As I’ve said before, my feelings about the impact of right-wing rhetoric on Jared Loughner are that (1) we don’t know enough yet to say much of anything specific yet and (2) it seems like an awfully big coincidence that the first time an American Congressperson was shot on American soil, it happened to a Congressperson in a particularly contentious district after two years of unprecedented levels of vitriol were aimed at Democratic federal officials.
In Politico’s normally dreadful “Arena” feature, I saw this from noted psychologist and neuroscientist Drew Westen. I can’t quite make sense of all of it but it goes in the general direction of what I tend to think:
As a psychologist, I find it remarkable that we’re having this discussion at all, especially in light of both the weight scientists put on prediction – Gabby Giffords’ own interview at the Capitol during the election when she warned that Palin putting people like her in the crosshairs has “consequences”— and what we know about what neuroscientists call priming, the influence of a prior stimulus on a later reaction, usually unconsciously.
[….]If you create a culture of hate, replete with people brandishing weapons at political events, as they did last summer and are permitted to do in Arizona, eventually one of the 300 million people in this country will be influenced by your words to act. Did Palin literally mean to imply with her crosshairs that someone should kill Gabby Giffords? I don’t know her mind, nor what she consciously intended (which I am sure was metaphorical, not a call to action) and what she unconsciously intended (which none of us knows).
If you read the full post, Westen does take things a little farther than I would. But he is an actual well-known psychologist, not some hack who’s paid to pretend he knows things, like David Brooks or Joe Klein.
We’ve seen next-to-nothing in the media about the psychology of someone like Loughner and how he might or might not be influenced by larger societal dialog. We’ve heard people who know nothing about the topic say “he didn’t listen to talk radio”, but that doesn’t mean anything.
I’d like to hear a discussion of this involving clinical psychologists, not just “centrist” Village doucehbags. But we never get that with any topic, so I won’t hold my breath.
tofubo
a: we do not know what motivated him
b: we know he acted alone w/out outside influence
there can only be one to run with, let’s hope they pick one soon, i can only be told conflicting things to think for so long before the cognitive dissonance becomes an unbearable hum
Jeff Spender
I’m afraid that anti-intellectualism will spread to the point where anyone can be an armchair psychologist, and an actual psychologist will be seen as out of touch with the world.
My friend is a psychiatrist, and he has very strong opinions about this. He’s always ranting to me about anti-intellectualism and how it effects his work. I tend to take his word for it.
Jim, Once
And I’m embarrassed to say this was not something I had realized. The atmosphere of violence recently is so … atmospheric … that this obvious fact had escaped me. Thank you for pointing this out, Doug.
beltane
I am not a psychologist though I have worked with mentally ill people in the past. There are two observations I will make here: 1) There have always been people suffering from paranoia; and 2) The particular form a person’s paranoia takes is largely determined by their cultural environment. For example, a person who lives in fear of the Jewish conspiracy that implanted a microchip in his brain becomes fixated on this idea because he has been exposed to anti-Semitic language. The mental illness itself is neutral, the narrative it takes often is not.
Mike in NC
We have a “Culture of Hate” in this country?
But uber-wingnut Cal Thomas wrote today that “someone said” that Loughner was “left-leaning” and a “pothead”, so it seems like that’s got to be the final word, right?
The Dangerman
From what I have read, the Shooter had an interaction with Giffords at a Q&A and asked some whacked out question; I guess he didn’t like her answer. That event predated the Surveyors map, IIRC.
I’ll partially agree with Palin; ultimately, responsibility* ends at the individual(s).
*offer does not apply to Muslims
Viva BrisVegas
I think you’re being a bit optimistic there. I’ve always had a suspicion that psychology was as about as meaningful as phrenology and half as useful.
However it is true that psychologists should be able to slip seamlessly into the punditry gig, given that they are able to speak endlessly on complex subjects based on nothing more than their own vague guesses, assumptions and biases.
General Stuck
People that end up doing what Loughner did, don’t just snap and go homicidal crazy. It is likely something they fantasized about for a long time, until natural resistance to acting out their fantasy becomes overtaken by the compulsion. This is true in almost all of these cases, I suspect, and if and when that point is reached, it is reached through a series of decisions of rationalization that ultimately provides such an individual the self permission to act. And we are all creatures of stimuli from within and without that direct our thought processes into an internal narrative. And any one who thinks that someone like Loughner, who has glommed his pain and frustration onto politics, would not digest nasty and violent political rhetoric in his immediate surroundings is a fool, or liar.
Disclaimer – I never tire of not knowing what I’m talking about, and that goes quadruple for psychoanalysing mass murderers mostly from watching too many cop shows. And a freshman college psych class 30 years ago.
Mnemosyne
Greg Sargent had an interview a couple of days ago with a psychiatrist from Duke who specializes in how environment affects people with mental illness and asked him if the surrounding culture can influence delusional people.
Short version from the doctor: “Well, duh!”
Neldob
The NYT in an editorial on Monday wrote …”Capitol security officials said threats against members of
congress had tripled over the previous year , almost all from opponents of health care reform.” Priming seems to me to be the logical reason for these crimes. Why would the specific case of the Arizona assassination attempt and mass murder be any different?
beltane
@Mike in NC: That “someone said” must have been the trolls who appeared on DKos saying that Loughner was a liberal pothead.
Jager
In the 80’s the language used in business began to move into the realm of “let’s fuck those bastards up”, kick ass and take names”, “we are going to absolutely kick the shit out of the market”, “we’re going to dominate those motherfuckers”, etc. I hadn’t heard that kind of talk since I was in the army.
