Hatred Is Not a Mental Illness

Trigger warning: Please read with caution.

I remember exactly where I was in 1995 when I heard how a mother had strapped her two very young children into their car seats and watched as the car rolled into a lake in South Carolina.

I couldn't get their murders off my mind. Had she been psychotic with commanding murderous voices that kidnapped her mind? How could she turn off an entire aspect of her being? Or had feelings of maternal protectiveness never existed in the first place?

I found myself unable to stop crying, until I realized why. My own son was two.

You may find yourself there now. The killings in Uvalde, Buffalo, and California tragically stand as more testament to the destructiveness and horror that one human can create. The reason you believe they happened or how they could’ve been prevented will vary depending on your beliefs and values.

But there are two psychological responses you may be experiencing: secondary trauma and psychic numbing.

Secondary trauma occurs when you hear or watch a trauma occurring, even when that trauma doesn’t happen directly to you, as in more classic PTSD. Both first and secondary responders can be dramatically affected and can develop stress disorders that can lead to minds being haunted by images of violence. But if you’ve been devouring news reports, or if like me in 1995, the loss hits too close to home, then you also can develop depression and heightened anxiety.

Yet, you may also find yourself numb. The New York Times recently featured an article describing a paradoxical phenomenon called “psychic numbing” which Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon has intensely researched. “When we come across data and numbers, the emotional part of our brain shuts off," Slovic said. "We become more detached from the information, which makes us care about it less.”

What can you do to stay present but stable?

1. Do something you have control over, even if it seems to not have anything to do with the actual tragedy.
2. Calm yourself by creating order. Turn to your faith or familiar ritual that can act to center you.
3. Talk to your children. Remind them of their own principal and teachers that care for them, about how you and they are there to keep them safe. Let them talk about their own feelings. Guide them to focus on something they can do as an act of kindness.
4. Journal. Talk with friends or a therapist about your own feelings. Tune in to those emotions. But couple that expression with a plan.
5. Ask for help if you need it. Realize how you’re being affected. Monitor your own inner dialogue so that it's productive rather than destructive.
6. Use your anger or your anguish not as a weapon, but as motivation. Realize that it's better to respond than to react.

Let’s talk for a moment about the role of mental illness in mass shootings, which is being hotly and (at times) irrationally debated as to its priority in the “why.” People who murder are obviously not mentally well. And there could be deeply engrained characterological problems such as within the rubric of antisocial personality disorder. Yet hatred itself is not a mental illness. Hatred can be taught, modeled, absorbed, even fostered. It can dehumanize its targets. Mental illness might—or might not— be present.

Because hatred alone can justify. And hatred can kill.