Depression and Mass Murder: What Can We Do?

I must admit to a certain fascination with Seung Cho. I know it’s not entirely useful to be an armchair forensic psychologist. I should be using this space to agitate for a return to the days of mental hospitals and involuntary commitments, as I did earlier this week. I would probably be making more of a contribution to the well-being of the world if I did that.

That said, I do spend a lot of time thinking about this guy. I think part of it is because I understand him. I’ve dealt with depression and suicidal rage before. I’ve experienced what it feels like to be profoundly alienated, on the outside looking in on all the shiny, happy people having fun.

One of the most destructive features of depression is the stubbornness it gives you. There are days when you know you should get out of bed, but you stubbornly refuse to obey the better angels of your nature. You know that it’s probably a good idea to go outside and run around. You know that the endorphins will make you feel better. You know that picking up the phone when a friend calls is the healthiest thing to do. But depression gives you immense strength to resist the kindness of the world and focus instead on its injustices. It gives you immense strength to do the unhealthiest thing possible.

This feature seems to be a unique asset if your goal is to kill a whole lot of people. As Newsweek’s Mary Carmichael writes:

Once a person has decided to commit mass murder, he’s extremely unlikely to admit to being depressed or to seek psychological help, and he may also cut off many relationships with friends who might encourage him to do so. In other words, the people who need counseling the most are those who will try hardest to avoid it.

As it turns out, there was a time when Seung Cho responded to the efforts of his classmates to include him:

At Virginia Tech, some of his classmates tried to include him. His suitemates took him to a frat party, and he indulged in drinking games, downing vodka and Kool-Aid and playing beer pong. He was adept, if a bit joyless, at lobbing Ping-Pong balls into cups of beer. “Down to the last shot, he made it, without any expression in his face,” one of his suitemates, Andy Koch, tells NEWSWEEK.

But depression has a funny way of pushing those memories from your mind. It’s so easy to focus only on the times when you have been scorned, rather than on the times when people reached out. It’s so easy to remain joyless even when those in your life want you to share in their joy. And when you’re trying to craft your self-narrative, to explain how you became the joyless human being you are. It’s very easy to remember only the sad, joyless times.

Sometimes that joylessness becomes so intense that the mind tries to make sense of the experience. Unconsciously, it can be easy to assume that there has to be a specific reason why everything feels so much harder for you than it does for everyone else. It’s possible that Seung Cho truly was sexually abused as a child, as so many have come to believe due to the nature of his written work. But it’s equally likely that those themes of incest and abuse in his writing were generated by his mind’s attempt to make sense of its own pain. Sometimes it’s not enough to just be desperately sad and lonely. You need a reason.

Depression doesn’t turn everyone who suffers from it into a mass murderer. But all of the mass murderers studied by forensic psychologists were reacting to some kind of perceived injustice. Depression is extremely efficient at generating that perception. It’s also great at reinforcing it by encouraging those who struggle with it to shut out the world. And while mass murderers may not fit a specific profile, almost all of them have some common threads that relate back to depression.

According to Newsweek:

They are not, on the whole, psychopaths, although they are often identified in the media as such. “A psychopath is someone with little conscience, little interpersonal bonding, someone who’s smooth and manipulative,” says Schlesinger. “That personality has nothing, zero, to do with mass murder.”

Indeed, the personality type most often associated with mass murder is in some ways the opposite of a psychopath. He is far from cool-headed; instead, he is aggrieved, hurt, and above all paranoid. Some mass murderers may be trying to exercise power over a world that they feel has left them powerless. “These people often feel some great injustice has been done to them. They’re angry and they want to take it out on the world,” says Schlesinger. “Then they develop the idea that committing murder will be the solution to whatever their problem is, and they fixate on it. Eventually they come to feel that there’s no other solution.”

The problems that the murderers, however horribly, are trying to “solve” can be almost anything—the loss of a job, a financial setback, or a bad breakup (several of Cho’s classmates have told reporters that he was looking for his girlfriend). But these relatively minor setbacks are merely the events that push the killers over the edge; they don’t put them near the edge in the first place. They are usually the last in a long string of perceived insults and hardships. “You don’t just get a D on your report card and then open fire on 30 people,” says Levin. “It takes a prolonged series of frustrations. These people are chronically depressed and miserable.”

So it would seem that if we want to stop to stomp out this “depressingly American” trend of gun-fueled mass murder, we need to get much, much better at recognizing and treating depression. Unfortunately, government can’t be relied upon to do this in any kind of reliable way. Other than reversing course on community mental health, there’s very little that can be done in the political sphere.

What do you guys think? What more can we do?