Mental Health, Jane Goodall, and Perspective On Tragedy
Posted On January 15, 2011
This is the portrait of a disordered mind. And now there are photos.
According to this article in the New York Times: The photos in question were turned over to the police by Walgreens, where Mr. Loughner had taken them to be developed.
In some of the photos he is holding the gun near his crotch, and in others, presumably shot in a mirror, he is holding the gun next to his buttocks, the police said.
When does mental health tip over from, “Boy, you so crazy!!” to “Man, you are seriously messed up!!”
How can we recognize the mental derangement that can lead to these outbursts? How can we stop them? And how do we as a people make sense of the heinous actions?
Why this is so hard
Part of our struggle to understand and make sense of this tragedy is the fact that mental health is a mystery to us. Some behaviors can seem crazy but aren’t, and some people who are completely insane may not display any outward appearance of their insanity.
Plus, it’s not like we have some answer to the problem. We can’t just say, well, if we did x, y, or z; if we all breast fed our babies or sent kids to Kum Bay Yah camp then pathological psychosis would not arise.
But none of that would solve the problem, because the inherent variability in humanity, in the genetic expression of the human animal is absolute. You can’t run from that, you can’t hide from it, and it will never not be there. We will always have some who are exceptional in a good way, most that are average, and some who are exceptional in a bad way.
When Jane Goodall observed chimps, she saw the same occasional pathology, in which a mother chimp systematically sought out and murdered the children of the group. Just as she observed in these primates, this pathology is a statistical inevitability of our biology.
Listen. There is no cure. There is only treatment. Treatment for the rouge behavior pattern (if you can catch it beforehand), and treatment for the rest of us after a tragedy like this happens.
What I Want You To Remember
It’s important to remember that this kind of event is the vast exception to the rule. There are 10,000 acts of kindness and decency and love that happen every second of every day. You don’t see it because there’s so much goodness in the world that it doesn’t stand out from the background. In fact, the very fact that you never hear CNN reporting on one person returning a lost wallet, or driving with courtesy, or giving a complete stranger in the grocery line in front of you two dollars because their purchase wasn’t large enough to use their credit card and they didn’t have any cash on them (this happened to me, actually).
You never see that. But it’s there, and this is the perspective that we must remember. We are by and large a good people, decent and well intentioned. That our steady stream of civility is gashed open by the gunshot of inevitable insanity is less an indictment of our world than a call to remember what is important, and rededicate ourselves of common purpose.
According to this article in the New York Times: The photos in question were turned over to the police by Walgreens, where Mr. Loughner had taken them to be developed.
In some of the photos he is holding the gun near his crotch, and in others, presumably shot in a mirror, he is holding the gun next to his buttocks, the police said.
When does mental health tip over from, “Boy, you so crazy!!” to “Man, you are seriously messed up!!”
How can we recognize the mental derangement that can lead to these outbursts? How can we stop them? And how do we as a people make sense of the heinous actions?
Why this is so hard
Part of our struggle to understand and make sense of this tragedy is the fact that mental health is a mystery to us. Some behaviors can seem crazy but aren’t, and some people who are completely insane may not display any outward appearance of their insanity.
Plus, it’s not like we have some answer to the problem. We can’t just say, well, if we did x, y, or z; if we all breast fed our babies or sent kids to Kum Bay Yah camp then pathological psychosis would not arise.
But none of that would solve the problem, because the inherent variability in humanity, in the genetic expression of the human animal is absolute. You can’t run from that, you can’t hide from it, and it will never not be there. We will always have some who are exceptional in a good way, most that are average, and some who are exceptional in a bad way.
When Jane Goodall observed chimps, she saw the same occasional pathology, in which a mother chimp systematically sought out and murdered the children of the group. Just as she observed in these primates, this pathology is a statistical inevitability of our biology.
Listen. There is no cure. There is only treatment. Treatment for the rouge behavior pattern (if you can catch it beforehand), and treatment for the rest of us after a tragedy like this happens.
What I Want You To Remember
It’s important to remember that this kind of event is the vast exception to the rule. There are 10,000 acts of kindness and decency and love that happen every second of every day. You don’t see it because there’s so much goodness in the world that it doesn’t stand out from the background. In fact, the very fact that you never hear CNN reporting on one person returning a lost wallet, or driving with courtesy, or giving a complete stranger in the grocery line in front of you two dollars because their purchase wasn’t large enough to use their credit card and they didn’t have any cash on them (this happened to me, actually).
You never see that. But it’s there, and this is the perspective that we must remember. We are by and large a good people, decent and well intentioned. That our steady stream of civility is gashed open by the gunshot of inevitable insanity is less an indictment of our world than a call to remember what is important, and rededicate ourselves of common purpose.
For more information: Click here to visit Will Clower’s website.
(Visited 3 times, 1 visits today)
About The Author
