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Are Mass Murderers Insane? Usually Not, Researchers Say - The New York Times

posted onNovember 10, 2017
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Article snippet: If what people do is any reflection of who they are, then Devin P. Kelley, who slaughtered 26 churchgoers on Sunday in Texas, surely was a madman. Before the atrocity, he had attempted to sneak weapons onto an Air Force base after making death threats to his superiors, according to a local police report. In 2012, he had escaped from a mental hospital in New Mexico to which he had been sent after assaulting his wife and fracturing his stepson’s skull. A video of the church killing reportedly shows Mr. Kelley working his way methodically through the aisles, shooting some parishioners, even children, at point-blank range. “I think that mental health is your problem here,” President Trump told reporters on Monday. It is true that severe mental illnesses are found more often among mass murderers. About one in five are likely psychotic or delusional, according to Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of 350 mass killers going back more than a century. The figure for the general public is closer to 1 percent. But the rest of these murderers do not have any severe, diagnosable disorder. Though he was abusive to his wife, Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub, had no apparent serious mental illness. Neither did Stephen Paddock, who mowed down 58 concertgoers from a hotel window in Las Vegas. Ditto for Dylann Roof, the racist who murdered nine African-American churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015, an... Link to the full article to read more

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