During a debate on American gun laws on an earlier post, a fellow blogger stated that he didn't recall any mass killings in the 60's and everyone he knew in Texas back then had guns. Then he posed the question what had changed in America between then and now?
Reading expert opinion on just why America has so many mass killings like the one in the Colorado cinema at the weekend nobody seems to be able to come up with a reason why young men, and it is usually young men, arm themselves and go on a murder rampage.
There does not seem to be a link between the shooters but some theories put forward are poor parenting, a 24-7 news cycle that brings instant 'fame', copycats, a culture that glamorises violence, a gun culture, violent films & video games, Americas involvement in wars, single mums, women working, divorce, lack of religion, pop culture, godless liberalism and right-wing hate-mongering.
Some of those theories may have a contributing factor but what most professionals do agree on is that the killer is mentally unstable and to answer q, the rise of mental illness is one of the things that has happened since the America he knew in the 60s.
The National Institute of Mental Health has some alarming statistics of the state of Americas state of mind, the most shocking being that an estimated 26.2 percent of Americans adults suffer from a mental disorder, a six-fold increase since 1955.
Obviously there were mentally unbalanced people back in the 1960s but the only mass killing i can find note of that decade was in 1966 and the University of Texas tower sniper. I found 5 single-incident mass killings in the 1980s, 13 in the 1990s and 13 from 2000 to 2010.
Looking at the NIMH website, the U.S. mental illness disability rate in 1987 was 1 in every 184 Americans, by 2007 the mental illness disability rate was 1 in every 76 Americans.
So the experts agree that mental illness is one of the major causes of these mass killings and the rate of these has risen along with the rate of mental illness so what has caused the rise in mental illness?
The NIMH site shows that the overwhelmingly treated mental illness in the 26.2% is depression which is described as a mental state or chronic mental disorder characterized by feelings of sadness, loneliness, despair, low self-esteem, and self-reproach.
Life today is fast paced and the younger generation do have pressures that we never faced in our youth. The pressure to do well at school, to gain a hatful of qualifications to improve their chances of landing a good job in a world where jobs are vanishing fast. The easy credit that can see debts spiral out of control, the constant fear of redundancy, the ongoing battle of being able to afford to just live in the World today and the line of rejection letters from employers for job hunters.
It is no wonder that depression is a major part of our lives and growing as populations expand and the recession continues to bite. The feeling of worthlessness and despair that must fester inside large swathes of the youth of today and you can maybe start to understand the mind set of someone who has given up on life.
The constant images of anti-heroes on our television and cinema screens and the edges begin to blur between reality and fantasy and if just one of those kids who has decided they have no future walks into a gun shop and walks out with an assault rifle as James Holmes did then you end up with yet another slaughter.
Modern life is not going to slow down, if anything the pace will get faster and the competition more fierce but the mix of mental illness, the stress of living in the modern world and easy access to guns is a lethal mix.
How to solve it is not an easy question, reducing the ease of how people can get hold of guns is the obvious answer to stop the gruesome conclusion but treating the symptom is not going to be easy because it calls for a wholesale change of our priorities and the way we live our lives and the pressure we put on our children that getting a good job and making a lot of money is the only measure of success.
6 comments:
Thought provoking stuff about the pressures of modern life being more likely to cause depression... I believe this to be the case, although I think it also needs the caveat that these days we are more sensitive to this illness - it gets discussed and, importantly, diagnosed a lot more these days. I also think the entire post was just as relevant to the UK as to the USA, with the exception that when someone goes apeshit here, he doesn't tend to take down as many people.
Although having said that, it can still happen... e.g. Hungerford in 1987 (16 dead), Dunblane in 1996 (17 dead) and Cumbria in 2010 (12 dead).
i've read that 60% of american women are on a prescription drug for depression - incredible.
men seem to deal with it by drink or marijuna.
i don't get it though. i get up every am at 5:10 leave for work at 5:20 commute 70 miles and get to work at 6:45. i deal with the chiefs and presidents of a fortune 100 company all day and get home at 7:00 pm. run 5 miles with my daughters. saturday fix broken house and cars. sunday church and chill. spend less than i make. save for rainy day. been doing this all since 17.
in the interim i married, raised 2 kids (helped wife actually), lived on one income, drove/drive used cars, have small blue collar house in small blue collar town, managed to get 2 dgrees, technology innovation certification, blackbelt LSS, cert project manager, competitive intelligence cert, strategic planning cert, and cert data processor to name a few.
lost and burried every close relative older than me excpet my 80 year old mom.
frankly i just can't relate to the "stress".
q
I suspect that, just as physical resilience varies hugely between different people, so does mental and emotional resilience. And the fact that you can't see someone's weakness most definitely doesn't mean that it isn't there.
Anyway, Q... 5.10?!?!?!? AM? Really? FFS! Some nights I'm only just getting home at that time... (although less and less these days, if I'm being honest)...
i agree, i'm saying, i can't relate... must be my half german stock...
you can always tell a german, you just can't tell him much
q
I'm with you Cheezy, people today do seem more sensitive to the illness or maybe people have always been depressed but it is only being diagnosed more now or even depression is a bit of a catch-all illness so it is an 'easy option' for the doctor. Possibly it could be like when someone has the sniffs and they call it the flu or a touch of the flu.
60% is an amazing amount of depressed women, really shocking. I admit i can never think of a time when i could call myself depressed, pissed off with everything but never depressed so it is not easy to empathise with just how low a depressed person feels but then i was never pressurised into having to get good grades and a good job like many young people today and some parents can be very, very pressurising that you do feel like telling them to lay off a bit because they sometimes want their child to live up to impossible high expectations.
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