I’m not a wimpy guy and it irritates me that people who have never “kicked the shit” out of anything seem to love to talk like people who have. Like our politicians on the right like to talk about, shooting, bullseyes and taking people out.
electricgrendel
I think the talk of causation is a distraction. It does not matter if Loughner was driven to do this by Sarah Palin’s gun sights, or “second amendment remedies” blather. The fact is that that rhetoric, whether it caused this or not, has one end point: the tragedy in Arizona. Don’t want to put the nation through the horror of seeing a Congressperson shot in the head? Then stop fucking talking about shooting politicians. This type of tragedy is the end of the road for that type of rhetoric.
Pooh
@The Dangerman: this is accepting the framing of the false dichotomy of either we are responsible for our own actions in totality with no outside influence vs. the (obviously risible) notion that it’s not actually our fault. It really really really shouldn’t be as hard as some (basically, people who benefit from doing so) make it out to be to simultaneously hold these thoughts in our head:
A) we are ultimately responsible for our own actions
B) the environment around us has a great deal of influence over those actions
Being a moral actor means, in part, making the right choices. That doesn’t mean we should go out of our way to test that morality by presenting as many chances to make poor choices as possible.
sukabi
Hey John, someone broke the internetz on the “fact- check” thread…
ok, nevermind… the talk box is back.
Mark S.
@beltane: @Mnemosyne:
Yeah, why did he pick a politician? Why not an actor or a rock star? It seems an odd choice for a supposedly apolitical person (albeit a nutcase).
Mike G
A psychologist? That’s one of them pointy-headed “scientists”. Everyone knows science has a well-known librul bias.
You can’t expect authoritarians to listen to a non-rightard on the basis that they actually know more about the topic at hand. They’d rather listen to Flush, or O’Leilly or Beckkk bloviate about every topic under the sun, no matter how stupid. And the stupider the stuff they believe, the more they prove their ‘loyalty’. Because it’s not about acquiring accurate knowledge, it’s a dog pack ritual like following the lead dog around the neighborhood pissing on trash cans.
Jim, Once
@General Stuck:
I’ve been resisting commenting on the whole mental illness thing, especially as it relates to schizophrenia, in light of the fact that my daughter-in-law suffers from that disease. I have, whether I wanted to or not, learned a great deal in the past ten years or so about the disease. The most important thing I’ve learned is that in her case, at least, she is not consumed by her compulsions over a long period of time, but when it happens, they are certainly consuming, and utterly terrifying. When the voices, etc. are not present, you could not ask for a lovelier, more loving person … or a better mother and wife. I must always remind myself of this when she cycles downward. And remember later how extraordinarily difficult it is to know what to do when she goes through that cycle. And that causes me to recognize how terribly difficult it must have been for the Loughner family … and the hell they are going through now. So… my point. I don’t know. But this disease is so horrible, and most of the people who suffer it are so good when they are well.
Ecks
Ok, I have a PhD. in social (not clinical) psychology so I can translate what he’s saying… Short story he’s making an overall good point, though he’s in a bit of a rush to get it out, and it’s to a non-technical audience so he’s mangled the details a little bit.
When he talks about priming he’s referring to this large body of research on non-conscious influences on behavior. It turns out that if you flash words at people associated with the stereotype of old people (e.g., “old, grey, bingo, florida”) they actually walk measurably slower on average. If you prime people with aggressive stereotypes (African American, construction worker), they actually get slightly more aggressive, etc. There are a bunch of caveats and limits and twists on this now, but the bottom line is that
a) we really are influenced by these things “automatically” (i.e., can happen without awareness or volition)
b) we are only influenced very slightly. If you are already going to do something anyway, then this sort of thing might alter you within your normal range of behavior. If you’re primed with old people and walking anyway, then you might go a little slower than you would have, but you’re not going to shuffle down the hallway and then buy real estate in Florida.
What he’s really talking about here probably isn’t really priming so much as people being enormously susceptible to normative influence. When we aren’t quite sure how the world works, we pick up clues from others around us, and then we settle on that as our reality and sometimes even defend it quite strongly. For a really really trivial example, if you watch a so-so movie you’ve never seen before with a bunch of people who you think are similar to you, and they’re all laughing their heads off the whole time, you’ll tend to come to define the movie as funny, and maybe even get annoyed when someone slags it off the next day. If you watch the same movie with the same people and they sit there in stony silence, you’ll tend to think it sucked too. We tend to say “naw, that stuff doesn’t affect me,” but it really really does. This is why shows put in laugh tracks, for a tiny simulacrum of the same effect. The reactions of people around you really really do matter.
In the considerably more important case of a paranoid schizo (which this guy almost certainly is), you’ve got someone who has feelings of anxiety and persecution, who’s looking very hard to explain where these feelings are coming from, and will pretty much latch onto any crazy random theory that comes to them (though once they’ve latched onto one it’s often near impossible to shake them off it). If you take a paranoid guy, and keep telling him that the janitor is after him, and not just you, but lots of people keep telling him this, then most of us would become somewhat wary of the janitor, but the paranoid guy is likely to cease onto it, because it fits very closely with the way he experiences the world (i.e., feelings of persecution and being watched and controlled that he can’t really explain and really REALLY needs to find an explanation to latch onto).
So long story short, priming is a real effect, but not, technically speaking, exactly the right one to evoke here. That said, his overall point is exactly right. He called a fir a spruce, but really he’s right that it’s an evergreen forest.
General Stuck
@Jim, Once:
Yes, it is a terrible disease, and a disease it is. There hasn’t been any in my family, but major depressive illness is prevalent. But that is like a walk in the park compared with the trials of families stricken with schizophrenia. My best wishes to your daughter in law and family coping with it.
