What's the chance that Adam Lanza was autistic?

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An obsession with ants itself doesn't imply that one will get stung by an ant; having an obsession may mean one is less likely to be stung as they're aware of the dangers involved.

For what I have read, it is not clear is he really has any diagnosis of AS, or if only had a "Einstein/Jefferson-style diagnosis" - "the guy was intelligent but strange, then he had AS" (my impression is that, in "street English", AS means "intelligent but strange"), or "he was very similar to a boy with AS that I once knew", and someting similar.

And was also some news that he was taking some anti-psychotic (I could be wrong, but I imagine that anti-psychotics are not the standard treatment for ASD).

If anything, I imagine more schizophrenia or schizotypal personality disorder than an ASD - begin to indiscriminate kill innocent children seems more typical of some kind of cognitive distortion or delusion (when, in your bizarre "reality", you have a valid reason to kill that children - perhaps they are nazi soldiers in disguise, or something like that...).

[And attending that the symptoms of schizophrenia and StPD are very similar to AS - the only relevant difference seems the bizarre ideas in schizo- vs. the obsessions in AS, but even that could be easily mixed - it is not difficult to understand who a schizophrenic/schizotypal could end up "diagnosed" - specially by layman - as autistic]

according to this study: http://www.drtomoconnor.com/4050/4050lect07.htm
mass murderers are also overwhelmingly male (94.4%)
typically are between the ages of 20-29 (43.3 %)
and are white (62.9 %)

Lanza seems to have fit these stereotypes as well...

Said drugs are often given to those with an ASD who're prone to aggressive outbursts during meltdowns (the "keep grandpa in bed", type deal), but it also helps with the things that cause said outbursts, like frustration and anxiety, so it can stop if beforehand, not just sedation (not that said sedation does much for someone with an ASD who's really "high" from anxiety). You hear of people saying "it's the drugs!", well, it's far more likely to happen when someone is off them due to what the medication actually does.

Psychosis is one possible explanation for these things, though it's one of the rare ones; Jared (Gifford's shooting) and the "Joker" are seen as examples of this (both Schizophrenia). There's really no known motive for Adam, so it's all speculation.

Martin Bryant's (AS) reason for his hasn't been released. Anders Breivik's (Schizophrenia to begin with, but said to have AS later on) is well known. Same with Cho (Selective Mutism).

Bullying and past trauma is a reason for these things, as is acute emotional stress. This is stuff that removes inhibitions; obviously it needs to combined with other things, like no one to talk to, the "right" personality, an obsessive and festering mind, and/or other things.

Psychopathy is another (one of the Columbine individuals).

Organic brain disease is theorized with Whitman.

What a load of nonsense. What studies do you base this ridiculous claim on?

I agree.

Fox includes gang violence and robberies in his research. Hempel excludes gang violence and robberies and comes up with a much different demographic listed below, from the same link, from research that spanned 50 years, in the US, up until the year 1999.

I believe the chance is about 1 in 88.

We don't want to throw schizophrenic persons under the bus either.

I remember reading in an abnormal psychology textbook way back in 1984 that the average person with schizophrenia was actually somewhat less likely than the average member of the general public to commit a crime, was in fact more likely to be victimized. For the sub-category of paranoid schizophrenia, the person is slightly more likely to commit a crime, but it's marginal.

So, we come to the not very remarkable conclusion that we should treat people as individuals.

Yeah. Schizophrenia doesn't make you violent, either. The statistics show an elevated risk for schizophrenia in general (which is still many times lower than the elevated risk for simply being male). However, if you account for the increased amount of drug abuse in that population, you find that schizophrenia is not a direct correlation. It's more like schizophrenia increases your risk of having a drug addiction, and people with drug addictions are more likely to be violent.

(I need to caution you, though: This is correlation, not cause and effect. They might have a common cause, like increased impulsivity, or be related to environmental factors. So you cannot conclude from this that drug addiction causes violence; only that there is some sort of relationship.)

In any event, people with schizophrenia are as likely to be violent as the general population, once you account for the fact that their lives, in general, involve more stress. If a violent person gets schiozphrenia, they continue to be a violent person. There are some situations in which schizophrenia may be directly related to violence, especially paranoid schizophrenia; people may try to "defend themselves" against a hallucinatory/delusional threat. Usually by the time it's this bad, the person is obviously ill and will be quickly sent to a hospital to be stabilized. But as I've said, the risk isn't increased. I can only guess that people respond to their delusions and hallucinations in a way that is in keeping with their general character. Someone who would punch the man who looked at his girlfriend funny may also, if he got schizophrenia, punch that same man because he believes that the guy is stealing his thoughts. A more retiring personality might have led him instead to hide in his basement and stay away from people wearing red sweaters to avoid the thought-stealing.

That's just my theory about it. I haven't read any research on schizophrenia and personality. But it seems plausible, and could be tested, so I think it's something we ought to look into.

Touché...

