Hey, everybody looks like Catherine's he already. Katherine, she just got some mail from us today. She was our winner that got the notebook that we bought in the UK, the Crime UK notebook, So she was our monthly school No September when we were over there.
So I just sent it yesterday.
She's so close that she just got it today.
But we're here, We're back.
My bangs and I are back, are here making their appearance. Scott, when are you gonna do something different with your.
Hair or to keep it from receiving any furtheratures of us from internship?
You gotta go tea. We need to put that somewhere.
Oh I did, Yeah, I have just the go tee no mustache. When that was and then the Sister Wive show started and I was like, no.
Time for you associate me with them.
Not gonna associate with that guy.
So funny.
Yeah, it's been a while since we've been here on a live stream. Thank you guys for bearing with us. For sure we've missed it. This is going to be a great show to come back with too.
Yeah, our last behind the Couch was about three months ago. But remember, if you're part of Patreon, we jump on into a live stream segment called shrink Wrap whenever the inspiration hits us and whenever we can find time to do it. And because we had our very densely scheduled summer finally over with, we will be doing more of them and they're very enjoyable for us because we don't really have to do any planning at all. It's basically plug and play, jump on and start talking, and that's
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For October today, So our winner is Ashley A.
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So thank you, thank you, And as most of y'all already know because you've been around for a while, we rarely, if ever do interviews on our podcast because we love the opportunity to have a live forum with our guests who kindly agree to appear on our show. This month is no exception, as we have yet another fantastic guest, Doctor Roggy gergis an expert on psychosis and violence and mental illness just literally an academic and researcher after our hearts,
because this guy is the real deal. We are so happy to have you. Thank you so much, Doctor gergis Roggy for blessing us with your parents. No, no, exaggeration. We appreciate it.
Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be with you.
Yes, So I'm going to do a little introduction. So bear with us for a moment, then we will absolutely jump into it.
So.
Doctor Gergis is a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and New York State Psychiatric Institute. His research often employs advanced imaging techniques such as MRI and PET scans alongside clinical trials to explore the complexities of psychosis and violence and mental illness, which is something
our audience can't get enough about. He has received substantial grant funding as a principal investigator from organizations including the National Institute of Mental Health, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and the Stanley Medical Research Institute.
So doctor Gergis is an accomplished author. He's published over a one hundred peer reviewed scientific papers and numerous books on severe mental illness, including his recent exploration of the intersection between religion and psychiatry entitled on Satan Demons and Psychiatry, Exploring mental illness in the Bible as a practice in Christian Doctor Gergis brings a unique perspective to his work merging clinical rigor with a deep understanding of historical and
religious influences on mental health, and over the past four years, he's worked extensively with colleagues to construct one of the most comprehensive mass murder repositories in existence, named the Columbia Mass Murder Database. First of all, I'm not sure how we're even going to get past the tip of the iceberg and everything that we and our audience would want
to know about you, But welcome, doctor Roggy. Before we dive into the Columbia mass Murder Database, can you tell us just a little bit about your personal background and what led you to this particular career. Our audience always loves to hear about people's journeys.
Well, thank you again, doctor Scott and doctor Shiloh for having me. I went to medical school knowing nothing about medicine, knowing in my family had been a medical doctor. I found psychiatry through a summer research internship that I did, and I knew right away that I wanted to focus
on schizophrenia. So fast forward to finishing residency at Columbia and then fellowship, I pursued research in my area of research is schizophrenia, like you mentioned, primarily dealing with path of physiology and development of medications and those sorts of things. Around twenty nineteen, a colleague of mine, doctor Gary Ricato, and I really wanted to as definitively as possible answer the question of how mental illness and mass shootings are related.
So we put together this database and we tried to bring as much of an evidence based, rigorous research design to this question.
Thank you so much for sharing about that.
You know, I think there are those of us in the mental health field where psychotic disorders are very gravitating towards us and or us towards it, and then there are those of us that are like, Nope, absolutely not what I wanted to do, And.
That's exactly my experienced percent. And most people, of course run the side of not wanting to be exposed. And I'm talking about psychiatrists in that college just not wanting to be exposed to psychoticsors in any way.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean I was also in either practicum or internship, and you know, looking in areas around southern California and where you might continue to do postdoc work. One of the big places that a lot of forensic psychologists were going was Patent State Hospital, and I saw a documentary on Patent State Hospital and said, you cannot pay me enough money to go there yet. Then I talk about well, I worked with hiers sex offenders for over a decade, and people are like, what, how could you you know?
It's just again, Scott, and I say all the time that there's just someone cut from a cloth to do absolutely every type of work under the mental health umbrella. So thank you for what you do, because it's really important work and someone has to get in there and start drilling down on some of these things. So please, I mean, can you tell us a little bit more about the Columbia mass murder database, because I know that's not just inclusive of school shootings but of so much more as well.
