There was a succession of spectacular acts of public violence and terrorism over the previous few months, together with the homicide of the CEO of the insurance coverage firm United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, in New York, the suicide of military veteran Matthew Livelsberger in Las Vegas and the automotive assault in Magdeburg, Germany.
It’s tempting to clarify these puzzling occasions as merchandise of psychological problems. The identical forms of explanations are ceaselessly heard for the unorthodox selections of United States President Donald Trump. However are these explanations authentic, and even a good suggestion?
Trump’s second time period in energy, which has targeted on stoking people’s anger, has given rise to quite a few interpretations of this type. Critics have analyzed Trump’s stunning decrees and statements (for instance, “cleaning out” the Gaza Strip) as signs of mental illness.
(AP Photograph/Jose Luis Magana)
Although they could disagree on its substance, some analysts are taking the Trump administration’s “shock and awe” approach to governance critically. Others merely declare that the president of the USA is loopy. This characterization is each violent and simplistic.
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What’s pathologization?
Pathologization refers back to the act of explaining actions by presuming or diagnosing a person pathology. It’s a widespread reflex to clarify excessive acts, one which additionally serves as a catch-all for violent and apparently inexplicable actions.
However what’s the social operate of pathologizing political violence and violent insurance policies? And the way does this have an effect on our understanding of the problems underlying this violence?
As a doctoral pupil in political philosophy, my analysis focuses on particular collective traumas and their political dimensions. In a context of elevated polarization, I’m significantly focused on how trauma and different psychological pathologies are used to clarify political phenomena resembling violence.
Psychological well being is actually a political challenge. Nonetheless, on the one hand, utilizing it this fashion dangers depoliticizing actions which might be a part of a transparent political agenda. And on the opposite, it dangers overshadowing the social pathologies that truly emerge from violent insurance policies (such because the collective traumas that outcome from colonization and conflict).
(AP Photograph/Sergei Grits)
Within the case of Donald Trump, pathologizing him is prone to generate confusion about the true motives behind his insurance policies. Certainly, though his incendiary statements are defined because the product of psychological instability, they’re, actually, effectively thought out. His statements additionally feed into the collective traumas that gasoline political conflicts.
Instrumental pathologization
It’s fascinating to match how pathologization, whether or not in reference to dementia or trauma, is used to research the actions of the highly effective vs. the powerless.
(Alcides Antunes by way of AP)
Within the present context, the alleged suicide of Livelsberger within the explosion of a “cybertruck” in entrance of the Trump Resort in Las Vegas in January 2025, is telling. As he wrote in his suicide observe, the explosion was “not a terrorist assault,” however quite meant as a “wake-up call” for an American public that has grow to be thirsty for “spectacles of violence.”
(Las Vegas Police Division by way of AP)
Nonetheless, Livelsberger claimed his suicide was additionally motivated by the necessity to “free himself from the burden of the lives” he had taken throughout his years of service within the navy. A number of media shops have been fast to notice the writer’s prognosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a major issue amongst American veterans.
So, this spectacular gesture befell at a novel assembly level: it was actually a political gesture, however one with motivations explicitly linked to psychological struggling.
The violence on the root of the pathology
What’s the level of linking the pathologization of the violent political actions of a president to these of a military veteran?
Firstly, as a result of the tendency to pathologize violent acts has lengthy favoured white males: a number of research on mass killings, for instance, present that violent white males obtain more empathetic media treatment than do men of colour.
Secondly, the pathologization of political actions, resembling oppositional activism, is a recurring instrument of depoliticization by way of the individualization and stigmatization of collective acts. Within the case of Livelsberger, who took particular person however spectacular motion, the pathologization appears to have rendered the political calls for behind the gesture invisible: it turned about trauma, case closed.
In the end, the over-visibility of particular person pathologies resembling PTSD, mixed with the pathologization of the actions of the highly effective — like Trump — grow to be a method that masks the collective traumas which might be truly the underlying reason behind political violence.
Whereas concurrently explaining Livelsberger’s suicide and the violent insurance policies of the American president as merchandise of psychological sickness, we overlook the social traumas which might be the supply of large-scale violence, such because the traumas of wars within the Middle East and people of socio-political events within the U.S. and the remainder of the world. These are sure to extend as fascism, already uninhibited, continues to progress.
The necessity to consider collective trauma
Khaled Diab, a Belgian and Egyptian journalist for the Guardian who focuses on Center Japanese politics, identified in a 2023 article that collective trauma is the cornerstone of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It nurtures a distrust that toxins the thought of coexistence “by investing violence with a hypnotic redemptive worth.”
(AP Photograph/Abdel Kareem Hana)
The dangers of pathologization are very actual, particularly within the context of rising fascism in some areas of the world.
Explaining violent actions and insurance policies when it comes to particular person pathologies can masks their actual causes, specifically divisive discourses and conflicts. What’s extra, decreasing violence to a pathology can conceal the opposite operate of those very discourses and conflicts by presenting using violence as “redemptive.” This rhetorical instrument is utilized in Trump’s agenda and in different instances of fascism centred on common anger.
To place it one other means, pathologization camouflages the system behind the violence, but additionally the collective traumas that stir additional violence, each right here and elsewhere.
Now, greater than ever, we should keep in mind that whereas particular person pathologies will be handled — supplied that therapies are accessible, a really perfect removed from being achieved all over the place — overcoming collective traumas requires way more time, sources and resilience. Sadly, these traumas can feed the very collective resentment that’s on the root of fascism.
