makes it more attractive to engage. The individual acts out of his own pain, which resonates with the other three ingredients.
Mass shooters, as opposed to terrorists, often do act alone, but let us not deceive ourselves that they are in fact lone actors. Just like terrorists, there is a group that equips them—it's the local gun store, gun fair, a friend or family member, or any place where they can quickly and easily obtain means to kill– once they have crossed the mental line where killing others becomes acceptable. And the ideology and social support that justifies mass shootings here in the U.S.–in the demented minds of those who carry them out–is the cultural milieu of violent movies, computer games, even family and cultural socialization that models for troubled young men to refrain from expressing their emotions and asking for help ("big boys don't cry") and glorifies using gun violence as a means to express pain and solve problems. (See the latest action movie, television show or computer game where the hero shoots his way into the arms of the loving girl). Social support also exists in the instant and overwhelming media attention that mass shooters are guaranteed to get by expressing their painful outrage, despair, or whatever other sick idea they wish to get across through murder.Like terrorists, mass shooters are vulnerable individuals and usually highly troubled. A young man does not pick up a semi-automatic rifle and go into a school, workplace or public gathering and shoot as many people as possible for no reason. In the case of shooting school-age children, the perpetrator may highly identify with the age of his victims, symbolically killing himself at the age when he suffered sexual abuse or some other violence or humiliation which he has never gotten help with, doesn’t know how to get over, and is now expressing his outrage in killing others. Again we see emotions acted out–versus spoken and worked through –and violence used to try to wipe away pain. Or he may just be mentally ill and unable to contain or work through upsetting emotions and the gun provides him an outlet.
Terrorist groups know that when a vulnerable individual is in overwhelming psychic pain it is often not hard to attract him into a suicide mission – he wants to express that pain, will act in behalf of the group and seeks to exit out of this life as what he believes is a "hero" by following the militant jihadi ideology that promises instant access to paradise.
In the case of mass shooting incidents, the lone perpetrators are often not following any terrorist ideology and don’t believe their act will take them instantly to paradise, but they are in deep psychic pain. Their emotional pain is so overwhelming that they want to express their outrage and despair publicly unleashing a bloodbath that can only result in their death even if they don’t suicide. They have so little help for dealing with their anguish that it overwhelms any reasonable judgment, and they see death as their only viable exit. They are in a state of what suicidiologist Edwin Shneidman called “psychache”, which is the biggest predictor of suicide. But these actors will not simply suicide. They will kill others as they exit life, which is why our first responders now need to know how to act fast to take the suicidal murderer down and hopefully lowering his potential number of victims before he kills himself or suicides in “death by cop”. In either case the terrorist or the lone shooter is aiming at suicide (the terrorist may be calling it “martyrdom”) and we need to understand that. His psychic pain is overwhelming and he will express it until he is killed or kills himself – if he is equipped to do so.
So how do we prevent the next Adam Lanza?
We can tackle the problem from any number of avenues. The fact that in this country, vulnerable individuals have access to semi-automatic weapons at the time when their minds are filled with overwhelming pain and a desire to die—but not without first expressing their outrage, despair and emotional pain in a slaughter of others. The availability of guns makes certain that the "lethal cocktail" of mass shootings continues to exist and operate in our country. We have to come to grips with finding a balance between our freedoms and the need to protect our children and innocent civilians. And some element of that is likely going to have to be restriction of weapons that can commit carnage in seconds.
We have to do more to try to identify and intervene with troubled youth, giving help to young people who were abused, neglected or otherwise hurt and who are now searching for a way to resolve horrible inner pain without knowing where or how to get help. Truthfully this kind of psychological care is very costly, and at a time of fiscal challenges, it isn’t easy. But can we do any less when looking at the faces of the children we lost in Connecticut? We can and should provide good mental health interventions that identify and treat troubled youth – but will we? And will everyone that needs it, engage in accepting help? We can’t force troubled young people who have committed no crime into therapy.
We are also unlikely to do away with violent movies, television shows and computer games that model killing. But we do have to recognize that our entertainment media is contributing to a violent society and perhaps decreasing the empathy of children who grow up witnessing countless violent acts. We can and should limit more carefully what we let our children watch and play. And as consumers we should encourage the entertainment industry to create dramatic action films and games that are fun and engaging but do not glorify death and killing.
And there’s no escaping media that will cover every moment of any mass shooting. So there will always be a subsection of troubled young people who will want to pick up guns to act out their pain. And as long as there are guns easily accessible to them, some of those young people in overwhelming psychic pain will chose guns and mass shootings ending in suicide as their means of expressing outrage and their pathway out of agony.
We can give teachers guns, put a cop in every school and hope they stop the perpetrators before they shoot our children. And we can begin to identify, treat and intervene in the lives of abused, neglected and hurt young people to prevent them from becoming violent in the first place. But for those we miss and who fall through the cracks, we can ensure protection of the general population by creating strong controls on assault weapons. We can and must stop the next Adam Lanza.
Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School. She is the Author of Talking to Terrorists: Understanding the Psycho-Social Motivations of Militant Jihadi Terrorists, Mass Hostage Takers, Suicide Bombers & “Martyrs” For more information and to read additioanl material authored by Anne, please visit her website at Anne Speckhard
September 12, 2012
Anne Speckhard's Book "Talking to Terrorists" is out now!
One of the only experts to have such a breadth of experience – having interviewed over four hundred terrorists, their friends, family members and hostages – having visited, and even stayed overnight at times in the intimate spaces of terrorists’ homes, interviewing them in their stark prison cells or meeting them in the streets of their shanty towns, Dr. Speckhard gives us a rare glimpse of terrorists within their own contexts".