Judgments and conclusions are often made just as quickly as they are frivolous: Someone kills five people with a bow and arrow, just like that, on the street, only a madman can do that. But the matter is often not that clear, as we know from other attacks.
“The psychiatization of terrorism trivializes it because it reduces it to the individual pathology,” the forensic psychiatrist Nahlah Saimeh told this newspaper after the massacre in Paris. “So far, no personality disorder highly specific to terrorists has been found.” The suspicion that only madmen could kill in this way is also related to the fact that for decades large parts of Europe were fairly peaceful. But one should only think of the time of National Socialism, when apparently normal family fathers systematically murdered. Humans have always been able and ready to kill.
Little is known about the 37-year-old Kongsberg assassin. The fact that he has converted to Islam gives the police at least one reason to investigate suspected terrorism. Perhaps he is one of those young people who cannot cope with the complexity of the modern world, and one who has radicalized himself over the years and whose deed is supposed to make him famous for a few days or weeks. However, there is also evidence of a mental disorder in the perpetrator, although the exact diagnosis is not yet known. At the moment, one can only speculate about the significance of this fact.
It is clear, however, that mentally ill people are usually more likely to be victims of criminal offenses than to be perpetrators themselves. According to a study in British Medical Journalpublished a few years ago, they are murdered five times more often than the average population. However, one should not hide the fact that there are indications of an increased tendency to violence in certain diagnoses, even if psychiatrists do not say this so loudly for honorable reasons: They do not want to contribute to stigmatization under any circumstances.
In Germany, schizophrenic people commit 30 fatal acts of violence every year
Nevertheless, the available studies show that people with schizophrenic psychosis are 2.4 to 5.2 times more likely to commit a fatal act of violence. Precise statements are difficult because the larger the number of unreported cases in the diagnosis, the greater the factor: Serious acts of violence are hardly overlooked, and mental disorders are frequent. And then there are discussions about causality.
Schizophrenia is often linked to substance abuse, which in turn can lead to violence. Who do you blame? The psychiatrists Asmus Finzen and Georg Schomerus still estimate in an analysis in the specialist journal Psychiatric practicethat one must reckon with around 30 murders and manslaughter by schizophrenic people in Germany every year. To put it into perspective: In this country, 800,000 to 1.7 million people suffer from psychosis, a good 30 percent of the population, according to the broad definition, are mentally ill once a year.