That's exactly right.
So, as I mentioned, I'm totally a researcher, That's all I do.
I do.
I'm a clinical researcher, one hundred percent academic. So we get doctor Gary Riccatto and I who's a psychologist who focuses on forensic issues, really wanted to apply rigorous kind of research methodologies and evidence based designs to this question. To the field of mass shootings in mass murder research, but in particularly this question of the relationship between mental illness, especially psychotic disorders, but mental illness in general and mass
shootings and mass murder. We wanted to include as many as we could so increase the sample size, and we wanted to have comparison groups.
That's critical.
As you all know, and I'm sure many of your listeners understand, it's important to have descriptive data like percentages in.
A group, et cetera. Those sorts of things.
Those are all very important, but it's also important to have comparison groups that allows us to limit bias, understand confounding like confounding variables, otheriables that affect whatever you're looking at, especially since in virtually all research, including this research, there's
no way to capture a whole population. If you were able to capture a whole population, you wouldn't necessarily need need these sourts of comparison groups either way, so we also wanted to include comparison group That's why we decided to include mass murders perpetrated with other methods in addition to mass shootings, which obviously mass.
Murders perpetrated firearms.
We figured that was probably the most comparable, least biased, or confounded comparison group. So basically we included all types of mass murders. We decided also to include mass murders perpetrated all over the world to examine, for example, differences between mass murders and mass shootings perpetrated in the States versus.
Elsewhere in the world.
Very very important questions about that sort of thing, And we decided to go back to nineteen hundred two understand how these changed over time again to be able to control for vearials that might be different between you know, modern mass shootings and modern mass murder and mass murder perpetrated in for example, the early twentieth century. So we have about twenty two hundred mass murders in our database, about sixteen hundred or seventeen one hundred of them are
mass shootings. Mass shootings definitely are more common than other types of mass murder, primarily because of the numbers of mass shootings in the United States.
Sure, can you talk a little bit about who or what you did not include what you felt like you wanted to separate out.
That's very important.
So we decided to focus on what we call and what other people call personal cause mass shootings. These are mass shootings and mass murders that have a personal motivation. So this does not include mass murder perpetrated in the context of war, date sponsored, a group sponsored terrorism, gang violence, or other types of group sponsored or affiliated mass murders. So we wanted to focus on personal cause mass murder.
And if you don't mind just talking a little bit, I mean, we've certainly discussed this in some episodes, but what seems to be so important about that personal grievance in terms of these types of mass murders, again not just talking about shootings, and maybe even with that you can talk about aside from school shootings or mass shootings, what were maybe a couple of other types of scenarios that were included.
Sure, well, that's fundamental.
It goes to motivation, and I mean, this is exactly what we all focus on. Motivation and understanding basically why someone would perpetrate a mass shooting, why someone would perpetrate a mass stabbing, why they would use a firem So the question, so one, the main question is why do people use firearms? For example, why do they not use knives? Why do they not use autom mobiles. Are why do
they use automobiles when they use automobiles. There actually have been a number of mass murders personal cause mass murders perpetrated with planes. United Airlines Flight I think six six, twenty nine, Continental Airlines Flight eleven, Egypt Air nine ninety, the German Wings, the German Wings disaster.
Many of these.
We understand state sponsored, war affiliated, group sponsored gang affiliated mass violence very well.
The motives are clearer.
It's the personal cause mass murder that we know less about we need to understand, and it is exactly those motivations that are important to us. So to take us that back to the initial question we wanted to answer, which was what is the relationship between mental illness and in mass shootings?
In particular?
This is fundamental and this covers so many questions that we probably want to try to answer and speak to today. But the top line conclusion or result, and this is based on data and these are all published, is that ment to illness is overrepresented among mass shooters, and it's primarily psychotic illness. And by overrepresented we mean overrepresented compared to the background prevalence, and that number is five percent.
So about say one to two percent of the population, for example, in the United States has a psychotic disorder. Five percent of mass shootings are attributable to or caused by a psychotic disorder, a mental illness.
That's it.
So ninety five percent of mass shootings are not caused by mental illness. They're not associated with mental illness in any way, and no other ment to illness is a major causative factor in mass shooting. That's the top line kind of result or conclusion. We can certainly go more into the data to explain how we came to that, because we came at that conclusion in many different ways. So the data are actually and the results and analysis are all very consistent.
But that's the top line kind of.
