Prominent psychologist Drew Westen at Emory University cited a "culture of hate" permitted in Arizona and in other parts of the country as at least partial explanation for the event. His point is that we (and the violently mentally ill among us), do not live in a vacuum. Regardless of whether shooter Jared L. Loughner was ideologically a member of the Tea Party or not, addicted to marijuana or videogames, regardless of the endless explanations we will search for in the effort to make sense of this tragedy, he did not live in a vacuum. He, and others like him, live in a culture. A culture where apocalyptic, frequently violent rhetoric permeates freely.
Paul Krugman was not surprised by the effects of what he called this "climate of hate," writing that "something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence." Indeed, there seems to be an intuitive link between individuals with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, and violent rhetoric in the culture at large. (The media has been quick to regard Loughner as schizophrenic without evidence of an official diagnosis, although he has been labeled by a psychiatrist as a "textbook case"). This intuition is likely bolstered by the pervasive attitude that the majority of schizophrenics, specifically paranoid schizophrenics, are violent. This attitude, however, is misinformed. In but one study, from 2002, Jeffrey W. Swanson and colleagues found a 1-year prevalence rate of violence in just 13% of their more than 800 patients diagnosed with serious mental illness ("The social-environmental context of violent behavior in persons treated for severe mental illness"). This figure, they noted, is higher than that of the general population, but nevertheless reveals that the vast majority of individuals with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, are not violent. Nevertheless, a real or suspected diagnosis of schizophrenia is a common theme of the media coverage of many of these tragedies (see the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting for merely one recent example).
Previous debates surrounding the effect of violent videogames is evidence of this frantic search for meaning after tragedy, such as those that followed the 1999 Columbine shooting, which frequently focused on the role of games such as id Software's seminal Doom on the mentally unstable minds of the shooters. The quest to identify that important cultural piece that explains a killer's motivation, that dispels the frightening specter of meaningless loss, whether it be Doom in the Columbine shooting, the Columbine-inspired Gus Vant Sant movie Elephant in the 2005 Red Lake High School shooting, or the South Korean movie Oldboy in the Virginia Tech shooting, is unending, particularly when the perpetrators are young.
Yet finding that meaning often involves disentangling an individual's mental illness from the vast web of cultural influences that an individual is constantly immersed in, which can be nearly impossible. Furthermore, a number of cognitive biases are at work when we make such dubious connections. The hindsight bias leads us to retrospectively interpret events as predictable, and in this case leads us to link events that are, in fact, unconnected (itself an example of an illusory correlation). This is especially true when the event of interest is emotionally charged, as the recent shooting in Tuscon could certainly be qualified. That is not to say that marijuana, videogames, or political ideology had no effect on the mind of this mentally unstable individual. But it does raise questions about our--and by "our" I also mean the media's--ability to dispassionately assess the situation.
Regardless of where our blame eventually falls, we must be cognizant of not only why we're searching for an explanation, but who we might damage in the process. Ending Sarah Palin's presidential ambitions or dismantling the Tea Party may be a favorable outcome; increasing the stigma of the thousands of individuals living with serious mental illness is not. David Brooks recently called the coverage of the event the result of a news media that is "psychological ill informed but politically inflamed." His point rightly brings the role of the media into play, but ultimately the media merely reacts to our own desires. In our frantic, emotionally-charged quest for meaning in loss, we only magnify the tragedy by engulfing dubiously related targets in the maelstrom, clouding the truth in the process.
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