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Aswad -> RE: Religion and Serial Killers (7/27/2012 10:56:15 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jlf1961
Worried?
Don't know about Edwynn, but for me: not in the least. Until and unless you show up crazy or tell me you have specific plans to go crazy, I'm not going to be concerned. And even then, there's about an ocean worth of distance seperating us. However, my personal experiences tell me serotonin reuptake inhibitors can, in rare instances, increase the risk of something turning out badly. I've been on most of the major classes of antidepressant drugs, and the serotonin reuptake inhibitors were the only ones that had this odd tendency to make me feel less sensitive to the potential for adverse outcomes and less invested in good outcomes. That more or less translates to a partial sense of detachment that could, if one were already inclined to go crazy, make it more likely that one actually would. Not by much, and I suspect it would even out all in all, plus this is anecdotal, but it makes me interested in seeing more research done into the possibility of a connection.
That said, you have 300 million people, a lot of places with high target density, few safety nets to ensure people have something to lose, and ample opportunities for anyone to go crazy (e.g. ready availability of guns when one has already gone over the edge). It strikes me as a combination that is far more relevant than drugs, religion, etc. For that matter, when people are having a hard time, drugs and religion are the two first things they tend to turn to, so it's not exactly as if the direction of causality is particularly clear in regard to those two. Living a messed up life under poor conditions, but not so far out that one can't go over the top, is- if memory serves- one of the best predictors of violence.
Where I live, if you're messed up to the extent the Aurora killer was, you'll be encouraged to settle for welfare instead of trying to go the route of a high workload education and high stress profession, and you'll have that to fall back on if you do try and fail. The USA has no such alternative, realistically, so anyone too messed up to have a good shot at surviving has to try at something that'll most likely fail, and will be exposed to stressors that may outstrip one's coping skills in the process. While I'm all for the idea that people should stand on their own if they can, it seems ludicrous to expect them to just lie down and die quietly in the midst of an extremely wealthy environment if they can't. That's not so much a question of entitlement as a realistic view of what an individual is likely to bear and a perspective on the just world bias (which is in itself a double edged sword).
IWYW,
— Aswad.
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