Well, I think off the bat, it is so important to just have a study done like this to set the baseline and when you said, with using some comparison groups, so we can have it to then dive into some of these other areas to ask why or isn't that
interesting or just build on it in the future. And I know from what you just said in terms of talking about that five percent, people watching this are probably going, Okay, wait what, because you know, do we focus on the guns, or do we focus on mental illness, or do we
focus on something else. However, before we get into those questions and drill down a little bit more, can you just tell us a bit about what the research showed in terms of what changed in the nineteen seventies, because certainly there was significant difference after some relative stability when it came to mass murder.
Well, that's the twenty five thousand dollars question or million dollar question or whatever. We we can speculate, I mean, we can speculate with a fair amount of certainty.
I think what you're getting.
At is that the prevalence per capita, so accounting for population growth and population in general, of mass shootings and all types of mass murder was just very stable before nineteen seventy, just very stable.
It just did not change. It was incredible.
And then starting on nineteen seventy nineteen eighty, around around that time, the rate has been increasing fourfold, fourfold things twofold for the other types of mass murder. So the
question is why is it's the case. So first to explain how ment to illness is affected or the association between ment illness and mass shootings is affected, what we have published and what is the case, is that the percentage or prevalence of mental illness among mass shooters and actually among all types of mass murders, but among my shooters,
has over the same time period actually decreased. So this is just kind of more evidence suggesting that the problem is not meant to illness and especially psychotic disorders.
It is something else.
So it's not meant to illness because people might think it had to do with deinstitutionalization and so forth, it's actually the opposite.
The proportion of.
Mass shooters and other types of mass murders mental illness has gone down since that time, So what else is going on? There are a number of potential causes of mass shootings and mass murder, and we would need to understand what has One among those is different between the early parts of the twentieth century and the later parts of the twentieth century. And now one of those is certainly gun available if we're talking about mass shootings, especially
gun availability. There's no doubt there are many other causes, and certainly if we look at the causes of mass shootings as a pie chart, for example, mental illness again accounts for about five percent of that, and then firearm access and availability and production accounts for a much larger part of the pie. And then there are other pieces of the pie also, But one factor is gun availability,
and this is very important. And again there are other factors, but the data are very clear, not just related to mass shootings, but related to all types of gun violence. There is a very strong correlation between gun production and gun violence. It's very strong. It's impossible to ignore. That's number one. Number two, there is an extremely strong relationship between and this is an inverse relationship between the strength of firearm laws and mass shootings. And again this is
per capita. Of course, this is all considering populations and population differences and growth and those sorts of things. Number three is that the prevalence or occurrence of suicide among mass shootings has also increased very substantially since that time. Now this is important because at least fifty percent are especially now now it's more than fifty percent of mass shooter especially also to some degree the other types of
mass murders. Mass shooters in particular don't just die at the time of the event, but actually take their own life at the time of the event. Either themselves or through the so called suicide by cop method. And again we've also published this. This is not incidental or coincidental. This is planned. So there's indication from before the events that these people went into the events wanting to die. That's been proven, that shown, we've published that, so that's clear.
And as you all know, the relationship between gun production, gun availability, etc. And suicide is so strong, so it's really hard to ignore the relationship between mass shootings and gun availability, and that obviously speaks directly to prevention, but other things have happened, so that's what we would refer to as a more proximal causative factor or motivation or then obviously possible preventive factor. We can go more upstream. There are other factors. So mental owns and mass shootings
in mass murder. System of mental illness is actually kind of it's its own category of mass shootings and mass murder. So if we're talking about other types of mass shootings, we can go further. So, for example, there are potential interventions such as limiting the amount that we meaning society maybe especially media, share private information or identifying information about
mass shooters. And in this case we're particularly talking about the public mass shooters, there's a I guess we'll call it a psychological profile of a public mass shooter in particular, and these are the mass shooters of which most people are most familiar. The Sandy Hook mass shooter that the Washington Navy are, and mass shooter.
Those sorts of mass.
Shooters, those are what we referred to as public mass shootings, which are actually the third most common type of mass shooting. Familiar side mass shootings are the most common type. Those are private mass shootings, which probably have different than motivating factors and maybe preventive strategies. The second most common type are the felonious mass shootings, those perpetrated as of some
sort of crime or felony. And then we have the public maschootings, which account for about fifteen percent of mass shootings. Either way, one strategy for decreasing public mass shootings is to negate or minimize the third component of the profile. So I'll go backwards. But the third component of the profile is the severe market desire for notoriety or fame. That is why these mass shootings are perpetrated in public rather than private. It's this severe desire infamy or fame
and notoriety. That's number three. Number two again going backwards, is the severe nihilism or emptiness experienced by these people, and this is almost universal. Nihilism again refers to I'm sure a lot of people understand what Nyland has been, refers to a sense of emptiness, a sense of having no severe sense of having no meaning, almost like you're not alive. There's no purpose to life, which in its
severest form than manifests as suicide. And that's why suicide is so frequent among mass and also which we have published. Although ninety percent of suicide is usually associated with some sort of psychiatric sort of that number is much less among mass shooters. So there's this epidemic of emptiness and
nihilism that we have to deal with and address. And then number one, probably the greatest again risk factor potential risk factor for masshootings in general, but also public mass shootings, is what we've discussed, and that is this It's not just availability or access to firearms, which is universal, of course, but it is in terms of just the mass shooter.