Ija
Am I anti-science if I think that unless we are talking about a psychologist who is actually treating Jared Loughner (in which case he can’t talk about it anyway), any insight from other psychologists would be almost as worthless as other speculations from pundits?
Martin
Not to offend anyone too much, but rational people who grow up in the US believe in different gods than rational people who grow up in India or Africa. They believe in these different gods with as much conviction as they believe that the earth is round, and the only reason they believe in one god vs another is the culture in which they are raised.
Now, we’re to accept that non-rational people are immune to this phenomena that is plainly obvious among rational people?
Jim, Once
@electricgrendel:
Not a religious person, but must say, amen. Amen.
Martin
@Ija: No, since it doesn’t need to be a specific illustration of how speech affected this individual, rather a generic illustration of how speech can affect all sorts of people.
PeakVT
As long as Loughner is the focus to the exclusion of all the other similar but less prominent incidents that have happened over the past two years, the influence of violent rhetoric can be debated. But take as a whole, I don’t how there can be any debate at all.
I think I have been more angered/disappointed by the media repeating the “both sides do it” b.s. than I have with the reaction of the imbeciles on the right. I don’t think our political culture will improve until a significant portion of the media starts adding factual context to its reporting.
gnomedad
@electricgrendel:
And another amen.
Jim, Once
@General Stuck:
Thank you … and to you and your family as well.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@electricgrendel:
I’m genuinely curious about causation though. As I said we don’t know enough now and I’m not claiming anything. But I’m curious what psychologists say, given that the two I’ve read say the atmosphere does make a difference. Maybe what they say will be bullshit. I’d just like to see this discussed further.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@Ecks:
Thanks.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@Ija:
Maybe, I don’t know.
EDIT: I mean maybe there’s no point in hearing from anyone but the psychologist who is treating him. But…I’m inclined to say there’s more point to it than to hearing what David Brooks and Joe Klein think about it all.
WyldPirate
@electricgrendel:
You really seem to be contradicting yourself here. First you dismiss the idea of priming as causation as a “distraction”, then you suggest that talk of the idea of shooting elected officials is the end result of such talk.
Perhaps, I’m mistaken, but it seems as if your point is not quite clear.
I would also argue that the absence of the suggestion of shooting public figures in public discourse is no guarantee that it won’t happen.
The idea of “priming” as a suggestive force for these acts of violence seems pretty damned valid to me. It’s not like there hasn’t been a shitload of violent acts over the past number of years where a connection HAS BEEN MADE to some of the crazy right wing rhetoric (the shooting in Knoxville at the church and at the Holocaust museum comes to mind just off the top of my head).
WyldPirate
@Martin:
I don’t mean to offend by saying this, but what is “rational” about believing in something there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of?
sukabi
does environment influence behavior… yes.
break it down from the family level… do abused children (either verbally or physically) act differently than children who are not abused?
Martin
@WyldPirate: Well, considering that not one human is immune to the phenomena, I think we have to accept that at least relatively speaking, it’s perfectly rational.
Pooh
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis: “causation” is an interesting term here, because we are essentially talking about actions that are already pretty rare, so anything that increases the incidence by what would be a small amount in another context seems massively amplified in this instance. For example, let’s assume there is a baseline of one horrific event X per annum but across the entire population, a certain kind of stimulus/environment what have you adds one more per year. This is a 100% increase! But if the same stimulus caused one more marginal “normal” murder per year, would anyone really notice?
Edit: I guess what I mean to say is that the “cause” is still a crazy person acting crazy, but the environment is possibly causing some small change in the aggregate behavior of the population of certain type of “crazy”
sukabi
@Ecks: sounds like a long involved way to describe “peer pressure”… the thing that all teenagers are warned about.
Jim, Once
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis:
Not sure how to phrase this, but my experience has been that the IMMEDIATE atmosphere is the most influential, so that if the individual does not have a person or family who can step in to deal with their delusions, then those delusions evolve into something terrifying. That said, the people who have had experience dealing with all this also have learned that, at a certain point, nothing they do, no matter what outer influences are at work, can have anything to do with the voices and the compulsions of the illness. And there is no question this is the illness Loughner is fighting.
The Republic of Stupidity
It’s been building for more than two years…
@Jim, Once:
Someone who’s opinion I trust said that Loughner was psychotic…
WyldPirate
@Martin:
I think that there are people “immune” to the suggestion of a god based on the lack of evidence. That’s why most atheists end up rejecting the notion of the “god” of their particular culture. They end up seeing that sort of a belief as a suspension of rationality.
Now if you are suggesting that more broadly very few people are immune to believing something in the absence of any evidence, I would come closer to agreeing with you.
Jim, Once
Throwing this out and running …
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-it-going-to-take-way-more-than-an-inconceiv,18816/
And Another Thing...
@electricgrendel: I agree as well.
I think that we should also assume that Fox watchers & other assorted righties are functioning (?) off of a data set that is significantly different than ours. I’d be very surprised if the average righty had ever seen Rep Gifford’s discussion of the crosshairs map on MSNBC, or the variety of violent imagery of Rep candidates, or the previous violence against liberals. Their info sources tend to filter those incidents out.
In addition, within their family or social circle gun & violence rhetoric may be so common that people cease to notice it, so when someone complains about it, they may have no memory of hearing it and don’t understand why anyone would be concerned by it.
Jim, Once
@The Republic of Stupidity:
I’d agree … does that contradict my opinion earlier?
Ecks
DougJ, just read your link. The guy is right, culture is enormously powerful.
