28% of murderers thought to have suffered from ASD

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Secondary deviance - Deviant behavior that results from being publicly labeled as deviant and treated as an outsider. When someone is given a criminal label, they are likely to internalize the label and integrate it into their self-concept, then act out accordingly in future criminal behavior (situations we define as real become real in their consequences).

There was a thread about this yesterday...I don't see the big deal so less than half the murderers might be on the autism spectrum, a least half of the ones that are also have brain damage and histories of abuse or mistreatment is essentially what the article said. So all it is saying is the combination of autism, brain damage and psychological damage through abuse/mistreatment might contribute to violent behavior in some cases....the article was very specific about how this hardly indicates people with autism, brain damage or who have had a bad history are more likely to be murderers but rather with this knowledge maybe some individuals could be helped before they reach the point of killing others.

So I don't see what everyone is up in arms about, would we prefer a study based on false facts that claims no one with autism has ever committed murder and that we are in fact incapable of said behavior? At least this study indicates perhaps some people need help earlier on before all the anger and resentment towards others grows and gets to the point of acting out violently. Also since its only 28% that means the other 80% don't have autism so its not like its saying we're all murderers waiting to happen.

Perhaps that has something to do with the fact there are less aspies/HFA than neurotypicals....and since it is a neurological condition that causes difficulties lots of people with autism are struggling just to get by as is and lack the ability to be succesful(by societies standards) and either are unable to or don't get a chance to improve society. Article never implies anything negative can be traced to autism.

So you don't think someone who gets severely bullied could ever possibly snap and go about it in a violent manner? I could see it happening, though as a rule suicide tends to be more common with that sort of situation.

The problem here is that fabricated facts if only stated in the form of facts, e.g. as numbers, easily become facts, as is already seen in here.

None of the murderers in the study had a diagnosis of autism. The researchers made the diagnoses post crime with an underlying objective to diagnose the murderers ? it?s an intentional interpretation of few researchers that hence is corrupted already in its starting point. You see somewhat what you are focused on seeing. These diagnoses are as valid as is diagnosing some famous scientists decades after they died based on some ambiguous anecdotes.

I don?t find it problematic that all human aspects of life are to be found also in the autistic population, but I find it problematic that this study is no true statistic at all.

The media representation of autism becomes the conceptual representation of autism in our everyday life and in the people we meet. Every time I?ve seen some casual person bringing autism up, the connection and context has been negative: school shootings, crazy, violent acts etc., even when in reality there is no link to autism in the cases they refer to. For the common person autism has become the "new schizophrenia? as an explanatory cause. That is the explanation the media has offered. That is what autism represents to them besides possibly the only other media representation that is this as one sided picture of a genius.

No. I was severely bullied and when I had too much of it I bit someone as well as beating them down.

The thing about snapping is, like, it happens in the moment. It happens right then and right there. It's not something that gets you to go off, get a gun, get ammunation, and walk through a school shooting people down.

The entire notion of people snapping and going on a murder spree like that is a rationalization.

Like even the iconic shooting of that variety turned out to not be like that. In this case, I mean Columbine.

I agree with everything VisInsita posted.

Why are you so willing to accept a study that misrepresents autism and autistic people to the point of basically saying "1 in 4 murderers are autistic?" Especially when using the study itself, it's more like 1 in 40, maybe, because these diagnoses are not rigorous diagnoses like most of us go through when we actually get diagnosed with autism.

So you ask why people are up in arms? That question answers itself. We hate being lied to. Why are you willing to accept being lied to or lied about?

How can it not be real life? I have actually read about some abusers having an abusive childhood and how a school shooter was bullied. Of course not all abused victims grow up to be abusers nor do all bullied victims end up going on a killing spree. My aunt ended up becoming a schizophrenic after getting raped but that illness came eventually down the road but not all rape victims end up with a mental illness afterwards nor do all child abuse victims get a personality disorder or something psychological.

Correlation is not causation. Just because someone was abused and becomes an abuser does not mean that it's typical for abuse victims to become abusers,

There are basically two factors that are most likely to be associated with spree killers: They're white, and they're men.

And the media is never going to discuss that openly, so it has to be autistic people or schizophrenic people or any other half-baked half-assed explanation that lets them get around admitting that white guys can be horrible people without needing a diagnosis to justify it.

Wow, this study is beyond insulting. Even if 28% of serial killers possibly have AS, it's still clearly safer to be on the spectrum than not, because 72% of the rest of the serial killers are NT.

What group would you feel safer around?

I am actually not surprised that a notable percentage of these people have ASD, not because of the disorders directly but the psychological stress from treatment as a result of them.

