The Papageno Effect and Spree Murder-Suicide
As news with details about yesterday’s shooting in Oregon emerge, today's shooting in Orlando there
will be much speculation regarding the shooter’s motivation and what should be
done to prevent future incidents. As I have been thinking and writing
a about this issue in the past year, I’m becoming more convinced that the apparent
motivations of the shooters may not matter as much as most people may think, and
the main solutions that are usually proposed (namely gun control and improved
mental health) may be unfeasible, or will not work as desired. That is not to
say that nothing can be done.
Similarly, mental health funding has stalled
or decreased in many states even in the face of increasing
mass shootings. Of note, while increased access to improved mental
health resources may aid the most severely mentally ill individuals, they
are not at higher risk to commit these type of mass shootings. While some of these shooters, but definitely not the majority, have had some contact with mental health services, they were not severely
mentally ill. Indeed, that is one of the biggest challenges in these cases. These men
have carried themselves with a veneer of normalcy and were well
adapted or even privileged,
making their detection nearly impossible by health services and law enforcement.
In fact, we can cite that currently, the NSA and other intelligence and law
enforcement agencies are engaged in one of the most detailed, technologically
advanced, and all-encompassing security surveillance efforts in history. And yet,
despite these efforts, they have been unable to prevent these tragedies
even when many of these shooters have a heavy online presence in which they
detail their frustrations, desires, ideology
and even their plans.
To be fair, I’m not pointing the inability of these
agencies to prevent these shootings as an indictment of their efforts. Rather I mention it to highlight
the incredibly difficult task of predicting violent human behavior even with very
intrusive resources, and to make a call to find creative solutions
that are not constrained by political and practical difficulties. In short, not
relying on the usual responses to mass shootings: Restricting guns which is a
political non-starter, and/or massively increasing mental health screenings
and/or law enforcement surveillance which is unrealistic and would probably miss
their target anyway.
Instead, one possible way to alleviate this problem (not a
solution because it is unlikely to solve it altogether), is a public health
approach that has shown promise in suicide interventions in Europe. In the
early 1980s, there were a series of sensationally publicized suicides of
persons who jumped onto the subway in Vienna. As a response, the Austrian
Association for Suicide Prevention made an appeal for the media to change the
quantity and quality of reporting of these suicides. The association guidelines
included tips such as not including pictures of grieving relatives, not putting
the word "suicide" on the headline, and including numbers for helplines in the
articles. Fortunately, a lot of the Austrian media heeded the suggestions, and as
they started publicizing stories of people who had found alternatives
to suicide, the rates went
down. More recent research suggests that types of reporting on suicides
were differentially linked to suicide rates. Specifically, articles that
focused on individuals who adopted coping strategies to deal with suicidal
crises were linked to lower suicide rates, while articles in which experts were
interviewed and there was a focus on epidemiological facts was associated with
increases in suicide. The researchers dubbed the increase and decreases in suicide
linked to type of reporting the Werther and Papageno
effects respectively, and they may be helpful in stemming the current spree-shooting-suicide
crisis in the U.S.
Changing the current reporting practices of these events is
particularly important because there is good evidence to suggest that men who
engage in mass shootings have followed and idealized previous mass shootings. On their diaries many talk about “outdoing” previous shooters, and/or fantasize about the coverage and “respect” they will
receive in the aftermath. This is why I mean that the apparent motive of the shooter may not be as
relevant. Whether the shooter espouses frustration about lack of sexual
experience and misogyny (e.g., Rodgers, Soldini), xenophobia or racism (e.g., Brevik,
Roof), or general misanthropy (Harris, Klebold), these motives are not a
satisfactory explanation for their behavior. Many people have those attitudes
and yet, they do not engage in murder-suicide.
The men who engage in mass shootings followed by suicide have
arrived at a point in which they feel murder-suicide is the only way to gain
the notoriety they crave, and escape the psychological pain they are in. With
the current shooting in Oregon, there is already evidence that the shooter
wrote online about Vester Flanigan (who recently shot a reporter and cameraman on live TV before killing himself ) in admiring tones, and remarked
about the infamy he gained. If we modify the content of reports on mass
shootings following
guidelines already provided by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
(AFSP), and supplement the reports with information about mental resources that
potential future shooters (who, to be sure, are in genuine psychological
distress) can access, and importantly do not glorify these events, we may be
able to make meaningful reductions in the incidence and lethality of these
events.
Excellent post! I shared this on Facebook, and I hope it goes viral so that change in media reporting can occur.
ReplyDeleteThanks Allison, I appreciate it! I hope these ideas gain traction, and social media is a good way to spread them. Best,
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