I mean, if you think the government is monitoring your thoughts through your fillings, you’re crazy, but somehow if you think the feminists are keeping you from having the sex, you’re not?

Also, just as a followup, I think the both of these belief structures are essentially crazy, and the fact that one is taken seriously while the other is soundly derided indicates a lot about how our culture thinks about feminist ideas.

—Myca

As to “misogyny v. mental illness,” (per the brief snippet of Muttering in a Corner’s trackback) I’m not sure I’m reading anyone saying that mental illness had nothing to do with it. Seems to me this is a lovely both/and situation.

*nod*

I think Mandolin has this spot on.

What I would add, I guess, is that I’m not sure the division between extreme misogyny and mental illness is all that clear cut. Misogyny (like racism) is an irrational hatred or fear, and if you’re embracing an essentially irrational thing to that degree, I think at some point it’s the same thing.

I mean, if you think the government is monitoring your thoughts through your fillings, you’re crazy, but somehow if you think the feminists are keeping you from having the sex, you’re not?

—Myca

Having written what I did, though, I later realised that most people’s energies were being concentrated elsewhere.

Koch: do u want to know who spankyjelly is
Koch: he is seung ho something
Female student: yeah i knwo who he is
Koch: he is a creep i would block him just doing u a favor
Female student: ahahha yeah
Koch: well i would block him he got in trouble forr stalking recently so i just wanted to warn you
Female student: yeah..hes called me…written on my door…all of that
Female student: kinda freaky
Koch: written on your door? like your room
Female student: yeah
Female student: the funny thing bout that…
Female student: is im unlisted…like everywhere
Female student: SO he had to do some investigations or something…into my roommate and what not
Koch: the ra’s are trying to do something about him
Female student: yikes
Female student: at first i thought he was one of my friends joking around…and i only accepted him cuz i saw a few of my friends were friends with him
Female student : then he turned out all psycho
Koch: i think he is is schophrenic or however you spell it

Sometimes children have the same personality disorders their parents have but how do you attribute it to what is called “nature vs nurture”?

If you have a parent(s) who has antisocial personality disorder and they rear you, will you be more or less likely to also have that disorder and if so, how? From a genetic componant, from being reared by someone with that disorder(which most likely will have some affect on how your personality is shaped) or both?

Interestingly enough, I think antisocial personality disorder, narcissist personality disorder and borderline personality disorder were the three that came up as having the strongest ties to a genetic componant in some articles I read.

But even so, is a genetic componant if it exists a cause? Or is it a contributing factor? If it’s the latter, under what conditions? I would think that socialization beginning at birth is the strongest causal factor. In the definitions of contributing factors for different personality disorders, there’s lists of “risk factors” which are separate for each one.

With Cho, the two that come to mind are schizoid personality disorder and narcissist personality disorder(especially in terms of him blaming everyone for his actions which he clearly did in his note and videos as well as the martyr Christ-like way he viewed himself). It’s hard to say, because his contact with mental health professionals was limited, forced and most of all, confidential.

But based on the limited information about his background especially his childhood(which is very important because while most personality disorders peak during adolescence, they begin earlier), he was showing problems and his relatives particularly those in South Korea couldn’t seem to recall a time that he wasn’t having problems.

OTOH, there is a strong misogynist bent and violent sexual content in his writing too, writing that clearly set off alarm bells not only in his instructors but other students. And there’s documentation that this was going on before the shootings by these individuals, most of whom were women, and not just thinking they should have done something after the fact. He’s got quite a paper trail too. It’s too bad that the guy at the pawn shop and the guy at the gun shop didn’t have access to it.

He stalked women, photographed women and had an imaginary highly idealistic “model” type girlfriend whom he talked to. His first victim was a woman and experts have said in some cases of these types of shootings that the first victim often has some significance in some way.

He also shot 4-5 male and female teachers and none of them survived. At least two died trying to protect students, others appeared to be the first killed in a particular room, but if you read one of his short plays, it was about plotting to kill a teacher who his main character perceived as having taken something from him that was rightfully his. Some of the people who tried to intervene with him earlier were teachers. But by the time he got to university, it was probably way too late.

Another thing that’s noticible is that at some point, the complaints against him stopped. There were fewer or no reportable incidents. I think that if you trace back to when this began to occur, it’s probably when he began planning his final actions because doing so would have consumed all his time and energy. The news stories mentioned that his hours of sleep changed and he was changing his hair and clothing style and adopting a fitness routine for example.

What these Republicans are doing as I’m sure you know is simplifying a complex series of personality disorders to further their own political agendas. It’s self-serving and it definitely doesn’t help those who have the disorders, their families and in some cases, their victims. I think it’s odious that they do this but hardly surprising.

That’s a really cool analysis.

The last time I heard anyone say that personality disorders had a genetic component, it was a Republican who was trying to convince me that it was a good reason for why the government shouldn’t be in the business of trying to fund welfare or other social programs (because it doesn’t matter how kids are raised; it’s all in the genes).

So, I’m just curious because I was taught the opposite in psych classes. Where does the genetic component research come from? Is it newish?

As to “misogyny v. mental illness,” (per the brief snippet of Muttering in a Corner’s trackback) I’m not sure I’m reading anyone saying that mental illness had nothing to do with it. Seems to me this is a lovely both/and situation.

And isn’t it interesting how this comment hasn’t generated any discussion here?

