People doing things that you consider irrational is not automatically "mental illness." To conflate the two is both to absolve criminals and terrorists of moral responsibility and to stigmatize the mentally ill, most of whom are not homicidal.
Unless you have specific evidence of a particular mental illness, this kind of statement is irresponsible.
A position doesn't become "relativism" just because you don't want to hear it. It's not relativism to point out that people have responsibility for their actions, nor to point out that mental illnesses do not generally make people homicidal.
Regardless of what is ultimately found out about the case, people were claiming mental illness before they had information to support that, as they do in nearly all of these cases.
Mental illness is described in terms of deviance from "normal" behavior and conformance to generally accepted morals. I think this is trivially proven from a lay read of the DSM.
A shooting spree in reaction to an website's policy change is both immoral and irrational. No conceivable context would make that chain of actions acceptable.
How could one look at this action and assume mental illness does not exist?
It's not relativism to point out that people have responsibility for their actions, nor to point out that mental illnesses do not generally make people homicidal.
Saying mental illness exists based on their behavior is not even close to the same thing as saying that they did not have culpability for their actions, and it's both unfair and disingenuous to imply I did.
>Mental illness is described in terms of deviance from "normal" behavior and conformance to generally accepted morals. I think this is trivially proven from a lay read of the DSM.
Deviation from normal behavior and generally accepted morals is absolutely not a definition of mental illness. A bank robber isn't mentally ill by virtue of robbing a bank. I don't believe you've ever read the DSM in any of its editions.
>No conceivable context would make that chain of actions acceptable.
No one said they were acceptable.
>How could one look at this action and assume mental illness does not exist?
People do horrible, outrageous things without diagnosable mental illnesses all the time.
>Saying mental illness exists based on their behavior is not even close to the same thing as saying that they did not have culpability for their actions, and it's both unfair and disingenuous to imply I did.
The assumption that any horrible, irrational crime must be due to mental illness--obviously this diminishes culpability. Have you never heard of pleading insanity? If someone is genuinely out of their mind, they cannot be held responsible for their actions in the same way a normal person would be held responsible.
This I just wrong from the start. If there’s a single overarching definition of mental illness, it’s “clinical significance” and not deviation from the norm. Of course it’s not that simple either, but it is a common thread throughout all of them.