Ryan Lanza, Adam's very own brother, was the first person to state Adam had Aspergers. This was the first day the whole tragedy happened too. Not to mention Ryan knew it was his brother Adam before being told, and how he could know, i'd only guess Adam showed warning signs we haven't heard about.

Years back during the parents' divorce, there were records stating Adam has been diagnosed with Aspergers, however i have no idea what quack diagnosed him, and it seems the diagnosis was for the divorce more than anything else. It was why Peter Lanza paid Nancy such a huge amount of Alimony and then some.

Too bad they didn't get help for Adam with that money.

It's possible but he had other things wrong with him.

Boulevard press. I avoid it for a reason. I'm not going to pay for something that says trivial stuff like "celebrity X is now divorced with celebrity Y" or generalizes "all *insert type of people* are a possible danger to us!". The final nail in my personal boulevard press coffin was the statement "people who play "killergames" (<- idiotic term used for the shooter genre of games here in Germany) are most likely killers/mass murderers/public/school shooters".

I play them too but I never killed anybody.
So what?

I'm German, does that mean I'm a little Hitler/nazi who shoots everybody who admits he's jew?
No.

I'm most of my time at home and being busy with my obsession. Does that mean I am planning a rampage?
No.

According to media and stereotypes, I would always fit the stereotypes of a killer/mass murderer.

Here is an example. The example lists stereotypes I heard/read created by media concerning what makes you a mass murderer (warning: heavy usage of sarcasm):

• I am a human - Check.
• I am a withdrawn person and live my life mostly within my room - Check.
  => of course, this automatically means I am a sociopath, misanthrope, psychopath, etc. - Autocheck.
• I am male - Check.
• I am white - Check.
• I have the hair colour of some other random mass murderer in history - Check.
• I have short/mid/long hair - Check.
• I think a lot - Check.
• I was bullied a lot for a long time - Check.
• I am single - Check.
• I have just a few friends - Check.
• I am ending my teenage years - Check.
  => of course, if I end my teenage years, I will fit into the other criteria: 20-something year old male white guy who was bullied - Autocheck1.
  ==> of course, this automatically means if I grow out of that group, I'll hit the 30-something year olds - Autocheck2.
  ===> I'm older than that? No problem - Autocheck3.
• I am spending most of my time in front of the PC - Check.
• I am definitely not normal in behaviour (and am suspected to have AS and soon am working on a diagnosis) - Check (eventually double-check later).
• I have troubles socializing (in school) - Check.
  => of course, this automatically means I am considered a nerd/geek/failure/whatsoever - Autocheck.
• I make checklists - Check.
• I believe in a god (which, of course, automatically means I'm some religious terrorist ) - Check.
• I play (first person) shooters/"killergames" - Check.
• I'm a German - Check.
  => of course, this automatically means I am a (neo-)nazi and thus overly violent - BIG AUTOCHECK.
• I listen to *insert music genre here* - Check.
  => in case it's more than one (x), check x times - Autocheck*x.
• I actually check my checklist - Check.
• I now think check as a word looks and is funny - Check.

If I had to believe media stereotypes concerning what makes you a mass murderer, I would have been dead since long (either by suicide or by police) and there would be no living people on this planet anymore (so in that case, most likely suicide).

The best you can do is probably ignore such statements and move on with your life. Time usually makes people forget that, the killergame statement was forgotten too by now. It just happened that now the trend is: Everybody who is in the slightest mentally/socially disabled (apparently even if you are additionally physically disabled and in a wheelchair) runs in danger of being seen as such a person. After the next incident it will be people who listen to heavy metal music again or some other dumb "stereotype" (you can't really call that, it has no long-livity as stereotypes do in my opinion).

I agree. I think associating in this way is ignorant prejudice. Like the woman who. Clutches her hand bag every time she sees a black man. My gf said that if autistics wish to be accepted rather than cured they need to understand that it comes with this sort of garbage. I personally do not understand this view either what does acceptance have to do with bigotry?

... *Shrugs*

Meh. Personally, I'd rather shoot up a fertility clinic.
Kids ain't done much of anything yet. They don't even get how fvcked up the world they've been dumped in IS. People who want to breed though... THOSE bastards have it coming for wanting to inflict existence on someone against their will.


Black humour aside though... he might have been and he might not have. I don't much care, to be honest.
It is quite plausible that he might have been. Mundies do tend to treat us quite badly, often without even realising they're doing so. The average person is casually hostile towards difference of thought, and we tend to receive a lot of that hostility just for not being subject to the same flavour of idiocy that they are. As such, revenge against the neurotypicals is not an unexpected result... Also, going for that which will hurt them most. The problem with this sort of revenge is that they don't see it as such, as people in general aren't aware that they do anything wrong to justify revenge against them... SO they tend to just view it as random evil (because they're stupid enough to believe in such things).
BUT that is just one possibility of many, and at this stage in the game not only will we likely never know... but it shouldn't influence our lives anyway. I'd spare maybe a moment's pity for anyone getting worked up over this... before advising we all chill out and focus on the next meal.

Last edited by Magnanimous on 08 Jan 2013, 6:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.