It’s actually very rare for people to commit homicide due to a DSM-categorized mental illness.
What are the other reasons someone might dismember a human?
Because they cannot distinguish right from wrong? Which is not a mental illness.
It’s not?
Genuinely asking, not trying to be confrontational. To me not knowing it’s not okay to kill someone and cut them into pieces seems like maybe sure, you aren’t born with that knowledge, but you should be able to pick it up as you get older from pretty much everywhere. It’s not like this guy was raised as a child solder in some third world or something?
You’ve sort of answered your own question. If a behavior might be unexceptional to a soldier confronting an enemy in a war-torn country, but not a civilian confronting another civilian in a peaceful country, then it won’t be classified as a mental illness.
Roughly speaking, mental illness is supposed to be agnostic of culture and circumstance. Schizophrenia is a problem no matter how you were raised. So are depression and panic disorder.
When considering with people like Peter Madsen, it’s tempting to classify them as mentally ill because it comfortingly implies that a “healthy” person could not do this. Sometimes we throw around labels like “sociopath”. But a sociopath is not someone prone to violence, it’s someone who is incapable of empathy. That’s quite different. There are plenty of sociopaths who know that violence is wrong. And ultimately, this murder happened because he could not distinguish right and wrong.
Er, Kim Wall is the victim.
And I think most murderers are perfectly capable of distinguishing right and wrong and just choose to do wrong.
Oops! Edited.
And “distinguishing right and wrong” is more than recognizing whether something is legal or illegal. It means to act accordingly. If you think you can get away with murder, as Peter Madsen did, then you are not actually distinguishing right and wrong.
This doesn’t make sense to me. I think the lengths he went to in order to try to cover up the crime, such as taking her out on his submarine to kill her, then dismembering and dispersing her body parts, implies he knew that what he was doing was wrong. Or do you think all that was part of some kind of fetish or something?
It occurs to me that from a legal perspective, “inability to distinguish right from wrong” is exculpatory. So maybe that was poor phrasing on my part, since I do believe he is guilty.
Suffice it to say that he doesn’t have mental illness. He has… poor judgment.
I was about to say exactly this. The fact that he tried to cover it up suggests pretty strongly that he knew it was wrong.
But people do things they know are wrong all the time, because they want to. Maybe they feel guilty about it, maybe they justify it to themselves, whatever. But the knowledge, and the ability to distinguish, is present. And if it isn’t, that is actually legally grounds for an insanity defense.
It’s really a good question, because sometimes we come close to implying that all people who do criminal harm to others are mentally ill, which pretty much obviates any distinction between good and evil, let’s call it. Often we seem uneasy with labeling something right or wrong, good or evil, but prefer to think in effect that no “normal” person commits a crime. But I think that’s at best, well, an unacceptable definition of normality. Plenty of people who are not technically mentally ill make a conscious choice to do things most of us think are bad, usually because it benefits them and their own moral calculus puts the satisfaction of their desires above everything else.
It’s not comfortable though to consider that there are people out there who would gladly, rationally, and calmly kill you for ten bucks.
There is evil in the world. How else to explain things like the holocaust? That was not a case of mental illness.
Exactly. It can be very difficult to understand making a choice like that, but it’s usually not due to any sort of clinical mental illness. Just different values and desires. Some of which are probably fair to describe as “fucked up”, but not in a medical sense.
But the act of covering something up doesn’t mean you know it’s right or wrong. it can just mean you know everyone else thinks it wrong. and you’re avoiding consequences That’s not really the same thing.
I think @magnet is mostly right on how we treat people here. Like this need to claim something is a mental illness. It’s comforting to think normal people won’t do xyz and normal people are healthy. To me, mental illness is about whether or not the brain is working right, not how you were raised or how lonely you are, or angry you are… it’s is the brain functioning in a way we expect to.
I don’t see that as a meaningful distinction. Your personal morality may not jibe with the larger world’s, but you are still operating on the basis of a difference between right and wrong that you clearly know about.
This, on the other hand, I agree with.
We’re talking about right and wrong, not legal and illegal. You can know something is illegal and not believe it’s wrong. The fact you act like it’s illegal and hide an act because it’s illegal does not acknowledge that you understand that act is wrong.
It’s entirely possible for someone to go through life feeling nothing for anyone or anything but simply not do things because the idea of prison isn’t appealing. That doesn’t mean that person knows what is right and what is wrong, it only means he or she knows the laws.
That distinction does not seem meaningful to me. A grown person knows that there are legal consequences to murder, even if that person doesn’t or isn’t capable of recognizing the underlying morality.
It’s conceptually the same thing with teaching my kids not to step into the street. They don’t seem to recognize that there is a real risk of getting run over but they know I’ll gove them holy hell if they do. I would say that they know what the right and wrong things to do are even if they don’t fully grasp the why of it.
Edit: I see I’m basically making the same argument as malkav. To which I would add, if a person knows that certain actions carry consequences, why do they need to internalize the underlying reasons in order to know that some are right and some are wrong?
Because if kicking a puppy in the head to death was legal, I still wouldn’t do it. It’s not the legality of the act that keeps me from being a monster. For some, it is.
My point is, so long as you’re not kicking puppies in the head, why does it matter why you aren’t doing it?
I’ll tell you why I ask the question. I am not a lawyer nor am I a psychologist, but if I’m approaching as a layperson, as the jurors likely will be, then I’m going to have a problem with “not knowing right from wrong” as a possible defense, just given his actions immediately following the murder. He acted like someone who knew right from wrong.
It may not matter to a jury faced with an admitted puppy kicker.
But it would matter when society contemplates new laws on puppy kicking.