Culture is the beliefs about what is right and good and just and how things should be done that are tacitly shared between people. In the US it’s culturally normative that when you meet a stranger and they extend their right hand, you should grasp it and shake it (but not for more than a few seconds), that it is not acceptable to walk into your neighbors house without knocking or announcing your presence, that it’s perfectly reasonable to have a gun in your house and receive bills for going to the doctor, and that snails are not edible. All of those things are not true in various other cultures, but in the US they’re just taken for granted. If you challenge them people will think you are odd or crazy or socially incapacitated. Culture shapes how we think and act.
It’s common in North America for young people to have dreams where they show up to exams and don’t know anything, and for people in some parts of Africa to dream about being chased around their hut by a goat. And when you establish a sub-culture which flirts with very violent themes, which nurtures grievances at length, sooner or later some marginal person is going to move those lines further out a little and shoot people.
Related point, there’s a guy who studies whether violent movies and video games make us more aggressive. The answer is that they do. In fact, the effect size of this is larger than the effect size that cigarettes have on causing cancer. That’s surprising to people. We don’t want to believe it, but he’s got lots of data – experimental, survey based, cross-sectional, real world, in the lab, you name it… and it’s consistent. Again, the right wing nurturing a culture of grievance with occasional violent ideation from its leading authority figures (and repeated by some – not all – of its listening public)… you’re ratcheting up the odds significantly that some person, perhaps one who struggles with mental illness, is going to take it far too far. Can you blame your grandma’s death on Philip Morris? Not per se. But you can blame a whole lot of cancer deaths in the aggregate on them.
Calouste
One thing to keep in mind that this was both an assassination attempt and a mass shooting. That is something that hasn’t happened before.
Why did Loughner target people gathering at a constituent event rather than say the community college from which he had been expelled? Typically mass shooters target people who they perceive have done them wrong.
Ecks
@sukabi: LOL. Good connection. You’re right, except it’s bigger than that. Peer pressure is about friends using normative compliance to get you to do something you possibly shouldn’t do. But normative compliance can also be everyone standing on the right on escalators, thinking something is funny with your friends and then realizing afterwards “you just had to be there”. It’s being upset when your date eats with their mouth open, it’s staring up into the sky to see what’s wrong when everyone else is. It’s why products write “9 out of 10 dentists agree” on their packages. It’s why blogs are sometimes captured by their readership, and why we all rapidly come to agree on what new words mean (especially when they’re cromulent).
It’s one of the primary forces in everyday human behavior. Peer pressure is just a pretty spectacular form of it ;)
WyldPirate
@Jim, Once:
It’s fucking sad that over the top satire from The Onion more closely describes the state of political discourse than our “legitimate” media and politicians.
I just wonder sometimes if we have finally jumped the shark as a culture or that we jumped it long ago but have always been fooling ourselves that we haven’t.
Tractarian
Right. The vitriol was specifically targeted at supporters of the stimulus and health care reform, such as Giffords. Also too, Giffords represented exactly 50% of the politicians on Palin’s hit list that weren’t voted out in November.
Given these facts, if we’re going to speculate (and we are), it makes more sense to speculate that right-wing hysteria did have something to do with Loughner’s motivation, rather than not.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Ecks: And if we were talking about music, movies, video games, gays getting married, etc. conservatives would agree that culture has a influence on us.
As with all things, IOKIYAR.
J. Michael Neal
@Ecks: You have managed to turn a mildly interesting thread into a fascinating one.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Jim, Once:
Not in a meaningful way…
Whatever was going on for Loughner, it was extremely severe and had tragic consequences…
The person who said he was psychotic is LCSW w/ many, many years of experience and married to a psychiatrist, which is why I trust her opinion…
I just googled schizophrenia and psychosis and the descriptions of symptoms and behavior was kinda similar…
Hallucinations… delusions… problems functioning socially…
I kinda think of schizophrenic as being episodic… it can come and go, like you described, and psychosis… it’s more ‘here to stay’…
The Republic of Stupidity
@Calouste:
Someone else pointed that out too…
It seems pretty evident that Loughner was gunning for Giffords first and foremost… AND… once he had accomplished that, he just starting shooting everyone and anyone he could…
Jim, Once
@WyldPirate:
Actually, I hope it’s right for me to say neither. The majority of people in this nation are not what the pundits portray, and are certainly not the Fox News watchers. I live with and teach hundreds and hundreds of us … and we really are not them. Maybe I’m ridiculously naive, even obtuse … but consider those who ran forward to save the victims of Loughren.
eemom
I posited a hypothetical the other day about what would have been the result if there had been “causation” as most people understand it — i.e., if the guy had a big blow up of Palin’s target map on his wall with the Giffords district circled in red, and left other written indications that yes, he was TOTALLY doing this because Sarah Palin told him to.
Granted, that would have been MUCH worse for Palin. She would have been not merely toast, but instant, burnt to a crisp toast. But let’s not go down that vaguely unsavory road.
The point is, “causation” could still be disputed, if less convincingly. Crazy is crazy. I don’t think even most of us really believe that Palin actually wanted anybody killed, and no actual sane person, even amongst her most rabid groupies, would have taken it that way. HE did, ONLY because he was crazy.
Her defenders would have just pressed harder on the John Hinckley analogy — i.e., she, like Jodie Foster, was just the fortuitous focus of a madman’s madness.
Jim, Once
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Yes, this is exactly right. Thanks for making the distinction.
Hawes
I’m +alot and too tired to summarize what I want to say, so I’ll self reference:
http://zombieland-nowbrainfree.blogspot.com/2011/01/historical-antecedent-of-jared-lee.html
We have seen this movie before, only then it was a minstrel show with Charles Guiteau in the lead.
