Active shooter in NZ

[Yonadav]

This is hugely inadequate/inaccurate/problematic by my mind. If somebody commits a crime, and is caught and punished for it, that causes significant distress and impairment of personal functioning therefore mentally ill. If you give up smoking cold turkey you're mentally ill if it causes distress. If a spouse is unfaithful and get's away with it, with no feelings of remorse/guilt or projected thoughts of infidelity, then no problem. If they do have such feelings then they do have a mental illness however; likewise if they are busted by their spouse who is livid about it, but only after they've found out. If they're not angry at the infidelity, again, no mental illness. There are about a gazillion other examples I estimate. 

I prefer this definition: Any thought or behaviour which the majority of local society considers to be maladaptive.

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I can't get on board with that. Mental illness is a real thing and isn't just a matter of majority opinion. And I also don't think that a society's opinion of what constitutes 'maladaptive' is worth squat. Society itself is frequently maladaptive. Sometimes a minority rebells against a maladaptive society and history lionizes them, even though a majority did not support them in their day. There is a bit of dispute about how many Americans supported the war for independence, but pretty much everyone agrees that it was not a majority.

People have completely sane and rational reasons for doing things. They are sane and rational regardless of how many people disagree with them. This guy in New Zealand seems to have felt that Islamic immigration needed to be stopped, and he was absolutely willing to go to war over it. I only know that he felt strongly that Islamic immigration was a threat and that something needed to be done about it. I know nothing about his mental health.

In 18th century America, we had an event occur that we call the Paxton Boys uprising. It began when some Native Americans performed a series of lethal attacks on white settlers in the Great Lakes region. The Native Americans had a bit of a problem with immigration. The Paxton Boys responded by mass murdering a bunch of Native Americans and then marching on Philadelphia. The Native Americans who killed white settlers were sane and rational. The Paxton Boys were sane and rational. They were all people who felt strongly enough about their position in the scheme of things to be willing to go to war and kill people.

Ascribing mental illness to people who do horrible things is just a lazy way of understanding someone doing things that we can't or won't do. And it more or less excuses the things that are done, instead of holding people stone cold responsible for their actions.