- Position‹3 of 3
- People don’t know why serial killers kill
- Argument
Serial killers' mental illness
Mental illness has been the cause of antisocial or aggressive behavior for years. As people become more aware of them, there are more treatments. The same goes for serial killers.
The argument
The position is that people do not actually know why serial killers kill, and the popular appeal to mental illness is offered as evidence of this rather than as an exception to it. Mental illness has been a popular cause of how serial killers become criminals, and particular diagnoses attach to particular figures: Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer were reported to have borderline personality disorder. The explanation circulates widely. What it does not come with is understanding. Many people don't understand how mental illness affects the mind, what a diagnosis describes, what it predicts, and crucially what it does not. The label is therefore doing something other than explaining. It functions as a way of marking the person as categorically different, and because the content of the category is unclear to those using it, people find it easy to see them as less than human and more like characters, figures whose behaviour requires no account because they have been placed outside the kind of thing that has accounts. Media and entertainment work on this gap rather than closing it. Serial killers are romanticized, and the mental illness attributed to them is exaggerated and incorrectly portrayed, shaped to whatever the story requires rather than to what the condition is. The result is that the diagnosis becomes part of a fantasy and is used to entertain ignorance rather than to correct it. This is the sense in which the fascination rests on not knowing. The explanation people reach for is one they cannot interpret, delivered through portrayals that distort it further, so what looks like an answer leaves the question untouched. People don't know why serial killers kill.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Not all serial killers have mental illnesses. Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer had anti-social behavior and borderline personality disorder. But anti-social behavior isn’t considered a mental illness. Additionally, not all cases of mental illness result in violence. Only about 4% of those with mental illness behave violently.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Not all cases of mental illness result in violence.