The Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV is the current version) outlines symptoms and characteristics of mental disorders in a somewhat reasoned manner. For each diagnosis there must be a set number of symptoms, a length of duration and other pertinent criteria.
Recently in Virginia a young man who most likely had a mental disorder killed 32 students at Virginia Tech University. Like many other mass killings in the U.S. this has been the continual story of most news agencies of the mainstream press.
Every major anchor person from each of the networks descended upon the college campus to interview any that would talk and repeatedly report the same story or stories. Memorials of flowers, teddy bears and other staple items of tragedies in the U.S. once again became evident.
Death of the innocent by an evil force of madness has become routine in our nation. We have a long trail of bodies that date much further back than the Columbine H.S. shootings. The public can’t resist injecting themselves into the tragedy by coming to the scene and erecting these “spontaneous” memorials of flowers, stuffed animals and other items to display our grief for the victims.
Newspapers run full biographies of the victims and the killers beyond anything a family would normally do for a deceased in death that isn’t a headline.
Finger pointing invariably follows the tragedy. Why didn’t someone know the killers were insane, evil and unbalanced? Why didn’t someone do something?
There is seldom any sympathy or empathy for the family of the killers. The evil killers are vilified and portrayed as having been the “bad seed” for most of their life.
Mental health “experts” will often be consulted to make “sense” of such events. Talking heads do quack psychiatry by conjecturing their diagnosis, often quoting the DSM. Such madness must surely be a diagnosis.
As the latest tragic killing on American soil took place and the entire American media diverted its attention to the 32 dead Americans a war continued to rage in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thirty some dead is about one-half or less of the daily death toll of Iraqis and Afghanis. Not counting dead soldiers from the U.S. and its “world wide coalition against terrorism”.
I continue to have this thought of imbalance and distortion when something like Virginia Tech or Columbine happens. I wonder why we can be so outraged and grief stricken when these things occur but fail to do the same with the daily carnage of wars we begin.
I wonder why the 650,000 plus dead Iraqis since 2003 hasn’t compelled us to erect memorials or vilify those who are responsible. I wonder why the 3300 dead American men and women go hardly noticed anymore. I wonder why the criminals responsible aren’t subjected to the same scrutiny of mental health experts.
We have to ask ourselves which is the greater evil. Is the evil of a mentally ill person who has fallen through the gaps of the under funded mental health system greater than a calculated and deliberate mass murder perpetrated by rich and privileged politicians and corporate leaders?
Why do we create such an enormous outcry at the comparably small number of dead at a school shooting when we fail to do so at an entire school of children killed by a bomb dropped from one of our planes or fired from our artillery? Where are the biographies of small kids with Arabic names? Where are the memorials of teddy bears?
Evil committed by a deranged individual is clearly caused by a mental disorder found in the DSM. Evil committed by the rich and powerful by proxy of young men and women they control is clearly established as fighting for freedom, patriotism, fighting them there so we won’t have to fight them here and other such ruses. Mass murder by megalomaniacs who spout platitudes about democracy and the American way of life is acceptable and there is not a diagnosis to be found in the DSM for what they do.
Keep in mind what is seen as patriotism here in this country is seen as sheer insanity by most of the rest of the world. But most of the world doesn’t use the DSM as the guideline for diagnosing insanity. The international diagnostic criterion does include compulsive lies and continued criminal actions as aberrant behaviors of antisocial minds.
Wm. Terry Leichner, RN
USMC combat vet
Psychiatric RN - 24 yrs.
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