Category: Violence

Psychopathy: Is It In You?

By Kevin Brandenberg & J.P. Malette

When one considers crime and its relationship to society, psychopathic behavior remains one of the most mysterious and intriguing conditions of the human mind. Psychopathy describes individuals who, put simply, don’t have a conscience and thus commit actions, often times illegal, without any moral consideration.

Gatorade, the popular sports drink, uses its slogan “Is it in you?” to describe the competitive drive in athletes, which is presumably enhanced by drinking their product. Just like the Gatorade slogan suggests about athletes, is pyschopathy a condition simply found in some and not in others? Or are there other factors that go into this serious mental condition? This post will explore the mental condition behind psychopathic behavior, how it differs from the normal human condition, and how it relates to the treatment of crime in society.

Psychopathy: What Is It?

While not always associated with crime, psychopathic behavior often comes up as a reason for and a cause of both small and horrendous crimes. A recent review indicates psychopathy is an accurate indicator of a person’s susceptibility to criminal behavior and violence.

“Although psychopaths make up only 4% of the total population, they represent about 50% of serial rapists, as well as a significant proportion of persistent wife batterers. Overall, psychopaths are twice as likely to reoffend as other criminals, and three times as likely to commit violent acts again after being convicted.” (Copley 2008)

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PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury: Trauma Inside Out

by Drew Matott and Drew Cameron
by Drew Matott and Drew Cameron
By Zoë H. Wool

Jake was fond of saying that even though he had become dumber, he wasn’t quite dumb enough. He knew that the improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq had mangled his body, brain and self.

Jake (a pseudonym) lost 30 IQ points due to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) from that IED blast. According to the military, he was still smart enough to function and hold down a job, so they didn’t plan to include TBI in his disability rating.

He fought them on this, just as he fought them on the decision not to amputate his leg. After countless surgeries and rehabilitation techniques, his leg was almost useless, allowing him maybe 30 minutes of use before it started rebelling against its reconstructed form. The pain that caused was excruciating; he simply couldn’t use it more.

Eventually Jake won his battle to lose his leg. It was the best thing that happened to him during the year I got to know him while doing my dissertation fieldwork at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. (yes, that Walter Reed).

Dealing with, or writing about, TBI is rarely as clear as an amputation. The same is true of TBI’s nearly constant companion, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). TBI and PTSD are not injuries that you can see, unlike a lost leg. Despite the high numbers of TBI and PTSD cases from Iraq and Afghanistan, the relationship of these conditions to more obvious forms of combat trauma remains a fraught one: Witness the debate about PTSD and the Purple Heart.

Most people think that the Purple Heart, that most iconic of military honors, is awarded to American military members injured in combat. As with most issues military, it is not quite that simple.

In 2008, after months of consultation, the decision was made not to award the Purple Heart to those suffering from PTSD because, in part, the medal “recognizes those individuals wounded to a degree that requires treatment by a medical officer, in action with the enemy or as the result of enemy action where the intended effect of a specific enemy action is to kill or injure the service member.” PTSD doesn’t count.

Though the decision was officially framed in rather bureaucratic terms, the debate which surrounded it raises much deeper issues about the nature of trauma. Thinking through these issues has led me to think about the Cartesian split between the (internal) mind and the (external) body and the nature of trauma inside and out.

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Cynthia Mahmood and Political Violence

Cynthia Mahmood is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and a great colleague of mine. She is also now a star on YouTube. Here Cynthia explains how she approaches understanding political violence as an anthropologist:

About six minutes in, Cynthia discusses the present case of Pakistan, and expounds further in a press release accompanying the video, U.S. must help calm nuclear-armed Pakistan.

“Right now, we’re finally seeing that the heartland of the region’s instability, in fact, is in Pakistan, and that the problem President Obama is having to deal with is not just what to do about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but what to do about the very serious and urgent danger that a nuclear-armed nation is on the verge of either collapse or takeover by radical Islamists.”

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Disparity, Disorder, and Diversity

cropped_copy_of_sampson_photo_by_tony_rinaldo
Robert Sampson has just published Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited in the British Journal of Sociology (BJS). It comes out of the annual BJS lecture that Sampson had the honor to give last fall. This paper focuses on both objective and subjective disorder, in particular highlighting the importance of subjective disorder for understanding the impact of disparity.

In his paper Sampson is basically taking on the Broken Windows approach to disorder, that visible and quite real signs of disorder encourage people to engage in criminal and other deviant acts. In one sense, Sampson wants to bring Durkheim back into the picture, that anomie – or a spirit or sense of disorder – is also vital to sociology.

As he says, “My general thesis is that perceptions of disorder constitute a fundamental dimension of social inequality at the neighborhood level and perhaps beyond… I argue that the grounds on which perceptions of disorder are formed are contextually shaped by social conditions that go well beyond the usual suspects of observed disorder and poverty, a process that in turn molds reputations, reinforces stigma and influences the future trajectory of an area (6).”