Let's face it, having ASD sets us up to be labeled as different, you don't have to look hard on this forum to find problems this causes. I'll bet most of these criminals who have ASD also had a rough childhood. We know that some parents do not treat children with mental disorders as they should. Is it really so hard to imagine a child who grows up in such an environment could become a person who is more capable of committing murder than most people? I don't.

So yes, it does make sense to me that these criminals could have these disorders but it does not mean that the disorders are the direct cause of the people becoming dangerous criminals.

But they don't have ASDs. They're accused of it, after the fact, by the media. Adam Lanza is the only one I can think of with a pre-existing diagnosis.

I had a rough childhood. It made me unusually compassionate. Why can't I, and other people similarly affected, be representative of abuse victims sometimes? Because it's just as likely to go that way as the other. It's about how you respond to the bad things that happen to you--the choices you make, how you deal with the near-inevitable emotional fallout.

First we get victimized by the abuser; then we get accused of being potential murderers. Bad science, and it's hurting people who've already been hurt enough.

Adam Lanza's father said himself that he always thought there was something else than ASD ... and I completely agree with him. I think he was probably a sociopath, and maybe other conditions as well.

But it's still a high statistic because autism affects 1% of the population. So 27-28% of murderers having an ASD is very high. Not that I agree with this study, it's too early and too little data to make such conclusions.



You said it before me.



Confirmation bias again, I'm absolutely certain you and every other poster here wouldn't be up in arms if there was a study that said 28% of geniuses have ASDs. The over-diagnosis culture isn't restricted to murderers either.



Retrospectively diagnosing Adam Lanza with an anti-social personality disorder and schizophrenia is no better than speculating that a lot of high profile murderers were autistic.

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Actually, I think antisocial personality/sociopathy are the diagnoses that are easiest to apply retroactively. They are mostly based on a person's actions, namely criminal activity, disregard for consequences, disregard for others' welfare. Those things are rather easy to observe, and the most striking of them--the deliberate harming of other people--is unique to sociopathy. So you're left with, either this person is a sociopath, or they have the most significant symptom of sociopathy.

But most sociopaths do fly under the radar. They never get in serious trouble because they know better, they know it's easier to get along with others. So, just because someone is a sociopath doesn't mean they are a potential mass murderer. (And most criminals aren't sociopaths.)

The trouble with drawing conclusions about either criminals or sociopaths, after retroactively diagnosing mass-murders with sociopathy, would be this: If you diagnosed people with sociopathy retroactively, after they committed some crime that made it glaringly obvious that they were probably sociopaths, you would get an unbalanced, unusually negative idea of who sociopaths are and what they tend to be like.

(And yes, that's exactly what they are doing with autism--and it's even worse, because unlike sociopaths, autistic people don't have an increased risk of committing violent crimes at all.)

You are all being way too harsh on this scientific study. I see nothing wrong with it, and I do not believe there is any reason for the outrage I see on this thread.

1. The study is specifically about serial killers, not murderers in general. Since serial killing is so rare, the authors have a very small pool of data from which to draw conclusions. The researchers readily admit to this limitation. Should we stop studying serial killers altogether, simply because we don't have much high quality data to use in scientific studies? It would be impractical to do population studies to look for trends. If we took 1,000,000 random people and asked how many of them will eventually become mass murderers the number would be somewhere in the region of 0 or 1. That's not exactly useful information.

2. The study is about serial killers not about autism. An example to explain: One thing you will notice is that serial killers are overwhelmingly male. That tells us something interesting about serial killers. But does it tell us anything interesting about men in general? NO! Because the likelihood of any given man becoming a serial killer is vanishingly small. The same applies to autism. Even if a lot of serial killers do have autism, that tells us nothing at all about the nature of autistic people in general.

3. One thing that can't really be disputed is that serial killers are very often victims of abuse that has been allowed to continue throughout childhood. People who have "slipped through the cracks" and been neglected by their family and society as a whole. Therefore, if they do have ASD it is highly unlikely to be diagnosed by the time they come to commit their crimes. Furthermore, most will already have been adults by the time mass diagnosis of ASD took off in the late 90's/early 00's.

4. The authors of the study repeatedly state that the data they are drawing from is shaky, so you can hardly throw stones at the research for that reason. I read it more as a suggestion that further research needs to be done, rather than as something that is drawing any definitive conclusions about "The nature of serial killers".

5. It is an undisputable fact that a large proportion of literature on known serial killers mentions possible ASD .(Whether or not that literature is reliable is an entirely separate question). Its the job of research to point out patterns like this. Would you rather researchers simply ignored certain patterns that they noticed and did not publish them, for fear of offending certain groups of people? Would you rather the paper was never published at all, even though it provides us with new and interesting information in the form of a literature review?