Is the market.
Affinity for or fascination with firearms. So these are the three kind of characteristics of nearly all public mass shooters. Again, we want to be sensitive, so we want to capture all of them, but we also want to be specific in terms of statistical terms when we describe this profile.
So you're blowing my mind because doctor Shiloh and I, you know, our work overlaps in our connection to law enforcement, and we get sort of the same trainings. But Shiloh gets a whole set of training taking her in this direction. I go towards threat assessment in a slightly different direction. But I love what you're talking about because I've never heard it phrase this way about, especially those categorizations you use. And I'm wondering if that sense of emptiness also has
like a then diagram overlap with empty vessel. So if there's an empty vessel there, that individual is more likely to take on some extreme rhetoric or an extreme movement. And is this something that applies to the work that you're doing too. That's one part that we may have a comment on. But the other thing is what is the fascination with weapons? Is that our culture is our culture teaching these people that are vulnerable in a search for meaning, that we're teaching them that this is the
magical sword that gives you power. And if we were to sort of do a metaphor, do you have any comment on.
That, You're one percent right. I definitely have a comment on it, and you're you're exactly right. And this guess to prevention and what maybe changed in the nineteen seventies. So first about the emptiness and maybe you know kind of what motive motivates people, and then the first and then the first part of the question also, so basically and the fascination with guns, they're somewhat related, I think, I think, but this goes to kind of motivation and
how we would prevent these sorts of things. So speaking to them, if we're we're understanding this in the context of how to then prevent a mass shooting, especially a public mass shooting, and this fascination with weapons slightly more kind of than you know, distal strategy of prevention specifically addressing you know, the fascination with guns is of course the effect of media on people. It's the fascination with guns,
it's the romanticization of guns and gun violence. So guns and gun violence are romanticized by the media, and we're talking primarily about the entertainment media, so movies, music, video games, television. There's this romanticization of guns and gun violence that definitely affects people and encourages people and and stokes the fascination for affinity with the weapons.
There's no doubt about that.
So you can be addressed that that can be addressed relatively easily by the entering media. I'm not sure they'll do that, but that could be addressed. So then speaking to you know, this emptiness, which then I think also leads to why people would be so taken with firearms and the romantization of gun violence and whatnot. That gets more to kind of maybe what changed in the seventies and eighties, and I think media again has something to do with that.
We describe a number of.
Things, you know, lot lots of things changed, but I think that the influences, and this is going even more kind of distal or closer in this case to maybe the fundamental issue or the kind of root causes of these sorts of things and the emptiness that you described, you know, or earlier, maybe in the twentieth century, the primary influences on young people were, you know, their teacher, parents, maybe clergy, those sorts of things that that changed in
the seventies and eighties. And obviously we had media, we had television and movies, and those were very important, but for example, you know, music television didn't begin really until the eighties. People couldn't rent movies until you know, you know, the eighties, and then and then of course we have computers, and then of course social media and now everything is now unfortunately in terms of you know, gun violence and mass shootings just growing exponentially.
So we see that the influences on young people.
Has changed dramatically, and that change really began and the you know, seventies and eighties and is continued. And we see this now exponential growth in mass shootings and mass murder. I mean, it's terrible, it's very unfortunate. So that's part of that's partly how we how we see things having developed, and how we then, you know, on the flip side, see how we could stem the tide.
Yeah. I think that's an interesting intervention point. And this is not my original thought because we I don't think I don't know if I can talk about this by naming names, but Scott and I have a colleague and another podcaster who's a former federal agent that was actually visiting Los Angeles earlier this year and meeting with the entertainment industry to talk about how, you know, everyone wants to be John Wick after the latest movie comes out,
and this romanticization that you're talking about, and it can be done because of the way that industry phased out cigarette smoking on screen, right, So it's kind of looking at the same formula and how can we get producers and creators to maybe start taking a little bit of, you know, a cue from when we looked at that
public health crisis and apply it to guns. So I'm just I'm really interested in how other folks and listeners and researchers or anyone watching this if they think that that is actually a transition that can be done, because I know those conversations are being had between people in some of the intervention prevention worlds along with the entertainment executives.
Oh yeah, that's exactly my thinking. Yeah, I really can't add much to that. That's exactly what That's exactly how we see it.