Sampson brings an intriguing mix of photoethnography, historical and theoretical analysis, and quantitative data from Chicago. His main thrust is to say that “because the link between cues of disorder and perception is socially mediated, it is malleable and thus subject to change.” He wants to get away from a mono-causal view of disorder to an understanding of disorder as something more complex and interactive, as these two contrasting figures from his paper show.

sampson-disorder-as-cause

sampson-perceiving-disorder

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Forever at War: Veterans’ Everyday Battles with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

ptsd-iwo-jima“To this day, every time I smell firecrackers or fire arms being shot, I feel like I am right back there. All I have to do is close my eyes and I see the whole scenario over and over again. I can’t erase it.”

Hundreds of thousands of US veterans are not able to leave the horrors of war on the battlefield. They bring the combat home and re-experience it in their minds each and every day, no matter how much time has passed.

“I don’t like people. I just live my life.”

Many PTSD veterans live a life riddled with divorce, unemployment, and loneliness because they are unable to form lasting social networks within civilian life. It is not uncommon for a war veteran plagued with PTSD to desire a solitary life in the mountains. One informant described Montana as the ideal locale – far away and quiet.

“I should have buried him.”

This veteran is still tormented by the fact he did not give an honorable burial to a fellow soldier. He knows he would have met a similar fate if he tried to leave his foxhole; yet his inability to act haunts his memory. He asks himself everyday why he didn’t even try to honor his fallen comrade. He also has never been able to justify why he wasn’t the soldier left unburied on that remote Pacific island.

“I didn’t even have the motivation to kill myself.”

Many of these men and women believe their situation will never improve. Some contemplate suicide as their only relief from the symptoms of PTSD. A number of the veterans we spoke with had thought about or even tried to end their own lives. They also participate in risky activities, threatening their life in a deliberate yet indirect way.

“I always feel like there is someone behind me – following me.”

Being on edge is the only way to survive in combat. Unfortunately, many PTSD veterans are unable to readjust within the civilian world. Everyday life becomes a battlefield.

Something as mundane as walking through a crowded grocery store aisle can be a source of intense anxiety for a veteran suffering from PTSD. Overwhelmed by a feeling that the shoppers behind them are enemies, PTSD veterans always feel as if they are under attack. A trigger as simple as the clashing of shopping carts can make them jump in fear of an imminent explosion. They are forever at war.

OUTREACH

Over the course of 4 months, South Bend veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have revealed their daily realities to us, five undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame. In conjunction with a course taught by Dr. Daniel Lende entitled Researching Disease: Methods in Medical Anthropology, we have engaged in community-based research with members and supporters of PTSD, Vets, Inc. Here, with the approval and encouragement of these vets, we seek to give their experiences a well-deserved voice.

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Bad Boys or Bad Science

So here’s a recent New Scientist title: “Bad Boys Can Blame Their Behaviour on Hormones.”

All I can think is: New Scientist, Old School. Old, as in nature-nurture old and biological determinism old. Old as in moldy, rusted, failing ideas old.

But it’s not just New Scientist. Discover matches New Scientist with, “Teenage Hoodlums Can Blame Bad Behavior on Hormones.” And The Daily Mail delivers “Now Teenage Thugs Can Blame Their Hormones for Bad Behaviour.”

So what’s the problem? Well, it’s two-fold. First are journalists playing out a cultural script just like they subscribe to old-school cultural determinism. And second is some bad research that, not coincidentally, helps the journalists act like cultural automatons.

The cultural model goes like this: stereotypes, then blame, then biology. Take a stereotype we fear (“we” meaning journalists and readers alike). Bring in the politics and ideology of blame – hey, there’s a reason they are not like us, and why they threaten us. Invoke a cause, generally biological (though cultural causes come up too), outside of our particular realm of control. Hormones, nothing we can do about that, it means they were bad from the get-go. So we’re right to fear them and better make sure they don’t hurt us, whatever it takes.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the photos that accompany the articles. At the Daily Mail, a hooded guy point his hand like a gun at us the reader. Over at Discover, a crazed man with a clenched fist yells in our faces.

We all know journalists will play to stereotypes and will get research wrong and so forth. But in this case, like in most of the biologically-oriented research about complex human phenomena, the research only feeds into journalists typing out the normal crap.

The article in question is “Cortisol Diurnal Rhythm and Stress Reactivity in Male Adolescents with Early-Onset or Adolescence-Onset Conduct Disorder” (full access) by Graeme Fairchild, Stephanie van Goozen et al. and appears in the October 2008 issue of Biological Psychiatry. Neurocritic gives us the overview of the article if you don’t want to read the whole thing. (While I liked the Bad Boys music, I could have done with some more criticism in this particular Neurocritic post – but that’s okay, I’m going to play the bad boy this time.) Here’s the popular take from New Scientist on the article:

Out-of-control boys facing spells in detention or anti-social behaviour orders can now blame it all on their hormones. The “stress hormone” cortisol – or low levels of it – may be responsible for male aggressive antisocial behaviour, according to new research. The work suggests that the hormone may restrain aggression in stressful situations. Researchers found that levels of cortisol fell when delinquent boys played a stressful video game, the opposite of what was seen in control volunteers playing the same game.

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