PTirebiter
@WyldPirate: Actually I think The Onion was just paraphrasing what Dave Weigel said on Countdown this evening.
eemom
@Jim, Once:
I will take this opportunity to point out, just because hardly anyone ever does, that the common usage of schizophrenic to mean “split personality,” AFAIK is totally, grotesquely wrong — but people use it that way ALL the fucking time, especially emmessemmbots, and even including people who aren’t idiots, thereby perpetuating yet another common misconception about mental illness.
Jim, Once
@eemom:
I feel bad that I didn’t point out the same – thank you for doing so.
Martin
@WyldPirate:
Yes, more broadly. Almost everyone engages in some degree of magical thinking, whether it’s luck, or whatever. It’s subconscious and simply a component of our (and every other) culture.
Ecks
@Barb (formerly Gex): Boom. If I had more than one internet I’d give you my spare.
@J. Michael Neal: Thanks :)
@eemom: Right, nobody is accusing Palin of ordering an execution here. If so the debate would be over whether to put her on trial. The debate is over whether her, and the noise machine she is part of is however unknowingly playing with fire. Which leads us to today’s entry in the right wing dictionary:
“Responsibility: The overwhelmingly vital obligation of poor people to stop being poor. In no way pertains to actions of speech of wealth right wing leaders.”
EDIT:
@eemom: Yeah, this one is psychologists fault, I think, for going and changing the definition of the word after it had already seeped into the popular imagination. Split personality is now termed as a variety of “dissociative disorder” which is horribly unmemorable. No wonder people stick with the wrong meaning of “schizo”.
Jon Ames
Even if Loughner said “i was inspired by Sarah Palin”, wouldn’t he be some liberal plant? It doesn’t matter what he fesses up to or not.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Jim, Once:
Yer welcome…
And I suppose, given the results, whether Loghner was schizophrenic or psychotic is irrelevant…
As to the part the culture around him played in affecting his behavior, and even fueling it… I don’t see how it could not… like w/ the 580 shooter out here in the Bay Area, back in July… Byron Williams, the guy who got into a serious, serious shoot out w/ the CHP on a Saturday night whilst on his way to ‘kill teh libruls’… BIG fan of Glenn Beck, as I recall…
Jim, Once
It’s late here … and I’m caring for wild little grandchildren tomorrow. Night …
protected static
Anecdata alert! Speaking as the partner of an actual clinical psychologist, I gotta say – you’ll rarely hear from them. At least, you’re highly unlikely to hear any of the *ethical* ones, unless they’re commenting on broader, related issues, and not the specifics of a case – you know, taking the kind of perspective that’s death to TV ratings. Commenting (publicly and) directly on a case where you lack direct knowledge could be seen as a major ethical violation. As could commenting on a case where you *do* have direct clinical knowledge.
Uloborus
@Ecks:
I’ve been trying to explain this myself! Without getting too specific, there is way too much mental illness in my family, quite a lot of medical people, and my mother’s an ER psychiatrist. So this stuff is common family conversation.
Schizophrenics are susceptible to outside influences. Precedent or exhortation to violence makes them more inclined to be violent. And it’s subtle stuff – it’s not ‘Sarah Palin told me to kill her’, it’s him hearing people talking about second amendment solutions and radio personalities discussing the need for armed rebellion and on and on and it bends his thinking very slowly, increasing odds rather than specifically changing any one person’s behavior.
And it’s not just the mentally ill. Ask the freaking census workers. If you make anti-government violence a mainstream message you may not create widescale riots and murder, but you’re sure going to bump up the statistics.
The Republic of Stupidity
@eemom:
Yes…
Church Lady
@Ija:
Only in the same way that you would be anti-science for making fun of Bill Frist for “diagnosing” Terri Schiavo based on seeing a video.
MsSkwEsq
I am an attorney and have degrees in pychology and social psycology. I work with the seriously mentally ill both as criminals and disability clients (for many years). I have worked with extremely disturbed murders, sweet young service members, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, professors, judges – all types of people who have serious mental illnesses. There is NO DOUBT that the political hate climate on radio, tv, the Internet and in person has a major effect on people with delutional disorders, psychotic disorders, the antisocial/sociopath disorders. I see clients who tell me they heard Rush tell them the US is going to have a race war or Beck said Obama want to enslave whites, etc. During the campaign I had one of my clients placed in the hospital to avoid his going to an Obama rally out of fear of his behaviors. On 9-11 I was on a large psych in pt unit. The patients were just breaking down to the point that the hospital had to unplugged the TVs and engaged many of them in emergency therapy sessions. For the following year I saw clients really struggle with worsening paranoid delutions and irrational fears of government attacts, etc. In the past year I’ve seen far more of the anti Obama, anti government, get your guns and be ready to fight the race war delusions than ever. The seriously mentally ill process information differently than those who are not afflicted. They ruminate and fixate on various things they see and hear. They have voices in their heads and have visions. Some of these are very dark and frightening for them. They will act out the demons in their heads.
But more than anything else, and I have been both enraged and afraid of all this hate rhetoric, I just don’t why anyone doubts that the far rightwing intended to agitate people like the AZ shooter- they want to set off a revolution, they want to see Obama at least run scared if not actually killed. That is the whole idea of the ‘dog whistles – to send a message to their crazy base.
Ecks
@protected static: If someone is in your professional care then it would not only be inappropriate but illegal to talk about their condition in public.
If you are speaking in an official capacity as a trained medical professional then it would not be appropriate to formally diagnose someone you have not met in person (unless you’re trying to, say, analyze the writings of a famous dead person, in which case it would have to come with appropriate caveats).
