To better understand murder-suicide, look at suicide

Writer Andrew Solomon makes an important point in a op-ed piece in the New York Times Sunday. As we try to understand the motivations of mass killers like Adam Lanza, and the central role of firearms in these killings, we should focus more on why they want to kill themselves than on why they want to commit murder.

When picking apart these crimes, we don't think much about the killers' desire for suicide, which Solomon calls "a disaffection with his own life." After all, someone's self-destructive urges are far less threatening than his rage to destroy others, and is therefore "less newsworthy,"  writes Solomon, who authored the new book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.

In understanding why someone like  Lanza first killed his mother and then 20 first-grade students who were probably strangers to him, one has to start with his decision to end his own life, Solomon calls suicide "the engine" of murder-suicides. "Adam Lanza committed an act of hatred, but it seems that the person he hated the most was himself. ... Only by understanding why Adam Lanza wished to die can we understand why he killed."

(Suicide also kills far more people in the United States than homicide.  In 2009, 36,900 people took their own lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fewer than half that number were victims of homicide: 16,800.)

I heard ideas similar to Solomon's from experts in murder-suicide when I researched a 2006 story, "Unnatural Causes" for Diablo magazine. This story looked at the tragic case of a San Ramon mother who killed her three-year-old daughter and then herself.  In that case, the mother was suicidally depressed and, in her writings, revealed that she saw her daughter as extension of herself, worrying how her daughter would survive without her. The mother also suggested that once she killed her daughter -- "with a mortal crime on my hands" -- she would have no choice but to end her own life.
Most perpetrators of murder-suicides are not women but men. And, most murder-suicides involve victims known to the perpetrators, usually wives, girlfriends, ex-wives or ex-girlfriends of these men, according to a 2009 article, Murder-Suicide: A Review of the Recent Literature, published in Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry. According to one study, about 70 percent of all murder-suicides involve couples, while 10 percent involve parents killing their children and 6.5 percent involve familicide, a parent (usually the father) killing his entire family.

While Maegan Mundi, the mother I write about chose to asphyxiate her daughter, the overwhelming weapon of choice for murder-suicides, which are mostly committed by men, is a firearm. Guns are used in anywhere from 85 to 92 percent of these cases. Along with poor mental health and substance abuse, access to firearms is a leading risk factor in murder-suicides, according to the National Institute of Justice.

This National Institute of Justice report also notes that: "States with less restrictive gun control laws have as many as eight times the rate of murder-suicides as those with the most restrictive gun control laws." 

Firearms are certainly the weapon of choice for what forensic psychiatrist James L. Knoll terms the "pseudocommando" mass murderer. This type of mass killing is another sub-type of murder-suicide, Knoll says in his article, The Pseudocommander Mass Murder: Part 1, The Psychology of Revenge and Obliteration, which was published in 2012 in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.

The pseudocommando, Knoll writes, "is a type of mass murderer who kills in public during the daytime, plans his offense well in advance, and comes prepared with a powerful arsenal of weapons. He has no escape planned and expects to be killed during the incident. Research suggests that the pseudocommando is driven by strong feelings of anger and resentment, flowing from beliefs about being persecuted or grossly mistreated. He views himself as carrying out a highly personal agenda of payback."

Knolls further says: 

"For the pseudocommando, revenge fantasies are inflexible and persistent because they provide desperately needed sustenance to his self-esteem. He is able to feel better by gaining a sense of (pseudo) power and control by ruminating on, and finally planning out his vengeance. ... These fantasies may lead the avenger to experience pleasure at imagining the suffering of the target and pride at being on the side of some spiritual primal justice. Thus, the revenge fantasy falsely promises a powerful “remedy” to the pseudocommando's shattered ego. It gives the “illusion of strength,” and a temporary, though false, sense of restored control and self-coherence.

The type of severe narcissistic rage experienced by the pseudocommando “serves the purpose of the preservation of the self” that has exceeded its limit of shame, rejection, and aversive self-awareness. This pain and rage cannot be contained, and he ultimately embarks “on a course of self-destruction that transfers [his] pain to others."

A necessary tool in these killers' desire to transfer the pain of self-destruction to others is the arsenal of weapons, as Knolls noted. We've seen this time and again in mass killings from Columbine to Virginia Tech to Tuscon, Arizona to Aurora, Colorado. And now in Newtown, Connecticut.

Some have asserted that if Adam Lanza couldn't have obtained guns to kill his victims and himself, he would have found some other weapon to carry out his deadly plan.

Maybe, but it's also likely that blasting his way into the school and opening fire on as many innocent victims as possible was part of his fantasy of self-destruction.

That idea that suicidal people fixate on a method of dying has become a central argument in the need to erect a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge.  For decades, opponents of the suicide barrier would offer the false argument: If people want to kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, a barrier won't stop them; they'll find some other way to kill themselves.

That argument doesn't withstand the weight of research, according to John Bateson, an East Bay-based expert on suicide. He is the former executive director of the Contra Costa Crisis Center and the author of the new book, The Final Leap, about the bridge's allure as a top world-wide destination for suicide.

In 1978, U.C. Berkeley psychology professor Richard Seiden published a study that asked, “Will a person who is prevented from suicide in one location inexorably tend to attempt and commit suicide elsewhere?” He and his graduate students tracked down 515 people who had attempted suicide at the bridge. Twenty-five years later, 94 percent were still alive or had died by means other than suicide. Only 6 percent had taken their lives.

