At least 17 dead in Florida School Shooting

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"Gordon Weekes, one of Cruz's public defenders, said he believed Cruz has been placed on suicide watch.
He said the defense team would be exploring mental health issues and "the possibility of autism."

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/16/us/s ... index.html

Seems we may be hearing about this for a while.

The unfortunate thing is that the guy really believes in what he did; otherwise, he would have shot himself.

It’s quite plausible he’s on suicide watch. Conditions in prison alone can induce a desire to “do one’s self.”

This goes WAY beyond autism. There’s no autism in what he did.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 16 Feb 2018, 11:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

Correct. This is psychopathy. It is neither a feature nor a bug where autism is concerned. It is a separate disorder entirely.

One of the survivors was shielding (successfully) his autistic younger brother, who takes his special ed classes at the same school, and was (of course!) even more frightened and confused than everyone else!

Just so we're clear we are most likely not talking about psychosis either. Most truly psychotic people (as in schizophrenia) are pretty harmless. I rather dislike the term "Psychopath" and prefer "sociopath" for people like this, but maybe that's just me.

^^ Nothing psychotic about it, and none was implied.

I use both terms. I prefer "sociopath" for the less spectacularly violent ones whose monstrosity is largely concealed, and "psychopath" for the ones whose monstrosity is on full public display. Both are monsters. Neither are, de facto, autistic. Or psychotic.

The CBS radio news led with Cruz having Autism as the intro to a huge story about the school shootings. I think the leading in was "Autistic school shooter murders 17 fellow classmates" Super...

My one media friend says they are not allowed to use the word Aspergers now as that diagnosis does exist in the US. The same would go for using Manic-Depression. The diagnostic term is Bipolar Disorder.

It blew my socks off that the news media just rolled out autism without waiting. Can a school release stuff like an IEP or other medical information?

For all we know, Cruz might have told the police himself.

His attorney said he is autistic and has depression in open court. Prior to that published reports said a cousin and a unidentified relative said he is autistic.

I have a thread about people using autism be it defence attorneys or relatives to gain sympathy and get judges to give lower sentences which has at times worked. This is by far the most high profile case.

The problem is that from a diagnostic perspective the assumption by court psychologists that autism is an "empathy disorder" so automatically used to explain behavior in male mass shooters

According to this article the assumption is flawed
https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access ... iew=mobile

Nueroscience assumes that malfunction in mirror nuerons in people with autism leads to a cascading series of processes leading to empathy disorder. However lack of empathy is not a DSM diagnostic criteria (repititious behavior, lack of social communication and difficulties with social interaction. Court psychologists make the error of assuming that social interaction deficits equates to poor level of empathy.

The assumed dysfunctional element of empathy in autism is still unclear (according to the article), and seems to be no sufficient empirical studies that have addressed the subject. According to available research, seem to be affected both fundamental mechanisms of empathy: the aspect linked to the perception process-action process and the metacognitive aspect of self-regulation of emotions.

A more plausible explanation for mass shooting is comorbid personality disorder or more specifically narcissistic personality disorder which is more clearly a empathy disorder.

Shooters like Adam Lanza, Anders Brevik. Martin Bryant and now Cruz seem to all have a burning desire to quench psychopathic desire and narcissistic attention seeking by going on a mass shooting. I think there is a lack of evidence that autism alone is responsible. I wonder therefore if its irresponsible or unethical for judges and court psychologists to even entertain these ideas.

I don't think Mrs Redpill is the authority on if he had a diagnoses or not.

My 16-year-old is anxious and depressed, says many of his classmates are the same.

I'm looking seriously into the feasibility of stepping up my retirement/expat schedule. I think he'd be safer finishing up high school in Belize.

I think in these cases rather than psychopath or sociopath and especially autistic being used, the singular and significant designation is homicidal.

All the usual why did he do it questions; was it autism, was it psychosis, was it depression, was it whatever? No, the reason why he did it is because he is homicidal.

@cyberdad: the assumption that the autistic are universally lacking in empathy is *definitely* flawed (I know you know this). Many of us are high-empathy - including quite a few of us here. Funny how our voices, somehow, never seem to be heard.

Defining us as non-empathetic provides a convenient excuse to "other" us, when the supposedly normal world needs a pat answer and a ready scapegoat.

(This will seem like a digression, but it's not: I just, within the past two weeks, saw yet another newspaper article that expressed, with great shock, the fact that human infants feel pain and therefore should receive anesthesia. THIS is how the "normal" world thinks... if whoever/whatever it is can't speak to me in my own language, whoever/whatever it is should be defined as an object. Even their own infants! This is so horrifying that it is literally making me nauseous.)

@Ezra: right to the point, and right on target - as usual (I'd smile here, but this is too grim for smiles). That's the bottom line, and the only thing that really matters now.

It could be possibly be some sort of psychosis.

I read one report saying that voices "told him" to do this (kill at the school).

Your assumption is very wrong.

I fail to understand how you could be so wrong.

Adam Lanza has been confirmed and Mercer was said by his mother to be autistic the others are speculation.

People have made a cottage industry out of diagnosing celebreties and histortical figures as autistic. The intent is noble and good to show others and ourselves that autistics and different people can accomplish things. As we see it is not so good when it what we the autistic community had a part in creating turns around and bites us in the ass.

Cruz was also depressed and appearently suicidal common co morbids of autism. It is convenient to say it was not the autism but the co morbid that made him do it. Maybe that is true or maybe these are autistic traits. Either way I do not think we are going get away with that much longer.

It is not going to be easy but the mass shooter stereotype like all stereotypes just might have a grain of truth to it. Even if not there is no hiding from it now. Looks like defense attorney is going to use an autism defense.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 16 Feb 2018, 9:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There seems to be a miss-attribution error in attributing causality of mass shooting to autism when infact we have no way of knowing what exactly is the underlying contributing factor

My problem here is not the media looking to pin something on the shooters or some in the autistic community trying to deny the fact autism is a common disorder found in shooters but with the specialists who seem to be feeding associative (not causal) information to the media and to the courts. While the information about a shooters psychiatric history shouldn't be banned the way it's communicated should be more carefully handled so as not to unnecessarily further stigmatize the autistic community...