The real - but invisible - causes of the human catastrophes in Orlando, Sandy Hook, Chicago, and Syria.
As Orlando, Florida just experienced the largest behavioral event of a "mass killing" in the U.S. since Sept 11, 2001, and the largest shooting behavior spree possibly in U.S. history (although much larger events have already occurred in Europe and the Middle East), this event did not occur in a vacuum or lack of scientific understanding, nor can we any longer disregard what we now know about the actual science of violence as a contagious process and contagious disease as 15 years of new groundbreaking research in theory and practice have shown, as summarized in the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences Report of 2013 entitled "The Contagion of Violence." I'm not writing here about the purported "reasons" being discussed in the media - which CNN and other networks spend days discussing with viewers wanting to know more and more about the shooter's stated motives, or the guesses of "epxert analysts of dead persons report. These are symptoms or associated phenomena. Further, most of these events can be simply categorized as suicides if you like if you want to simplify matters. However we do not more - and it's not "evil" anymore than evil is the reasons for leprosy, tuberculosis, seizures or mental illness (although we used to think so before we had scientific breakthroughs in each of these areas).
I'm also not writing here about who is to blame. Blame (think Islam, hate, guns, Obama, congress, the FBI, ISIS, Bush, etc) is the well known historical reflex of (fearful and therefore angry) societies when a problem is getting worse, when people are afraid and we don't (yet) know what is really going on - or what to do (think Ebola before the pathways became clear). This is usually when more restrictions or punishments are levied. (Think historically of plague when marginalized populations were blamed and Jews were thrown down wells. This is a bit before we discovered that plague was due to an invisible microorganism inside a flea inside a rat - who knew?) More recently, Ebola - where extensive enforcement measures in W. Africa apparently enhanced spread until health workers could be deployed to both explain what was invisibly going on to the populations at risk and then interrupt events and the prevent spread.
Blame and a focus on symptoms was the manner of approaching many diseases and contagious processes from leprosy to cholera to smallpox and more - problems that kept people in fear because of sudden attacks on populations, and until we developed new scientific understandings of the invisible processes that underpin these problems. Then, more effective epidemiologic methods and preventive public health tools and methods were developed. Now, these are rare problems.
However there is no excuse now. We know more about violence including mass shootings, "lone wolf attacks and even what we call terrorism than we did 25 years ago. And therefore looking and treating them as health problems in the first place - we can shift or at least greatly add the health approach. As we "suddenly" learned more about the invisible processes of microscopic microorganism and shifted strategies 150 years ago got out of the realm of unhelpful responses to plague. I ask again, where is the health sector and its methods now? First a very quick review of what the IOM summarized and what a few other studies have taught us a new.
First, we now know definitively that violence is contagious. Violence causes more of itself as flu causes more of itself, likewise for TB, cholera, etc. Being a risk factor for itself is what separates infectious disease epidemiology from all other epidemiology (for example high blood pressure causes more stroke in a person, but strokes then do not cause other people to have strokes, etc.). we see the infectivity of violence in gang wars, retaliations, child abuse and family violence, through generations, and in violent "recruitment", as well as the clustering of mass shootings and suicides.
We now know exposure to violence of one type - for example child abuse or other types of violence - untreated - leads to high susceptibility to violence of another type. We now know that violence of all types behave like contagious diseases - family violence, community violence, mass shootings, recruitment into violent groups (e.g. religions, tribes, gangs or countries), we know that exposure during war leads to violence after war. We now know that like other contagious diseases, they are subject to interruption and change.
Yes we know that this act was conducted by a young man of a Muslim background who used his phone to call 911 before the killings started and claimed a relationship or allegiance with ISIS. Yes he had prior conversations with concerned work colleagues about many different Islamic fighting groups - some with different allegiances that many Americans have trouble sorting out, and which are a moving target of identification. But these calls and statements are associated phenomena and are symptoms. They are what he said. This is not be confused with causality.
Yes we know the killings were perpetrated at a gay club which it seems he had visited several times before, possibly to scope it out and possibly as a patron. But we also know that when anyone has been exposed to violence and is activated or reaches a threshold of his latency or subclinical period, the violence is performed either to those closest at hand (e.g. family), people most vulnerable (younger sibling, child, or whoever his peer group or aspired to peer group he believes might approve of the violence being performed against. We even know the brain circuits being activated in anticipation of approval are the same brain mechanisms (reward or dopamine circuits) that are activated in anticipation of a pizza or of sex. Circuits designed centuries ago when we were on the savanna (for food, sex and "belonging" - essential for survival then and sometimes in overdrive today) are also active in other animals where belonging is or was prized for evolution. We also know that this need for belonging/approval/attention/status removes at least temporarily the awful and sometimes overwhelming pain of social isolation, rejection and low self worth. This can be acute or chronic. We have all felt it. Anger temporairtluy makes you feel better if you have the strength to get to that and the consequences of that - and hopefully this too can be assisted and interrupted before events progress. And we know that this shooter valued this approval attention and status (similar concepts, same brain pathway) to the point of looking for attention on facebook and in text massaging during the shooting itself. The power of approval and perceived approval when susceptibility is so low, the need so great, and vulnerability untreated. People who are susceptible to violence commonly usually find persons who are vulnerable or perceived as weaker as vicitms.
