(Icarus Project Facebook page)

The mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 young school children and seven adults (including the shooter himself) has not only reignited the debate over gun control in the United States, but also a discussion over how communities deal with madness in their midst. Adam Lanza showed signs of mental illness before the killing spree — as have other recent perpetrators of mass shootings.

Psychiatrist Lynne Fenton of the University of Colorado says her patient, James Holmes, alerted her of his plans before strolling into a packed movie theater in Aurora, Colo., this July and spraying the crowd with bullets. Fenton informed school officials, but she says they did nothing because Holmes was in the process of dropping out. Jared Loughner killed six people and wounded 14 others with a 9mm Glock pistol in a Tuscon parking lot in January 2011; in the two years prior to the shooting, the state of Arizona had slashed mental health services from its budget, services that could have diagnosed, medicated and provided therapy for Loughner’s schizophrenia and possibly prevented the deaths. The 1999 Columbine High School massacre took place at an epicenter of high-tech weapons production, part of the military industry that consumes more than half of our yearly income taxes.

There is a tendency in this country to regard mental illness — as if in deference to the antiquated notion of “possession” — as the personal property of those who exhibit the most alarming symptoms. But the circumstances of each of these shooters indicate the social character of mental illness, and the need for a social response to it.

Read the rest of this article »

J.R.R. Tolkein’s “The Hobbit” had its fare share of swords. But Peter Jackson’s movie adaptation adds several large battle sequences not in the book. (Warner Brothers Pictures)

In the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook, there is little doubt that the gun violence debate in the United States has radically changed, with proponents of gun control and mental health care gaining greater acceptance. Even those calling for an end to violence in the media have found a more receptive audience.

Several films scheduled for release since the Newtown shootings, such as revenge auteur Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, have been delayed. And following reports that Newtown killer Adam Lanza may have played violent video games, West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller has introduced legislation to study the impact of video game violence on children.

The problem is, when it comes to media violence, questions of causality are difficult to establish. Is society violent because we glorify violence in our films and video games? Or do films and video games simply reflect the violence that’s already present in society? The real answer is probably both. Research on the subject is inconclusive, though as Django star Jamie Foxx said in a recent interview, “We cannot turn our back and say that violence in films or anything that we do doesn’t have a sort of influence.”

Read the rest of this article »

Banner drop at New York’s Manhattan Bridge on November 6, 2012. (WNV/Erik Walton)

On Tuesday morning, as New Yorkers were beginning to vote, 60 polling stations had been either destroyed or turned into emergency shelters. Above the same waters that had flooded many of the city’s coastal neighborhoods a week before, I and other Occupy movement activists hung a banner at the midpoint of the Manhattan Bridge. With the intention of drawing a line between the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy and fossil fuels, it said, “Got climate change blues? Fuhgeddabout fossil fuels!”

Read the rest of this article »

Screenshot of directory.occupy.net.

Anniversaries, like today’s one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, bring about pangs of nostalgia as we remember what was and what we could have been. After participating in numerous Occupy protests (while continuing my graduate studies in sociology) this past year, reading the Situationists’ accounts of the 1968 occupations movement makes this OWS anniversary even more weirdly sentimental. There were several moments when I got up from my chair to take a breath, as the texts recounted the purpose and drive of the 1968 occupations: “It was a rejection of all authority, all specialization, all hierarchical dispossession; a rejection of the state and thus of the parties and unions; and of sociologists and professors, of the health-care system and repressive morality.” I shook myself into remembering how I read these same writings years before. I now realize how little I comprehended by reading about direct action without also experiencing it — like how little one learns about sociology by only reading about society without being rooted in it.

Read the rest of this article »

There is a problem of diagnosis in just about any resistance movement: Either the status quo has become psychologically unhealthy, or the resisters are. On some level, the answer is usually both. Yet a prevailing stigma against talking about mental illness means that neither side of the conflict will admit to its own ailment, or its need for help.

That’s part of why Jonah Bossewitch is facilitating the creation of a new, collaborative zine-in-progress: Mindful Occupation: Rising Up Without Burning Out. In addition to being an organizer in several Occupy Wall Street working groups, Bossewitch is a software architect and is working on a doctorate at Columbia University about how questions of surveillance and transparency relate to psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry. For years, he has been involved with The Icarus Project, an organization devoted to “navigating the space between brilliance and madness” — a space that the group resolutely recognizes as being politically charged.

Bossewitch and I met at a recent event hosted by Triple Canopy magazine in New York about Anonymous, where he showed me a draft copy of Mindful Occupation, and where we began the conversation that follows.

Read the rest of this article »

Logo of the We Can End AIDS campaign.

Last week, for the fourth year in a row, President Obama declared June “LGBT Pride Month” this past week. Pride parades and festivals now take place all over the world, as annual events commemorating the Saturday in June of 1969 when New York’s queer community fought back against another night of abusive police raids at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Meanwhile, in recent years, a handful of states have approved same sex marriage laws.