But there is nothing wrong with a whole lot of people talking about a case of public interest, and sharing whatever knowledge they have about the apparent condition of the person, and how that condition works in general – what is known about it, etc. When a famous person comes out as bipolar it’s perfectly fine for psychologists to stand in front of cameras and say “well, the thing about bipolar people is…”
So thank you for your concern, but there’s nothing worth getting upset about here.
Church Lady
@eemom:
It scares me a little that I agree with you.
Ecks
@MsSkwEsq: Really interesting perspective, thank you. I don’t know if Beck and Palin, etc really do intend for there to be violence. I think while everything you say is true, they don’t really understand just how real it gets for people with these disorders, and they’d probably be a little frightened if they were forced too up-close and personal with it.
I think to them it’s a big huge live-action game. They’re kind of like teenagers in high school playing out power games in which they toss around spin, act like each other are important, make dramatic statements about the WOOORLD being in danger, and get caught up in the emotion and vivid role playing of it. I don’t know how cognizant they are that it’s a game to them, it might vary (I suspect, for instance, Beck is probably more meta-aware than Palin).
It’s sort of like how lots of perfectly normal people will fire up grand theft auto, and immediately get into car jacking and killing hookers… when it’s a game it’s very involving but somehow it’s disconnected from the notion that you’re actually hurting anyone. With computer games that rationalization is very easy – you really aren’t. With these guys, the rationalizations are a bit more complex. “Oh come on, I don’t want anyone to actually die. I’m not telling people to actually do anything bad”… and it’s aided by the convenient way they spit the world into us (i.e., good, sane, god fearing people who never do anything really bad), and them (i.e., everyone else – liberals, gays, foreigners, criminals, terrorists – bad people who enjoy hurting good people just for the sport of it, and who, like bad guys in movies must be implacably opposed at every step because it’s a zero sum game against them).
Holy crap, I’m enormously ranty in this thread. Sorry all.
EDIT: And it’s time for me to go home! Night all!
Church Lady
@MsSkwEsq:
You seem to have trouble spelling the word “psychology”.
dww44
@Jeff Spender:
I’d be interested if your psychiatrist friend has an opinion about the possible motivators, political or otherwise, that caused Jared Loughners violent rampage last Saturday.
Uloborus
The distinction I’ve been trying to make that I hope @MsSkwEsq: and @Ecks: have helped clear up is that this is not an either/or situation. Your choices aren’t ‘Did he do it because Palin told him to’ or ‘Would he have done it anyway’. This guy seems to have absorbed a number of Tea Jerker issues, so he may even have been very directly influenced. But he doesn’t have to be. Even regular people become more violent (that’s ALSO not a binary ‘violent’ or ‘not violent’ choice) if their culture is inundating them with suggestions they do so. Schizophrenics are way, way more sensitive than that.
The irresponsibility here isn’t Palin pointing at Gifford as someone who needs to be shot, although that’s bad enough. It’s creating a national discourse praising violence and emphasizing the need for it. The conservative movement pushed the timid into fantasizing about violence, people who already fantasized into making threats and throwing rocks, and told the dangerously unstable that society was behind them and they should act.
I was never afraid of a violent uprising or massive riots in Teatardia. It’s not going to happen. I was worried you’d get incidents like this because they’ve given the entire nation a little push towards violence and someone is going to fall. And they should have known it ahead of time and certainly didn’t care. Have they stopped now that something has happened?
roshan
Check this out. You don’t need a psychologist for this one:
__
In the video, you can see that a Tea Party candidate who lost leads a violent crowd to the Democratic winner, calls him a liar, and encourages the crowd to join in on the fun.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Uloborus:
Uhhhhhhhhh… no…
Uloborus
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Right. They don’t give a damn about the consequences of their actions. They’ve got just enough cover to claim they’re not *really* telling their followers to *actually* kill someone, and if someone took the nudging and winking seriously, they didn’t care.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Uloborus:
I was scrolling around the intertubez yesterday, just checking out the comments made by various media figures and elected officials in the aftermath of this mess and I was stunned, esp by Limbaugh’s rant about how Dems were actually supporting Loughner and working to get him off on a lesser charge…
Simply astonishing…
Suffern ACE
@Mark S.:
It’s not that unusual. In a different world long ago, back when I was trying to be a social worker, I had more than a handful of cases of people who were referred to my office for help, who didn’t want me to help them with food or shelter, but who wanted me to get XXX public official to stop harassing them. Or were angry with Congressman or Senator YYY because their office had promised to help them with their “grievance” and then reneged. Or had taken the “Dear Constituent, Thank you for your letter. We always like to hear from our constituents like you” letters to mean that someone had finally taken an interest in their case.
MsSkwEsq
Sorry about spelling and other errors- wrote this on my iPhone and it’s a bit odd for me to write out a comment on it…
LongHairedWeirdo
Well, this is the thing that I think is the crux of the matter.
It’s not so much that Palin “caused” this, or that anyone else “caused” anything.
It’s a matter of basic decency.
John Scalzi put it really well here:
I think this should not be in the least surprising. If your political messaging traffics in rhetoric heavy on gun imagery and revolution of the overthrow-y sort, then when someone shoots a congressperson who you opposed, then guess what: You get to spend some uncomfortable moments in the spotlight being asked if it’s not reasonable to suspect a connection between your rhetoric and the actions of a shooter targeting someone you’ve opposed. You also get to spend time being asked if, in fact, your rhetoric isn’t overblown, simplistic and on balance detrimental to the nation’s body politic. Querulous complaints about the unfairness of this can be reasonably overruled by others; the time to complain about your bed is before you make it.
sukabi
@LongHairedWeirdo: that’s an overly long way to say “you shit your own bed, now deal with it.”
but there shouldn’t really be any doubt that Palin and the professional yappers on the right have contributed significantly to the atmosphere of hate and keep stirring it up. Even in the wake of this last week, they’ve doubled down.
piratedan
well speaking about local triggers….
