A Weekend of Public Homicidal Warnings About Our Human Violence Vulnerabilities: A Preliminary Analysis

PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

“The horror . . . the horror.”

-The last words of the renegade Green Beret Colonel Kurtz in the 1979 movie “Apocalypse Now”

Whenever an unanticipated mass killing is publicly covered in the mainstream media, I almost immediately associate to the movie “Apocalypse Now,” based on the Vietnam War. In the actual war and movie, the usual moral norms around human killings break down. The My Lai massacre is just one of such horror examples.

After the homicides over this past weekend, if apocalypse is defined as widespread destruction, the apocalypse is still now.

On any given average day around the world, there apparently are over a thousand homicides a day, all of which are impossible to cover and absorb psychologically. Currently, we have the wars in Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, and other places to keep adding to those numbers for now. But, on occasion, like this past weekend, some smaller mass killings break through to public media attention due to certain aspects of the killings, such as is the apparent case yesterday for these 3 in order of their occurrence:

• The mass gun killings at Brown University
• The mass gun killings in Australia at a first night celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukah in a country of strict gun laws
• The stabbing killings of the well-known Jewish entertainers Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, by their son with mental illness

Collectively, they seem to represent our ongoing struggles with anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and rising mental disorders. Jews were the victims in Australia and the Reiners case. Muslims were both the perpetrators and hero in Australia, and father/son pairings were also victims/perpetrator. Traditionally, fathers are supposed to protect and teach their sons the best standards of living, not be killed by them, nor include them in undue mass killings. The social identity of the Brown perpetrator and victims are unknown at this time.

I had another column about to go today until this news arrived. It is about the 8 gifts of psychiatry to correlate with the 8 nights and gifts of Hanukah. We will still post that, but among those gifts was not a terrific track record of helping with such social psychopathology as mass murderers and violence, along with all the antis, isms, and undue social phobias that have been illustrated over the weekend. We must be able to overcome—and can overcome—our inborn tendencies to fear and scapegoat the other inappropriately for security and power.

Right now, though, we must first mourn the losses and our human vulnerabilities, then learn what we can and see what we can contribute to a better world, including—but beyond—our individual patients. What we seem to have is a breakdown in our collective morals, inadequate attention to the major social psychiatric problems, and perhaps, as one of my colleagues suggested, the need to try to establish a new paradigm. In old Freudian terms, it is an increased breakthrough of our id impulses, a breakdown of our superego collective conscience, and the overwhelming of our egos to manage reality.

Though it can go awry, all this horror seems to fit under the rubric, connections, and collective therapeutic potential of religion, spirituality, and psychiatry.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.