Despite these advances, the shadow of the AIDS pandemic continues to hang over the struggle for LGBTQ rights, though the shape of this global crisis has changed dramatically. In the late 1970s and early 80s, AIDS was thought of as the “gay plague,” a disease that only affected the gay community, particularly men who had sex with men. The first documentation of AIDS was made in June as well — on June 5, 1982. Within months, heterosexual intravenous drug users were being diagnosed in large numbers as well. By 1983, the first cases of non-drug-using women and children were being diagnosed. The first needle exchange to limit the transmission of HIV was set up in Amsterdam in 1984.

Read the rest of this article »

Way back in 2000, author Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point, a book that explains how ideas and messages spread like viruses. With catchy phrases of its own, like “the law of the few”–which attributes the success of any social epidemic to 20 percent of the population–The Tipping Point led to an explosion in the pop science genre.

While Gladwell’s work has been greatly debated, scientists working far from the literary spotlight have produced complex, but no less compelling, findings in the realm of tipping points. The latest came out this summer when scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York published a paper with findings that truly trump Gladwell’s assertions. They found that when 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, the majority of the society will eventually adopt it.

Read the rest of this article »

The recent British film In Our Name is a returning-soldier drama featuring a married woman, Suzy, who leaves her husband and little girl to fight in Iraq. Because she’s involved in the killing of a little girl during her tour—this part is based on a true story, but it happened to a man—she returns home only to steadily fall apart under the stress of soul-destroying anxieties.

In real life, Ethan McCord was involved in a now-infamous episode that took a strangely similar turn. It became one of the most shocking (and hopefully awakening) revelations by Wikileaks: the video now dubbed “Collateral Murder” that was taken from an Apache helicopter as its gunners massacred a group of civilians in a Baghdad suburb in 2007. Addressing a Southern California audience about his role in the episode this past June, McCord described how he saw two small children mangled by gunfire from the helicopter and thought of his own two children at home.

Read the rest of this article »

This country is famous for one of the most organized and inspiring nonviolent movements in modern history. It unfolded sixty years ago in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe and focused on the racism that was an unresolved legacy of the Civil War. It was brilliant, but sadly, not enough.

Last week in Mississippi, Deryl Dedmon, Jr. and John Aaron Rice, along with a group of ‘psyched up’ white teens, left a party with the intention of finding an African American to ‘mess with.’ Driving sixteen miles to the other side of town they set upon the first man they saw—James Craig Anderson—and beat him viciously. Eighteen-year-old Dedmon, now charged with murder, stayed behind long enough to run Anderson over with his truck and leave him for dead. To top it off, his lawyer went beyond human decency to protect his client, insisting that it was not a racially motivated crime.

Maybe, on some level, it’s a positive sign that we do not want to admit that there is still racism in this country, despite the experience of people living in James Craig Anderson’s community, immigrant families in Arizona, farmworkers in California, or sleeping children in Afghanistan. But denial isn’t going to make the problem go away. What will make it finally go away is a recognition that racially motivated crimes have a cause and that we can get to it by shifting our awareness from hate crimes to just simply hate.

Read the rest of this article »

Sebastian Junger, embedded.

Science writer John Horgan on Sebastian Junger on war:

Describing himself as an antiwar liberal (who thinks the U.S. botched its occupation of Afghanistan but fears that worse bloodshed will result if the U.S. abruptly withdraws), [Junger] said his reporting and research led him to the disturbing conclusion that war stems from innate male urges. I disagree. Here are some counterarguments to Junger’s contention that we’re “hardwired” for war:

• The evidence that war is in our genes is flimsy to nonexistent. Lethal raiding among chimpanzees, our closest relatives, is often cited as strong evidence that human warfare is ancient and innate. But as I pointed out in a previous post, scientists have observed a total of 31 chimpicides over the past half century; many chimp communities have never been observed engaging in deadly raids. Even Wrangham has acknowledged that chimpanzee raids are “certainly rare.”

• The oldest clear-cut evidence for lethal group violence by humans dates back not millions or hundreds of thousands of years but only 13,000 years. Moreover, as an excellent recent article on this Web site points out, tribal societies in regions such as the U.S. Southwest did not fight continuously; they lived peacefully for centuries before erupting into violence. These patterns are not consistent with behavior that is instinctual or “hardwired.”

• Young men who are willing and even eager to fight certainly help make wars possible, but that doesn’t mean that these young men cause wars or that all young men are itching for a fight. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney launched the current U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they went to great lengths as young men to avoid serving in the Vietnam War. (This irony brings to mind something that World War II hero Sen. George McGovern said in 1971: “I’m tired of old men dreaming up wars for young men to fight.”)

• Junger claims that the “moral basis of the war doesn’t seem to interest soldiers [in Afghanistan] much, and its long-term success or failure has a relevance of almost zero.” The Americans in Restrepo may be fighting for fighting’s sake, but surely that isn’t true of their Taliban and al Qaeda opponents. Moreover, does anyone really think that the young men who have been battling in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria lately are not fighting for a higher cause?

Read more at Scientific American.