Bateson says Seiden's research shows strong evidence that suicidal people fixate on a method of death, whether that person wants to jump from a landmark like the Golden Gate Bridge or shoot up a room full of relatives before turning the gun on himself.  “They might have a Plan A, but there’s no Plan B,” Seiden told the New York Times Magazine, according to Bateson.

Mothers who kill, or try to, as in this latest Concord case

Another woman in our community has committed the kind of act that provokes particular outrage and disbelief. Self-destructive, and she decided to take her child with her.

Armed with a knife, a 38-year-old Concord woman slashed and wounded her 10-year-old daughter in a sudden attack Tuesday morning. The woman, Xuan Liu, then killed herself in what police are describing as an attempted murder-suicide

Liu had woken her daughter up and attacked her. The girl struggled with her mother and was able to break free. Officers found Liu in a bedroom, and she was pronounced dead at the scene, dead of a self-inflicted knife wound. . The girl was able to call 911, and then was taken to the hospital where she was in serious but stable condition Wednesday. No one else was in the house at the time, and police are still investigating to find out what prompted the attack and the suicide.

I’ve written about this topic before: mothers who kill their own children. It's not a pleasant thing to write about or to contemplate--especially when you try to imagine what the kids are suffering, and not just during the attack but in all the time leading up to it. Are they living in constant fear of their parent? Do they see their parent act out?

Last summer, there was the killing of Adam Williams, a 16-year-old Walnut Creek boy who was entering his junior year at Las Lomas High. His mother Judith, a professional, seemingly happy woman, told her son she wanted to go on a drive up Mt. Diablo on a Friday evening. At a picnic area near the top of the mountain, Judith Williams, armed with a .357-caliber revolver, opened fire on her own son. She shot him first on the chest. After he fell to his knees, she put the gun to his head and fired again. Then she turned the gun on herself.

Judith Williams' ex-husband described her as "angry" and suggested she was upset that he had moved back to Northern California and might want to spend more time with Adam.

As an editor for Diablo magazine, I dissected one case in particular, a 2003 murder-suicide in San Ramon, in which Maegan Mundi, a smart, successful tech professional and seemingly devoted mother killed her three year old daughter, Galadriel, then killed herself.

There had been other local cases since, and these sorts of cases cross class, race and geographic boundaries.

Before Judith Williams killed her son Adam, there was Mary Alicia Driscoll. She was a single mother who happened to live in the same Walnut Creek neighborhood as Judith and Adam Williams. In June 2005, Driscoll drove to a remote country road in Sonoma County and fatally shot her five-year-old daughter and herself. Three months later in 20005, a homeless Oakland mother who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia admitted to police that she threw her three little boys into San Francisco Bay.

Yes, there are fathers who kill, fathers who take out their entire families, including their wives, before ending their own lives. As a whole, fathers are a lot deadlier. The thing is, we tend to consider these killings committed by women to be more shocking, and not just because we don’t usually associate women with violent crime. These killings, I wrote "challenge society’s model of nurturing, self-sacrificing motherhood.”

I continued: “We’re tempted to quickly classify the mothers as inherently crazy or cruelly self-centered, but there are often complex factors underlying these crimes, including marital breakdown, financial stress, and under-treated mental illness, including postpartum depression. Experts say it is important to look at these factors in order to try to understand the evolution of these crimes and gain a chance to prevent future tragedies.”

Phillip Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who testified on behalf of Andrea Yates, was one of a number of experts I interviewed for the story. He says that in many such cases, the mothers are suicidally depressed and view their children as "extensions" of themselves, worrying that the children can’t survive without them.

He said this is one explanation for the San Ramon mom’s decision to murder her daughter. "Once she decided to die," he told me, "she thought her daughter was better off with her." Then there are rare instances, Resnick said, of mothers “who, Medea-like, kill their children out of revenge. They want to get even with boyfriends or husbands who they believe have wronged them.”

In Mundi’s case, the only motive police publicly ascribed to the deaths was a custody dispute between Mundi and her ex-husband, Galadriel’s father. Although Mundi’s friends and relatives were well aware of her complaints against her ex-husband, they believe that there more to the loss of Mundi and Galadriel than just a custody dispute.

Their stories provided a picture of a woman who may have suffered from an undiagnosed, untreated mental illness. Her writings and accounts by her loved ones show she was given to mood swings, rigid, obsessive, grandiose, paranoid thinking and a fractured sense of self. At the same time, friends and relatives also remember how she could be “normal,” a good friend, a warm, intelligent companion and a loving mother.

In hindsight, they realized that she offered plenty of warning signs. She even talked about suicide, but like a lot of people in their position, they never imaged that she would ever take things so far. They certainly never imagined she would hurt the daughter she so much wanted and loved.

We don't know what happened in the Concord case, whether Liu had a mental illness, or whether there were other things going on in her life that made her think her daughter needed to die.

But the experts I interviewed for the Diablo story all said that one key to understanding why these crimes happen is to look at the suicidal behavior of the parent. The destructive drive behind most of parent-child murder-suicides is self-destructive. The mother, or the father, wants to die. Unfortunately, they also get into a mindset in which they believe they need to take the best part of them--their children--with them.