Mental illness is a disease.
So is diabetes and so is cancer.
If Stephen Paddock – who massacred 58 people and wounded more than 500 others in Las Vegas earlier this month – had diabetes, would he be labeled a diabetic mass murderer?
Absent a cogent well-fitting narrative for Paddock’s motive, an undiagnosed or latent mental illness may become the default reason given for his carnage.
And that could be an unintentional denigration of an entire class of innocent individuals – the tens of millions among us who suffer from mental illness.
The majority of people with mental illness seek help, especially now that the stigma long attached to it has weakened to an appreciable extent. Not one such person wants Paddock to be known as having suffered from that illness.
Let’s not classify him as obsessive compulsive for his meticulous surgical planning, or assume he was a sociopath for his profound lack of empathy and indifference to life, or tag him with a narcissistic personality disorder for believing he was godlike.
Sheriff Joseph Lombardo, chief of the Las Vegas Police Department, has the grim task of identifying the “why.”
Indeed, an important part of working with victims of abuse and violence is to determine the why.
A victim of sexual abuse wants to know why a predator chose to hurt him or her. Was it the predator’s sickness, or did the victim do anything wrong?
So too the victim of domestic violence. Was it her husband’s uncontrolled rage, or was she somehow at fault?
We see this in our work at OHEL with victims of trauma. Each victim searches for a reason. Why me, why my family? Why do bad things happen to good people?
Getting to the “why” of the horror in Las Vegas will not mitigate the anguish of the loved ones of those who were killed or the suffering and long-term trauma of those who were wounded.
Nor will it lessen the enormity of the loss of so many lives or attenuate the sheer brutality that inflicted unimaginable pain on hundreds of families, a city, and a country.
But it may help to blunt the emotional pain and reconcile a void.
Let’s label Paddock for what he was: Evil.
He was a diabolically evil person.
The 58 people he killed, who ranged in age from 20 to 68, were executed. They were executed by a man they did not know and who had no idea how many of the more than 20,000 concertgoers he was shooting at would be hit.
Have you read the profiles of the victims? They were everyday people reveling in life; each of them the polar opposite of the murderer.
What would our reaction be were we to hear that an ISIS fighter summarily executed 58 people? Would we search for clues of mental illness? A family history of violence?
Our revulsion would overwhelm any curiosity to know more about such an evil subhuman.
Could it be that in his formative years Paddock suffered greatly from a neglectful and absent father who he learned was one of the FBI’s most wanted criminals?
Was he angry with his father? Worse, was he jealous of him? Did he think he could outdo him in terms of notoriety?
Mass murderers seek fame. They want to be remembered for their heinous acts. Who can cause the most chaos, the most damage?
What is the ultimate punishment for a fame-seeking narcissist? Ignore him. Label him a coward. Make him invisible.
In the closing scene of Harrison Ford’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” we see the ark placed in a cavernous storage facility the size of a small island. The building is so large and the ark so infinitesimally small by comparison. The purposeful imagery is to convey that the ark is locked away, never to be found again.
So too should the memory of Stephen Paddock, a coward seeking fame at the expense of so many innocent victims, be locked away – erased and forgotten from this earth. That would be the greatest punishment of all.
Paddock appeared from oblivion and should return to oblivion.
May the families and friends of all who were murdered, along with the wounded survivors and their families and friends, be comforted in their unimaginable sorrow.