I want to take a little bit of a turn here because I don't want to get too far away from something that I am absolutely fascinated by Shiloh, and I complain all the time about as much as we are so enamored with training, it's so hard to stay up with the latest developments. And for me, especially working clinically in a large mental health agency, working with a
lot of co occurring personality disorders. You know, I was ending my academic career at a time when we were still saying that all personality disorders were strictly as a result of trauma, and now the paradigm has shifted because we have this unbelievable opportunity to utilize brain imaging to tell us that no, there are structures, there are issues happening organically that predisposed individuals to personality disorders, which then
has an overlap to the mental illness that you're talking about. Maybe not psychosis, but there is that strong element of narcissism that displays in some of these shooters. So can you tell us about how you're using this amazing technology to further your research.
Well, we haven't, you know, because of the nature of mass shooters and mass murders, and that most of them dying that they're still relatively you know, huld be it's hard to you know, interact with them very much.
We have been unable to you know.
For example, image them, which is how I would you know, normally study people. We use MRI and primarily positiveno mission
tomography to understand people. But we do better understand that the neurobiology of violence in general, and we can understand maybe you know, mental illness or violence in general even among you know, mass murders and mass shooters on the general by literature, there are brain abnormalities and people who perpetrate violence primarily in the you know, I don't want to get it too technical, but you know these are limbic areas, and these are the areas in which we
see many abnormalities and all sorts of people with psychiatric conditions and other sorts of behavioral conditions, just because I mean, that's that's what the Olympic system does. It's involved in emotion and behavior and these sorts of things. So obviously you'd find issues there in the amygdala and the stritum and in those sorts of places. Chances are we'd see the same things and people who have you know, perpetrated
mass murders of any type. What I can say though, is that maybe the contribution of our work imaging and otherwise in the other phenomenological work that we do in violence in general and especially in mental illness can be applied to mass murder and understanding mass murder and shootings, and another way, going back to the question of mental illness, and I definitely want to get to the radicalation the emptiness question.
And then now I'm going to talk about.
Radicalization because that's extremely important and that's fundamental and probably you know, contributes to about or response for about six percent of mass murderers. Well, one contribution from the general violence and especially violence and mental illness literature that really just confirms what we've already shared about the relationship between mental illness and mass shootings and mass murder in general.
It is this.
So first I'll say that one other kind of result that we observed or found when we analyzed our data is that while only about five percent of mass shootings related to a psychotic men's on this in particular again psychotic mental illness being overrepresented among mass shooters, but still only being responsible for five percent of mass shootings, that number is very different if we talk about mass murders perpetrated with other methods.
That's extremely important.
So if we talk about mass stabbings and any other type of mass murder, we're much more likely to see someone who is psychotic. Now, the primary reason for that, well, there are two primary reasons. One goes to the question of why someone chooses to use a firearm versus something else. They are really two main reasons why someone chooses a firearm versus something else. Number one is for this infamy and fame. They're going to receive a lot more media
coverage and attention if they use a firearm. That's just the case. That's what happens. Number two is because they want to take their life. And when people want to take their life, they're much more likely to use a firem than anything else.
That's very clear. So people with psychotic disorders who perpetrate.
A mass murder usually don't want to take their own life, and they're certainly not interested in fame. That is not the motive in any way. If someone truly has a psychotic disorder, it's not about fame. It's again, these people are very often paranoid. They definitely don't want media exposure, they don't want anyone to know what they're doing. As opposed to the mass shooter, who generally wants people to know what they're doing. They want the infamy, and that's
the purpose. So the other thing we have to understand about the other types of mass murder is that women rarely perpetrate mass shootings of any sort.
But they rarely do, and they're not interested in using firearms. They're just not.
However, the other category of mass murder is much more populated with females, So if a female perpetrates and mass murder, they're much more likely to use another method. There are a number of reasons for that, but that's also associated with and consistent with that the women are much more likely to be psychotic than men, even among the group
of people who perpetrate mass murder with other methods. So this is consistent and can be understood through the viol the general violence in mental illness literature, it turns out that the effect of mental illness on women is different than the effect of mental illness on men. So men at baseline are already very violent. That's because of hormones and biology and a whole bunch of sorts of things.
So it's just so men are just so violent in general especially younger men, that mental illness has very little additional effect on violence perpetration in men a little, but not very much. The mechanism by which mental illness, especially severe mental illness, serious mental illness, increases the.
Risk of violence is by impairing impulse.