This last election cycle, Jesse Kelly weighed in with charges like…..
Giffords is soft on illegal immigration (despite the fact that she was damn near personally responsible for an additional 1200 national guardsmen being sent to help the border patrol)
Giffords voted for Obamacare/HCR
Giffords was responsible for culling 500 million from medicare
Giffords opposed SB 1070
Giffords is SE Arizona’s Nancy Pelosi
the week prior to the election, he claimed that she had a bus load of illegal immigrants brought across the border to vote preliminary balots for her in Benson (a small town of 2000 folks 30 miles SE of Tucson) on RW Talk radio as an example of how outrageous the lies got.
The messages were EVERYWHERE, the signage blanketed each street corner and the media ads were non-stop. There were the ads from Kelly’s own campaign, he got ad money and time from McCain’s own PAC and there were at least three outside “political” organizations running ads against (the usual attack ad big lie stuff) and one from the RNC. The market was well and truly saturated, ask TR and any other of the Tucson BJ crowd, it was very personal campaigning and it was fugly.
Prior election cycle 2008 – opponent Tim Bee
Gabby is too liberal for Arizona
Giffords is soft on immigration
Giffords is a tax and spend Democrat
Prior election cycle 2006 – opponent Randy Graf (open seat, Jim Kolbe (R) retiring)
key issues – Immigration, political affilliation, education policy
so if JLL had an anti-immigration bee in his bonnet, Giffords would be a likely target.
gwangung
@Ecks: Ah, Ecks, I am SOOOOO glad you explained this and not me.
In a former life, I was a behavioral communications guy (or social psychologist), studying the effects of media on collective groups. The effect of violence in media was all the rage in the 50s and 60s and eventually it came out that there’s no magic bullet of media effects. You couldn’t point to cause A and show effect B as its result. But you sure could show that you’ll raise general levels of violence by increasing stimulation (either by violent acts or increased porn); you MIGHT get catharsis effects in very rare instances, but you’re much more likely to get increased levels of violent behavior. And this all applied across the board, no matter if you’re “sane”, “well adjusted” or not.
But nobody EVER listens to people who’ve done the work and know what they’re talking about. They’re not interested in what the facts say–and I can confidently state this is independent of politics.
protected static
@Ecks: That’s what I thought I said; evidently I did it poorly. I was trying to address DougJ’s initial “I’d like to see” comment.
The Republic of Stupidity
@sukabi:
Simply astonishing, innit?
But hey… once you’ve committed to as extreme a position as, say, Rush Limbaugh has here… you can’t back down, or you just look like a complete putz… so Rush has no other choice here than to double his bet…
LongHairedWeirdo
@sukabi:
True, but there’s too many people who will insist that she didn’t shit her own bed, unless it’s spelled out. And really, that shows how fucked up politics is in this country.
danimal
The conservatives really want to cement the “lone wacko apolitical psychopath” explanation in peoples minds as quickly as possible. We don’t know nearly enough to understand Loughner’s motives.
The feds will presumably trace every website visited from his home computer and track every phone call he’s ever made, etc, and come up with a full profile. Until then, it’s all parlor games and hearsay.
eemom
@Church Lady:
I’ve changed my mind.
Origuy
Not so. In 1954, five Representatives were shot by Puerto Rican nationalists in the House chamber. All survived.
Robert Kennedy was a Senator when he was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan.
Suffern ACE
@danimal:
Yep. If only investigations would move at the speed of the need to fill our heads with information, we wouldn’t get our heads filled up with so much nonsense that is so hard to get out later.
curious
@J. Michael Neal: agreed. ecks, you’re a very engaging writer.
Pat
Well psychology is kind of like a science, and that is probably where your answer lies. If the topic is anywhere related to the study of a science, the smart people don’t go there because they know that may involve a little research and that would be completely out of their league.
mclaren
You wanted a discussion by clinical psychologists? You got it.
This is an article (“The psychogeography of gun violence”) which links to research suggesting that the kind of violence we observed in Tucson is primarily due to a “culture of honor” in the rural Southwest. The psychologists who wrote the paper controlled for poverty, differences in demography, lack of education, hotter weather, and a variety of other factors, but none explained the increased incidence of violence in the American Southwest. The “culture of honor” hypothesis, however, did.
Here’s a link to a more recent study (or at least an abstract thereof) by Ryan P. Brown, Lindsey Osterman, and Collin Barnes at the University of Oklahoma which confirms Nisbett’s findings.
None of this provides a convenient simplistic media narrative with a pleasingly trite moral to the story, so we can expect the media to continue to ignore the results of this research.
cleek
@Suffern ACE:
a million times, this.
bob h
Why is it we never hear about an arrest for threatening Republican Representative A? Or news of a brick thrown thru the district office of Republican Representative B? Why is all the actual and threatened violence directed at Democrats and the Federal government?
aimai
@MsSkwEsq:
Wow. Thank you for that testimony from the trenches.
And eemom, thank you for pointing out that to the right wing who don’t want to admit, even to themselves, what they are doing there will/would always be an interpretation that lets them off the hook. Its what makes having these conversations with actual right wing people so difficult. There’s no there there. There’s always a denial of common ground and common facts. So, yes, Loughner could have been caught with a pin up of Palin and the crosshairs map and there would still be a way in which it wasn’t “Sarah’s Fault!”
aimai
brantl
This is a feature, not a bug. It gives plausible deniability, as long as you need only deniability to your base, which would require that they be gullible, or have low impulse control, or both. This perfectly describes the Teabaggers. And a wide share of the Republican Party.
