The Symptoms

ALL murder is horrifying, but the work of such as Charles Whitman or the Chicago nurse-killer produces an almost hysterical quality of shock and dread. Numbers of dead alone cannot entirely account for it. Nor can the unsettling plaint of Austin's police chief that "this kind of thing could have happened anywhere." What is ultimately so disturbing about the 23 lives so taken is that nearly all were snuffed out for no reason and at random. In almost every case, they were unnamed and unknown to their killers, the incidental and impersonal casualties of uncharted battlefields that exist only in demented minds. They were sacrifices to the irrational, wherein lies, as it always has for reasoning man, the ultimate terror. They were victims of the blind fury of the psychotic murderer.

Many psychiatrists believe that there is something intrinsic in modern American society that causes on occasion the sort of senseless mayhem practiced last week in Austin. Some of the violence of the frontier still lingers in the American character, they believe, aggravated to extremes in a few individuals by the pressure to succeed and the social and economic mobility of American society. Perhaps, as many psychiatrists insist, the American mother's increasingly powerful position in the family has weakened the ego of American men, who are with rare exceptions responsible for mass murder in the U.S. All, or none, of this may be true--or, most likely, part of it. But the fact is that mass murder is by no means an exclusive American institution; it has been perpetrated in scores of countries down the ages, from Caligula's Rome to the Congo.

Helpless & Haunted

Of the nearly 2,500,000 Americans who were treated for mental illness in hospitals and clinics last year, almost a third were classified as psychotic: a person who, by minimum definition, has lost touch with reality. Many types of psychotics are harmless and helpless. The most dangerous type, the paranoid schizophrenic, on the other hand, is a powder keg of lethal emotions. He frequently has deep sexual problems, often involving his mother. He not only lives in an unreal world that may be dominated by either macabre or fairyland fantasy, but is haunted by fears and delusions of persecution. In his befuddled mind, an accidental bump on a crowded sidewalk or a passing criticism from his employer or family can be transformed into an illusion that the world is plotting against him. When he chooses to retaliate, he may become an irrational killer.

The psychotic does not murder often; neither, for that matter, does the professional thief. "Contrary to popular myth," says Wayne State University Psychiatry Professor Emanuel Tanay, "murder is not the crime of criminals, but that of law-abiding citizens." The great majority of the nation's 9,850 murders last year were family affairs, committed by outwardly ordinary people who, asserts Tanay, "practically never repeat this or any other crime again." When the psychotic whose trouble is deep enough does strike, the result is often wholesale slaughter.

Compulsive Need

The menace of the psychotic killer is the more frightening because he may seem a model citizen until he goes berserk. Many of them "have a feeling that there is a demon within themselves," says Los Angeles Clinical Psychiatrist Martin Grotjahn, "and they try to kill the demon by model behavior." Sensing aggressive impulses that frighten them, adds a Manhattan analyst, "they live the opposite of what they feel. They become gentle, very mild, extremely nice people, and often show a compulsive need to be perfectionistic," which is one reason why people can always be found to describe a murderer as a "nice" or a "gentle" or a "good" boy, as some described Charles Whitman last week.

Some psychiatrists estimate that the percentage of potential mass killers in the U.S. ranges as high as 1 per 1,000 of the population, or about 200,000 Americans. Most, of course, will never carry out their aggressive urges, but enough will so that unsuspecting people will continue to fall victim to their irrationality. Says Houston Psychiatrist C. A. Dwyer: "Potential killers are everywhere these days. They are driving cars, going to church with you, working with you. And you never know it until they snap."

Is there any way to identify the psychotic killer before he snaps and acts? The doctors will only say: sometimes. Any violent personality change should signal an alert to family and friends--a habitually shy and quiet person who suddenly becomes aggressive and talkative, or the reverse. Other danger signs: depression and seclusion, hypersensitivity to little slights and insults, a change in normal patterns of eating or sleeping, uncontrolled outbursts of temper, disorganized thinking and morbid interest in such potential tools of destruction as guns or knives. Psychiatrists are quick to add that the appearance of even all those symptoms does not necessarily mean that a man is about to turn killer. But the symptoms do mean that he is in need of help.

Even if a dangerous psychotic reaches the examining room, it is by no means certain that he can be headed off. Most doctors agree that the University of Texas psychiatrist was without fault in taking no action even after Whitman confessed his urge to climb to the tower and kill people several months before the event took place. "Thousands of people--and I mean literally thousands," says University of Chicago Psychiatrist Robert S. Daniels, "talk to doctors about having such feelings. Nearly all of them are just talking." Deciding which patients mean it is still more art than science. Doctors tend to take a patient seriously, of course, if he relates his threat to a particular happening or circumstance ("The next time they read my mind, I will . . .") or has the immediate means and resources to carry out his threat (a chemist who threatens to poison people).

Enormous Pressure

Medical reluctance to call in the police is rooted both in therapeutic practice and the practicality of the law. Successful treatment of mental illness depends on the confidence of the patient in the therapist. If doctors were expected by the public and their patients to report every threatening remark, they would soon have few patients. Moreover, as New York's Deputy Police Commissioner Sylvan Fox noted last week, "we can't arrest people because they are ill." Adds New Jersey Psychiatrist Henry A. Davidson: "We are in a situation now where there is enormous pressure for civil rights. The idea of locking someone up on the basis of a psychiatrist's opinion that he might in the future be violent could be repugnant." It would also be a very poor way to help the vast majority of disturbed people who make threats that they will never carry out.

Some states empower a doctor to order commitment to a mental hospital when he thinks a patient dangerous--at least long enough to subject him to a thorough examination by psychiatrists. Other states insist that the individual commit himself voluntarily, that his family commit him or that the courts remand him into hospital care. In such situations, the doctor can only try to persuade, though the psychotic is not notably amenable to having himself locked up. Nor, often, is his family, who may still regard mental illness as a shameful smirch and resist formal commitment to an institution until it is too late.

Study v. Punishment

For this reason, most medical men believe that the best way to catch psychotics before they begin shooting is a long-term program of education in mental hygiene, more psychological testing in schools and colleges, and the spread of community clinics that can make instant help available to all. Necessary, too, is more money and manpower for research. Far too little is known about the mass murderer because he erupts infrequently--and even less frequently survives to be examined. Psychiatrists firmly believe that Richard Speck, accused of the nurse killings, ought to be studied intensively rather than punished by society, if found guilty. Pilot studies in Massachusetts and Illinois of juvenile offenders indicate that many potential psychotics may be identifiable and curable while in their teens, and an important segment of the medical profession has not given up hope of finding the cure to psychosis in the chemistry of the brain. While science may never develop a foolproof psychiatric Geiger counter or a cerebral "Pap smear" for spotting every psychotic in advance, there is no doubt that far more can be done within the resources of the Great Society to pare the danger of sudden, irrational murder.

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