That's kind of that's common to psychiatric conditions that increase the risk of violence, is common to substance use. Young men are impulsive in general, so mental illness doesn't have too much more of an effect. Young women are not
as impulsive as young men. So what we see is that the effect of mental illness on young women in terms of violence perpetration is huge, huge, So that's very consistent with what we understand and what we see in terms of the risk of women perpetrating mass murder with a weapon that isn't a firearm versus with a firearm that so many of those people do have schizophrenia. Those young people tend to be women. They're very frequently psychotic, and so the kind of different lines of evidence are
very consistent with each other. Now, getting back to this question of radicalization and emptiness and also what's changed since the nineteen seven these so we have this, we have one hundred we have, you know, a certain number of one hundred, say, mass mass murders. About five percent again or maybe more for including other types of mass murders
are perpetrated because of mental illness. The other critical factor that we have to understand and really speaks to or gets that the question of really the forensic questions in mass murder is the question of psychopathy. So psychopathy, as I'm sure all the listeners known as you all obviously know, is real. It's a technical term, that's a diagnosis. We have a way of diagnosing it. About five percent of the population I think approximately you know, has it would
be diagnosed as a psychopath. Now, about eighty percent of serial killers are psychopaths, ninety about twenty to twenty five percent of single or double murderers are psychopaths. Now one to two percent of mass murderers are psychopaths. Slightly more the mass murders whose other methods are psychopaths. But about one percent one and a half percent of mass shooters are psychopaths. Now, they still perpetrate the most heinous evil acts, but diagnostically they wouldn't be considered psychopaths.
So this might be hard to understand, but this gets too motives.
So only five percent are mentally ill primarily have a psychotic disorder, like a couple percent might be psychopaths.
So what about all the rest?
So this gets at what you're talking about, and basically, again to use one term, it's radicalization. So basically, all these other people are relatively or at one point were relatively normal people.
They didn't have a psychotic disorder. They weren't psychopaths.
You know, they weren't torturing animals, they weren't sexually assaulting people when they were like ten or eleven years old. They weren't causing fires those sort of sending like animals or things on fire, which is you know, typical young psychopath behavior, or people with contact disorder, which which is
what people usually have before they become psychopaths. They are relatively normal people don't have mental illness or at least don't have a psychotic disorder, who are radicalized for some reason and then perpetrate a mass shooting or a mass murder for some other reason.
Yeah, that leaves so much open to what doctor Scott was saying in terms of looking at personality disorders. And you know, I think what still is rising to the top for me, which is obviously I don't know if epidemic is the right word at this point with our
population and especially young people of suicidality. Right, just coming back to that issue, which I know we're not technically talking about that being mental illness in terms of like what your study has shown and looking at psychotic disorders, but it does leave the door open for so so much more for us to say, Okay, okay, it's not this stuff. It's not the big, the two biggie psychotic or psychopathy. So there's a lot left to start looking at for sure. Again, just kudos to why your work
is so foundational. To then jump off from that point, I'd like to ask a little bit more about the female perpetrators, because Scott and I always find it so interesting to kind of dial down on female perpetrators of violence, you know, whether that's sexual assaults or homicide.
Or what have you.
What, Because you also did an additional study right out of the study and analysis of one hundred and five female perpetrated mass murders. Was this interesting to you as well to sort of parse that out or what was sort of the idea behind focusing on some of those numbers with women and or girls. And you know, I think this is always very fascinating to our listeners because mass murder is often viewed as very male dominated. So then we kind of say, Okay, what's going on with
these women or young women? So I'm just curious about, you know, your interest there with the female perpetrators. And then were there any findings that sort of challenged existing stereotypes or assumptions when it came to gender.
Well, when we conducted our initial analysis and publish our initial paper, we did start to notice some differences between men and women and seemed like more women were using a non firearm methods of mass murderers. Seemed like more of the women mass murders tended to have psychotic disorders,
so we wanted to investigate that further. There are definitely less female mass murderers than the male mass murderers, of course, but we had this sample size of one hundred and five out of about twenty twenty two hundred, But we had the sample of one hundred and five, which is enough.
For a studion.
We found maybe what people would expect, maybe not what they would expect, but again, so female perpetrators of mass murder tend to use other weapons, so they're not interested in using firearms.
Again, that gets to motivate.
They're very likely to have schizophrenia, and not just have schizophrenia, but for schizophrenia really.
To be the cause.
So these are people who are experiencing delusions and or hallucinations responding to those delusions and hallucinations, and most of the time I think the number was like eighty percent to seventy five or eighty percent taking the life vi of their.
Okay, that was going to be my question because this totally tracks with doctor Philip Resnick's work in looking at the different typologies if you will, of kind of familicide.
Yeah, it's so.
Did you see any difference in male versus female population regarding the intersection or influence of substance use. I mean, that's something that certainly has really increased in since the seventies when math made its way basically east from Hawaii where it was so prevalent there and then became distributed across the US, first in a recreational sense and then really causing behavioral changes in the most vulnerable of our population. Can you comment on that?
Absolutely? So Substance use is another part of the pie. It's not the biggest, but it's definitely part of the pie. Men mass murders tend to have difficulties with substance use more than female mass murders. Again, psychotrit schizophreniag just really dominates among female mass murders.
