ABC News: Armchair Psychologist
Here we go again. A gunman fires on an unsuspecting crowd and the American media leap to conclusions about the shooter’s state of mind.
The most reckless example of this, following the early Friday morning killing spree in an Aurora, CO, movie theater, which left as many as 14 dead and dozens more wounded, was a deplorable article from ABC News.
No sooner had police arrested 24-year-old James Holmes, whom witnesses said walked into a screening of the latest Batman film and started shooting, than the network began to speculate about mental health.
“Psychology experts say it’s hard to know what Holmes’s state of mind was before his alleged rampage, but emerging details suggest he was a deeply disturbed individual,” its article read.
Ya think?
ABC News reported that it spoke with “several psychologists” to come to this nuanced conclusion, and while it acknowledged that none of them had “direct knowledge of Holmes,” it proceeded to draw wild conclusions from their comments.
Take this gem, in which the network slyly turns statements about the general characteristics of madmen into a specific diagnosis:
Psychologists said shooters who go on rampages, targeting random people with no apparent motive, may or may not have a psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia. Rather, Holmes was likely living in a world of an alternate reality, suffering from delusions of threats and making plans to make right things that he perceived were wrong.
As I wrote last year, whether it’s the gunman opening fire on a crowd, a dictator brutally killing his own people, or a simply a celebrity having a temper tantrum, the news media have a penchant for “covering crazy.” And in their rush to psychoanalyze, they often violate the “Goldwater rule,” an ethical standard adopted by the American Psychiatric Association, which warns [PDF; see section 7.3] that:
On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.