cyberdad wrote:
It was interesting reading the facebook comments below the article.
Quite clearly the commentators (mostly female) don't understand concepts such as mental illness, mental disorders or what makes people psychopaths.
Young men are very self-conscious about their status in society in the same way as young women. Most young girls suffer body image and eating issues due to media depictions of "ideal beauty". In the same way young men are influenced by the media to believe that you have to have sex to prove yourself as a man otherwise you are "social loser". This creates (I suspect) a feeling of low self-esteem in young men who want to have sex (because they think from television everyone else is doing it) but can't get a date. I imagine in some men (such as the young 19 yr old autistic man in the article) this feeling leads to sexual frustration and couple this with poor executive control and you have a man who is very high risk of lashing out/externalizing his frustrations.
I'm in no way supporting what he did, but am disappointed that sexual frustration in young men seems to be ignored in psychological circles as a major social issue whereas eating disorders in young girls are considered fashionable/topical for research. There seems to be a taboo with dealing with young men's mental health in relation to sex?
People tend to forget how these kinds of serious self esteem issues can be brought up by a long history of rejection from peers, bullying, abuse, poor parenting, among other things. It's so much easier for those looking from the outside to scapegoat mental illness rather than take a good look at what brought up this person to become a monster to begin with.
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If Jesus died for my sins, then I should sin as much as possible, so he didn't die for nothing.