But yeah, so substance uses.
Is a much bigger deal among male mass murders and among mass shooters, much less among the other types of mass murders. So it's a bigger issue among mass murders who use farms at a bigger issue among men. And the primary substance is marijuana. You know, we see people who are affected by methamphetamine, of course, and you know, ketamine and others are drugs like those, But the primary
substance affiliated with mass shootings is marijuana. The relationship, the association between marijuana and mass shootings has increased over time. So that's certainly another thing, you know, with the legalization of marijuana. So for an example, the prevalence of marijuana use among mass shooters has increased. It is outpaced, for example,
the prevalence of marijuana use among the background population. And one thing that may be hard to understand but maybe may not be hard to understand, is that while the prevalence of marija want to use among mass shooters has has increased over time, and especially around when marijuana was legalized first and I think nineteen ninety six medically in California and then around it was a twenty twelve or twenty thirteen recreationally, but there has been no change in
the prevalence of marijuana use among mass murderers who use other methods.
Oh, it's it's very strange. I mean, it's that those of what the data show.
But the prevalence of marijuana use has not changed among mass murders to use other weapons very strong, but among mass shooters it's gone way up.
It's very strange.
So I'm always interested, you know. Part of the responsibilities of my day job with law enforcement is looking at all of these factors. And one of the things that I'm always dismayed by is that sort of the idea of the cannabis culture, which, hey, it's legal, you know, it's like any other substance that can be used to
an extent that it's dangerous. But what I try and educate people on when I can is that what you're getting now from the dispensary is five hundred times stronger than any skunk weed that was grown in somebody's backyard seventy years ago. Like, it's just a completely different I mean, it's not a different chemical, but the intensity is so much So can you comment or I mean, I'm just wondering. Is the cannabis use an attempt to self medicate overwhelming
anxiety but they're only making it worse? Or are they developing psychosis as a result of this overload of cannaboids in their system. I don't know if that's related to anything you're doing. And just like I see over and over again that it's like you're trying to use something to calm yourself down that is making the situation absolutely worse. And I wonder if there's any connection here.
To some degree, I'm sure all of that is part of what's going on.
I can say that going back a little bit to what I said, that is that the primary mechanism by which substance use, or any substances which are of course the highest, the greatest risk factor of violence more than any other potential risk factor, is that they directly impair impulse control.
All substances impair impulse control.
That's kind of their nature, probably via disconnecting or disassociating, you know, the way that dopamine works from austraatum, the stratum, this restratum is responsible for motor control. So that's so basically what substances, including marijuana do, is they they they take the break off of basically dopamine and austratum, and that leads to it, you know, disinhibition and impulsivity. That's probably that's probably the mechanism why they're using it.
There are many reasons.
Why people use marijuana and other substances, including those that you've described. Just even empirically and considering or thinking about prevention along the line lines of you know, gun availability and gun production is that it's it's very empirical. What we know is that the more the more guns are made, the more people buy guns and use guns, the more marijuana is available and made, or the more substances are around, or the more opiates opioids are around, the more they're used.
And again that that I frame it in that.
Way just just because that speaks then directly to to prevention and and a lot of these potential strategies don't require additional rules and regulations. They maybe require a little bit of, you know, just a little bit of maybe changes in behavior by by let's say, stakeholders and partners and in society and culture.
So out of everything that you've been doing, which is so broad. Again, we've eaten up the majority of our hour, and I could talk to you for the next four days NonStop. What was surprising about your research? Like, what did what was expected and kind of came out of left field for you? That was, you know, not what you expected from this area.
Sure, well, I think that I don't know how surprising this was, but maybe it was. Maybe we were surprised at how strong this kind of finding was. And that is the relationship between psychiatric medications and mass murder mass shootings, and that is of course a negative or inverse relationship. Not only are they not not only are are psychiatric medications not related to mass shootings not positive.
Not necessarily in the mass shootings.
Virtually no mass murders or mass shootings take psychiatric medications or are on a therapeutic dose of the psychiatric I mean virtually, wow, some, I mean there are some, but virtually there and some are maybe some maybe had blood levels in their system, but they were sub therapeutic. I mean virtually zero mass murders have therapeutic levels of psychiatric medications in their system. It's quite from Wow.
There's so much today that it's like blowing my mind. Yet it all makes absolute sense, Like I, you know, looking at these and I think for us, you know, we've known the numbers and the research has been pretty clear about the rates of mass murders as compared to how much we.
Hear about it, right, which then instills.
Fear, whether it's as parents or kiddos going to school and you know, more prevention and drills being done at school. What do you think is important in terms of messaging moving forward to I mean, I don't know if it's alleviate fears, but to get the right data out there that maybe as a byproduct, will alleviate some fears.
