Reviews | The deadly collision of racism and mental illness

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A decade ago some Norwegians believed the label of mental illness had been mistakenly applied to Anders Breivik, a right-wing extremist who on July 22, 2011 murdered 69 people at a Labor Party-run youth camp left after killing eight people in Oslo earlier today. Like Mr. Gendron, whom he apparently inspired, Mr. Breivik explained his reasoning in a racist screed that called for the expulsion of all Muslims from Norway and inveighed against cultural genocide against the indigenous peoples of Europe (by which he meant whites like him). Thereafter, he showed no remorse, as one would expect of a mission-driven fanatic who saw it as his duty to kill the leftists responsible for allowing Muslims into Europe.

But, as Asne Seierstad writes in One of Us, his book on Mr. Breivik, two court-appointed forensic psychiatrists interpreted his lack of empathy in another way: as a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia, making it Norway meant that Mr. Breivik would be sent to a psychiatric hospital rather than prison. The diagnosis was made despite the fact that Mr Breivik himself described the mass murder he committed as a political act, a deliberate massacre which he deliberately carried out in accordance with his beliefs. As with Mr. Gendrons, these beliefs were not unique to Mr. Breiviks. They were shared by some members of the Progress Party, an anti-Muslim party to which Mr. Breivik had belonged. (His leaders condemned his actions.) A second psychiatric evaluation later concluded that while Mr. Breivik showed signs of dissocial personality disorder and narcissistic traits, he was not psychotic, setting the stage for his trial. and his condemnation.

As Mr. Breiviks’ case shows, it is not easy to determine who should be classified as a mentally ill offender, not only for diagnostic reasons, but also for moral and political reasons. In his book Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence, psychiatrist Willard Gaylin argues that the ubiquity of psychodynamic interpretations of destructive violence risks trivializing it.

To illustrate the danger, Dr. Gaylin quoted the response of Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, Archbishop of Boston, during deposition for the trial of John J. Geoghan, a Catholic priest convicted of groping a 10-year-old boy. and accused of raping and assaulting more than 130 children, abuses his superiors had known about for decades. I viewed it as a pathology, as a psychological pathology, as a disease, Cardinal Law said of such allegations. It was a stark departure from the kind of language the Church typically used to condemn conduct it considered immoral, such as homosexuality and abortion. It also underscored what can happen in a culture where nothing is right or wrong, only sick or healthy, argues Dr. Gaylin, where nothing is seen as punishable, only treatable. To confront violent hatred, we must be able to name it and identify it as evil, argues Dr. Gaylin, an imperative that therapeutic language can curb. If all aberrant behavior was sick, there would be no room for judgment, he argues.

But acknowledging the role that mental health issues can play in hate crimes doesn’t require downplaying their perniciousness or distracting from the inflammatory language and ideas that can fuel their rise. Too often in America, there seems to be a false binomial: medical problems versus political problems. The truth is that it is often impossible to disentangle the internal experience of mental illness from the external social and political forces that shape the world. And the mentally ill are no more immune to these forces than the rest of society. One of the reasons the language of characters like Mr. Carlson is so dangerous is that it can seep into the culture and possibly help trigger an angry, mentally unstable individual to act violently. It can fuel stochastic terrorist violence inspired by inflammatory rhetoric whose eruption is predictable even if the precise details are not.

In 2019, a gunman in El Paso opened fire on a Walmart, killing 23 people, many of whom were Latinos. The alleged perpetrator, a 21-year-old white man named Patrick Crusius, who has pleaded not guilty, is, according to his lawyers, psychotic, but his choice of targets hardly seemed random. Before carrying out the mass shooting, investigators believe he posted a manifesto on 8chan decrying the Hispanic invasion of America, a sentiment voiced by a growing chorus of right-wing xenophobic figures in recent years, including Donald Trump.

Edward Dunbar, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies bias-motivated crimes, finds it unsurprising that during the pandemic, when anti-Asian rhetoric swirled in public discourse, thanks in part to Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly referred to Covid-19 as the Chinese virus and the kung flu, some mentally ill people have acted on. As Professor Dunbar noted, one thing that can increase hate crime is the demonization of a group by public leaders, effectively sending the message to society that there will be no social cost to harm. to its members.

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