Think about it. You keep a steady stream of invective going, your opposition remains adult and doesn’t, for the most part, come out to meet you for this type of thing, then the most easily prosyletized buy it, hook line and sinker, and you then have the American equivalent of suicide bombers. It’s no accident that many suicide bombers fit a profile of the mentally damaged or impared. It’s the same with these folks. Their primers want deniability. And without person-to-person contact, they’ve got it. The media won’t make any real point of showing that these people are associated with the extreme right, will they? In the past they certainly haven’t, have they? And previous associations were inarguable.
Chris
@Ecks:
IMO, the point of all the apocalyptic rhetoric is to whip the base up into a frenzy so that they’ll all turn out at the polls and vote Republican. People getting killed is a byproduct, not something they really care about either way.
Chris
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Thanks for the Scalzi link. That sums it all up really well.
AuldBlackJack
While I reject Friedman’s freemarketeer philosophy outright, the man was no dummy. Why is it so difficult to see that the crisis can just as easily be a personal one, as in Loughner’s case, and that for, at least, the last 36 months the Right has been engaging in develop(ing) alternatives to existing policies, (and) keep(ing) them alive and available until someone like Loughner picks them up and acts on them.
Chris
@brantl:
Not really a response, but your comparing him to a suicide bomber made me think on the analogy for a sec, and what I came up with; you can easily use the analogy to show how absurd the right’s arguments and defensiveness are.
First: Suppose that tomorrow, somebody shoots up a Christian church in Cairo. Everyone will suspect Salafist involvement, yes? It might violate the spirit of “innocent until proven guilty,” but given the pattern of Salafi violence against religious minorities in general and Egyptian Christians specifically, hardly an unreasonable thing to assume.
Second: Now suppose that it came out that the shooter wasn’t a Salafist, just a regular asshole. The question would still stand; “why a Christian church when there are so many other targets?” That question would be followed by, “is it not possible that Salafi rhetoric, and the example of Salafis blowing up Christians [not unlike crazy “lone wolves” here in the last two years] helped create a climate in which Christians are seen as acceptable targets?” Millions of people, American conservatives leading the pack, would be screaming “DUH!!!”
Which part of the above sounds unreasonable, exactly?
Oh, and third: as long as we’re on the Muslim analogies, check this out; http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/95/3216/Egypt/Attack-on-Egypt-Copts/Egypt-Muslims-to-act-as-human-shields-at-Coptic-Ch.aspx.
Anyone heard if there are any Republicans out there willing to put themselves in harm’s way like this to protect fellow Americans? No, I didn’t think so.
madmatt
The only thing the event did was cause the scum in the House and Senate to start writing bills to protect themselves…screw a dead 9 year old thats just how america works. Behavior like that justifies killing off the scum…why should they be more protected than that dead child.
And since “gabby” spent her entire career voting against any kind of gun control I think its just fine that she gets shot by one of the whack jobs she wanted to keep armed.
madmatt
@electricgrendel:
Why should I give a fuck about the scum in the house and senate getting shot when they don’t care about citizens getting shot. Gabby was against any kind of gun control…she got what she deserved.
chopper
@Viva BrisVegas:
wow, can’t wait to break it to my wife that the 6 years (and counting) she’s spent in grad school is absolutely meaningless.
maybe you should, you know, read up a bit on psychology.
Farmer
@brantl:
You’re not the only one thinking this way….
G2geek at DKos calls it “Stochastic Terrorism”
http://www.openleft.com/diary/21377/stochastic-terrorisma-powerful-highly-accurate-new-meme
eemom
@madmatt:
Holy shit. Talk about a bifurcated comment.
As to your first point, yes, it’s pretty fucking amazing how they rushed to cover their own fat asses. It was rather sickly entertaining the other day seeing that utterly despicable hater King on teevee, explaining how protecting himself REALLY is the same thing as protecting his constituents. Disgusting fat fuck.
The Bobs
@Jim, Once:
No, this is not correct, schizophrenia is a type of psychosis. It may or may not be episodic. In Loughner’s case I would say that it is not episodic, but is on slow downward and continuous trend.
Ecks
@protected static: No offense meant. I think a lot of the things a bunch of us said are somewhat repetitive, it’s just the nature of the beast with these kinds of threads.
Ecks
@mclaren: True story: My first every publication was with Cohen who did the culture of honor work with Nisbett. It’s very cool work.
Ecks
I need to stop replying to these one at a time, and nobody is probably reading here anymore anyway, but…
@brantl:
This is actually not true. Studies on terrorists find that they’re often perfectly sane and well-adjusted people. And if you believed the things about your enemy and what they’ve done, and about the status of your “people” in the world, and you had the type of social support and encouragement that they did, you might seriously think about suicide bombing too.
Creating an alternate-reality bubble isn’t only a strategy for republicans. Imagine if right-wing republicans really actually WERE persecuted, arbitrarily arrested, beaten up, raped, murdered, forced to wait at checkpoints in their daily life, etc. Combine that with their natural sense of grievance nurturing and revenge-oriented militarism, and they’d be spoiling for a fight. And if it was a fight they discovered they couldn’t possibly win by conventional means (the other side has all the tanks and planes and body armor and well-developed military), you better believe that some of the very sane ones among them would figure out how to use terrorist tactics, and the rhetoric of the early christian martyrs. As it is, they’re only imagining their persecutions, so the only one’s to actually take up the real violence are the ones who have a clinically loose grip on reality.
Ronbo
Great piece! Douchbag is much too nice of a term for the bought-and-paid-for media. They are much more like Santorum (fecal matter mixed with semen and lube).