We also hear of a history of domestic violence in the shooter- violence against his former wife. How interesting but also incredibly serious and important if left untreated. We've heard about this in prior shooters. And we know about this in the setting of community violence and even war. These are the same disease - different syndromes. either can occur first - community or war violence, violence in the family, etc. Israelis exposed to violence form Palestinians and vice versa are more likely to do violence in their own homes and in their own communities. Post war and police exposed to violence in their jobs more commonly perform violence at home. Persons exposed to violence as children are more likely to show signs of all or both as well as suicide. And many of these mass shootings are clearly suicides too - only with an attention flare. All untreated persons, with progression expected as for other contagious diseases in latency phases. The contagious nature of violence, mediated by cortical mirror neuron like mechanisms as well as the effects of trauma on the emotion (or limbic system) causes people who are exposed to violence and abuse to do it themselves. Not all will do so - nor are all person exposed to as
This shooter was bullied. This is exposure to violence and the trauma and pain of social reaction. Social rejection has an incredibly powerful and serious health effect on the brain. social rejection shows up in the brain in the center of the brain that lights up (is activated) as physical pain. (Generally speaking there are two pain centers which we know about form person who have had strokes or cancers in different parts of the brain as well as from brain scans. One pain center tells the "brain owner" where the pain is, the other conveys something like "I can't stand this anymore>" the latter center is activated in social rejection. This important pathway is part of why people are susceptible to contagious violence - - ie to avoid the pain and get into a more "accepted" and powerful position with respect to one's self as "judged by others" and is even a strong motivator for usual community violence - ensuring that you are doing what your peers expect of you. These mechanisms are invisible and people will not tell you about this in focus groups anymore than person hundreds of years ago would have told you that they were coughing becuase of invisible microorganisms in their lung alveoli or intestinal villi.) similarly to the cortical mechanisms of contagion which were designed in evolution to
We don't know all that goes on in anyone's mind, nor do we know all the processes in a lung or intestine when exposure progresses over time to dangerous symptoms for the person and the community. The shooter's fathers ideas may be different than his wife's than a CNN commentator. But we know about exposure, early and late symptoms and prevention.
We must leave the bad person, criminal, and enemy paradigm.
Why do they hate us? people ask. Why is there hate? Peter Bergen, one of the most experienced analysists of terrorism writes, "Why do terrorists commit Terrorism and concludes "I don't know."
Robin Wright, a best selling author of books and papers on terrorism writes of Hena Khan a best selling author of children's books who was so proud of the attention to the life of Mohammed Ali and her hopes for turning a corner in perceptions about Islam, as well as feelings of solidarity with the LGBT community as both communities suffer bigotry in the U.S, (although the Muslim world is of course known for little tolerance for the rights to even personal security or human rights of persons with most gender identifications including women.) Ms Khan is quoted by Ms.. Wright in the current context as saying “Today, in this increasingly confusing world I wonder, who exactly is the enemy? Is it . . . me? My children? My Muslim family members who do amazing things that don’t make the headlines: strengthening government systems for the Department of Homeland Security, conducting flight safety tests on aircrafts, performing skin grafts on burn victims? Is it ISIS? The Taliban? Russia? Or is it the armed hate groups united under a false banner of ‘humanity’ planning to target mosques and Muslim communities to intimidate and bully us in an attempt to take back America from ‘people like you’?” The "enemy" is violence. As the enemy could be called tuberculosis or Ebola - not the people who are exposed and susceptible (to any of these) and who progress to symptoms and then show disease in themselves and to others.
On the same day as the Orlando shootings, but given much less attention a white youth with a familiar stare - from Indiana was caught with lethal weapons and explosives in Santa Monica California at a gay pride parade. We don't hear of an affiliation with Islam, the presumption is that he is Christian, but his behavioral act could have been the one to cause the death and chaos, as persons with "foreign sounding" names caused chaos in Boston - and as other young white males - some with crazed looking faces caused death, fear and chaos in a Connecticut pre-school, a South Carolina Church (black Christians the vicitms), as well as in other schools, workplaces, etc.
Violence in our neighborhoods is now mostly affecting (both exposed and exposing others) African Americans and to a lesser extent Hispanics. But this epidemic process on our cites decades ago was primarily affecting Italians and Irish Americans. Epidemics course their way through populations - TB affected Europeans and then America and then Africa and Asia as it spread across continents.