OTOH, Cho lacked the qualities found in antisocial personality disorder including impulsive acts and contacts with police(outside those more associated with other personality disorders and/or mental illness). The fire setting if that took place may or may not be a behavior found in sociopaths(as they used to be called) and is often more familiarly known as part of a triad of behaviors known as the pet/set/wet triad that’s most commonly associated in the media with serial killers.

Or you can have different personality disorders involved. Two that are often found together are narcissism personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder including in serial killers.

Like bean said, personality disorders may have genetic predispositions. Sometimes parents have them but even with that, it’s not easy to clarify whether that ties in with genes, environment or both. The earlier years are often the root period of development and they often intensify or peak in adolescence or young adulthood although they are all considered chronic conditions.

A lot of them are extensions or exaggerations of behavior that might not be abnormal in lessor amounts. An occupatonal hazard of psychology students is to read the symptomology of personality disorders which are divided into different axii categories(four based on two factors if memory serves me or a box with four squares) and think that they have three or four of them, because there’s not much explanation in often bare-boned explanations of these disorders to emphasize how severe they can be manifested. There’s still much that is unknown about them or how to treat them. It’s different for different disorders and it’s partially dependent on age of individual, stage of progreession of disorder(s) and which disorder it is(i.e. antisocial personality disorder is one of the toughest but it tends to wane a bit in terms of external behavior with age).

It doesn’t absolve or totally explain what he does, but if personality disorders are involved, then it’s one tragic reason why further research needs to be done, in order to recognize them and to do intervention when and in ways that might stem off the fairly rare but serious violent behavior. That was tried in Cho’s case to the best of the abilities of those who took that on, especially the creative writing instructors but what was going on with him had been going on for years by the time he was at university and it was beyond their ability to help him.

I read his writings and his social maturity was somewhat younger than being a college senior. He appeared in his writing to be operating at an adolescent level and dealing with issues in his writing that strongly impact that age group. It was very disturbing how he expressed himself, especially using violent pornographic imagery, but in one of his stories, there was the typical step child fantasy of a parent being killed and replaced by the evil step parent. The mother in that story appeared weak and at the same time he treated her with contempt, he wrote her in a way where she sided with him against the stepfather, when in real life, maybe she took a different position when he had conflict with his father/step father or authority figures. His other story is another violently pornographic fantasy of killing a male authority figure in this case a teacher who he viewed as stealing something that belonged to him. Authors like Lois Duncan who writes young adult fiction have written books, i.e. Killing Mr. Griffen on a similar theme(though far different in style and tone than his).

It’s the way he expresses his fantasies, rather than the themes of them(which are not unusual in teenagers) that’s disturbing and that this was the only writing he seemed to be interested in. Abuse including sexual was a theme but it’s not indicative by itself of abuse in his childhood. It’s complicated in this case because it seemed that part of what he wrote in his fiction was intended to shock people.

He harassed women through the internet, probably to a greater extent than they are aware of but it would be difficult to determine to what extent given that it’s largely an anonymous medium.

But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

Violence is commonly resorted to as the antidote to the disturbing emotions raised by the widespread hostility toward women in our society and the pathological fear of so many men that they aren’t quite tough enough, masculine enough — in short, that they might have homosexual tendencies.

“DBT is Dialectical Behavior Therapy”

It works on personality disorders? That is some seriously cool shit. (didn’t check out link yet, but will!)

[/OT interjection]

But personality disorders can most definitely be treated with various forms of theraphy (for example, DBT has an extraordinarily high success rate for those with borderline personality disorder).

Yet another example of Alas as a teaching tool. I had always understood that sociopaths were born that way and stayed that way. What is DBT?

As for the male tendency toward violence, I’m not sure how much is nature, testosterone poisoning as my dad calls it, and how much nurture (socialization, patriarchy). There’s definitely an unhealthy synergy there. I’m also not sure to what extent misogyny is entangled with that. Take John Wayne Gacy, for example: all (AFAIK) of his victims were male. Likewise Jeffrey Dahmer.

Also, “other people categorized with him” is a radically inadequate description of the system of gender. The socialization that leads men to commit crimes of senseless violence against strangers is the socialization of men, not the socialization of some weirdos who happen to sometimes be categorized with me as men. Men are socialized in this manner. My co-worker’s comment about wanting to cut his balls off was an acknowledgment that the ways that all men are socialized is what creates men who commit atrocities. This is a more feminist and more conscious awareness of this than I see in most men, so it was beautiful to see it in a man in his mid-fifties (I tend to see feminist awareness in men as something that has improved greatly if totally inadequately over the past 30+ years, and as something that doesn’t seem to improve hugely with age, which may just be my biases, but is why it was particularly unexpected for a man in his fifties).

A few months ago two female hikers were shot to death in an area where my co-worker often hikes (left-leaning libertarian, ex-biker, ex-druggie, computer programmer), and my co-wroker told me about it and went on this long rant about “Have you noticed how when this sort of thing happens it is always ’some guy’ who is the murderer” ending with talking about how sometimes he felt like he should cut his balls off. It was totally unexpected and absolutely beautiful.

A presumably harmless person sometimes feels like he should mutilate himself because other people categorized with him commit atrocities? What’s beautiful about that?

The difficulty I’m having with your analysis is that Cho didn’t seem to be targeting women. I do agree that seeing violence as some kind of solution or appropriate response to his complaints (and I had the same question as Rachel about potential child sexual abuse) is in keeping with our view that violence can solve all kinds of problems instead of just really creating a lot of new ones. Now I would agree in that sense he was on the extreme fringes of what we often view as normal behavior.