How do we do it?
Do we still just keep having conversations like this, because how do you get out in front of it? Right If, as one of our listeners in the chat pointed out, you know, going back to the entertainment piece, if entertainment is mimicking life, and then life is mimicking entertainment, right, where do we get in there to have the correct messaging?
What do you envision that might look like.
That's a very good question.
So I think you know the data, the data around mass shootings, in mass murder in general are are very informative in the lightning at A lot of it, especially recently, is new, but a lot of it is at least intuitive, but has been shown in one form or another, and it's certainly consistent with what we understand but other types of gun violence. But as you said, as you actually I think just said a lot of what I'm saying
is super interesting but also makes sense. So these are not necessarily I'm not saying, you know anything that is so so different than what you know people have shared before. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that there are definitely solutions to measure. I think we could easily decrease the prevalence of mass shootings and other types of mass murder we actually know how. This is similar to other cultural phenomena and problems that we have, whether they be medical
or psychiatric or purely social sociocultural. Speaking as an academician, to get to the point is that it's hard to kind of find reliable.
Sources of information and data.
I think just information, valid and reliable information and data are important. And what I'm trying to say is that those data and research studies and information are out there, especially in the the academic literature and the like the real literature. Unfortunately, there's there's misinformation. Then there's a lot
of just bad information out there. I think with a little bit of kind of searching in diligence, one should feel comfortable and confident on knowing that the information is out there being able to find it because by and large, researchers in the academic community have actually identified and at least proven potential efficacy of these relatively facile and easy interventions.
Yeah, it's it's a tough you know, maybe that's even the tough or problem is figuring out, you know, how do we get the right information out to folks that can digest it at least to try and compete with just the news and the twenty four hour news cycle of all the horrible things we see to start understanding it rather than just being fearful of it. Do you happen to be a member of a tap the threat assessment professionals. We got to get you to come speak at their conference.
By the way, you would be perfect for it.
But you know, a TAP has done some wonderful things in some you know, not obviously not just law enforcement, mental health and researchers they've worked with, but letting in some journalists who really understand and you know, whether it's getting information out via books and trying to you know, find other ways when you know maybe nobody's going to watch.
A YouTube show about it.
But yeah, I just I feel like that's really important piece because there are a lot of people living in fear, and I don't want to say it's unnecessary because I'm definitely a planner. I'm definitely a prepper, definitely have a lot of situational awareness, but.
We also need to be able.
To live in our you know, go on with our lives and live day in and day out and not think that this is going to happen to us around every corner. So your database is like, no, I'm just I'm just kind of thinking off the top of my head here, But this is such an interesting conversation in your database. Is that ongoing You guys are adding to it all the time. Is that how it's a living, living database as we say, that's right, that's very interesting, Scott, anything else before.
We wrap up?
Yes, our rapid fire questions that are these are going to be the hardest things you ever answer.
This is a new segment.
I here it is. This is new. We've only did a couple of times. But to kind of shake off the seriousness. Favorite ice cream, favorite movie, least favorite activity.
Sure, chocolate ice cream.
I don't ea as much ice cream anymore, you know, nowadays I'm relatively older.
Chocolate ice cream, you know, the Godfather?
Oh nice?
Oh, and no, I run a lot, but I don't like it.
You run a lot? Running is the worst. Running is the worst.
Yeah, I do it. Yeah, I read it. Yeah, for about twenty four hours ahead of time.
Yeah.
Well, I love you know. It's a silly little exercise to throw these at you, but it's always interesting to me the type of person that's able to just know exactly what the answers are, and of course that goes along with your incredible ability to research and present. Thank you so much for giving of your time today. Like Shilah was saying, you've blown our minds. You've made me
even more interested now to go in different areas. I'm going to go back and dive into your papers and we have to get you attached to a tap like. You are absolutely the type of presenter that they would would love. So thank you for your time, and please we can if we can entice you with a like some swag and a couple of gifts or something, please come back and let's have an expanded version of this conversation.
Thank you, it was a pleasure to be with you all. I really appreciate I think the work that you all do is great. I'm sure your listeners very much appreciate.
Thank you so much.
Well, I'm sure they're going to be on Discord and our Discord channel and among our patrons. I can already tell there's a bunch of activity just about our broadcast today. So we'll have a lot more questions for you in the future.
And I will put a link to doctor Gergus's book in the YouTube notes, so please if you want to check that out. Sounds absolutely fascinating. And yes, thank you so much, and thank you to everyone who is here tonight and everyone who's going to watch this in the future. At some point, have a great Saturday evening and we will see you next time. Bie guys, take care, goodbye. We sincerely thank you for spending some time with us today. La Not So Confidential is part of the Caral Space
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