<story><title>Thinking the unthinkable</title><url>http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/12/thinking-unthinkable.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joonix</author><text>This may be politically incorrect to say right now, but I think the genes associated with mental illnesses that have a tendency to lead to violence will be phased out by a future generation sometime within this century and the next.&lt;p&gt;We&apos;ll soon enough try gun control. That won&apos;t stop mass killings. Then we&apos;ll try increased mental healthcare access. That won&apos;t do much because we&apos;ll struggle with the Constitutionality of locking people up in mental hospitals when they aren&apos;t &lt;i&gt;yet&lt;/i&gt; a threat to anyone.&lt;p&gt;By this point in the future, genetic screening will be ubiquitous and affordable, possibly mandatory. Cultural attitudes will shift with this, and it will be expected for people to study their genome and compare openly when dating. People will pass on mates due to a high risk of major issues occurring should they have children together (this already happens in the Jewish community with Tay Sachs). Eventually people will be a lot more picky and aware of heredity and we could see a lot of hereditary mental illnesses removed from the population.&lt;p&gt;(I want to make clear I&apos;m not expressing an opinion on or endorsing this, merely trying to make a prediction)</text></item><item><author>forrestthewoods</author><text>Post like this terrify me. What if there isn&apos;t anything that can be done? It seems like there are some people that are just born broken or at some point they break.&lt;p&gt;Men who experience schizophrenia it often stars in their late teens or early 20s, and late 20s/early 30s for women [1]. I had a friend in high school who was completely normal in every way. During his first year in college he literally just went crazy. It wasn&apos;t a singular event but over 6 months he lost it and he&apos;s never been the same. He has access to mental health care and after several years his parents even had him committed for a few months. Nothing helps and even his parents have finally accepted that he will never be the same or even normal.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t know what we as a society are supposed to do in these cases and that&apos;s what terrifies me above all else.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/healthlibrary/conditions/mental_health_disorders/schizophrenia_85,P00762/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/healthlibrary/conditions/ment...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>omGac0W</author><text>Is &quot;wanting to kill people&quot; really so far from the norm as to have a gene associated with it? What would the gene be responsible for, &quot;Propensity to give a fuck about other living beings&quot;? Because in my mind, the line between being &quot;sane&quot; and killing everyone in sight is pretty fine.&lt;p&gt;One&apos;s logic could go like this, &quot;Man, everything sucks, and those kids down at the preschool are always so damn happy. Fuck Them. If I&apos;m not happy no ones gets to be  happy. Lock and load assholes.&quot; Suddenly you&apos;ve got another tragedy. I would imagine people that are suicidal sometimes feel like this. Maybe it depends on how introverted or extroverted they are. The introverts disappear quietly in the dead of night, and the extroverts start mowing down pedestrians in the town square and then blow their brains out standing on the Mayor&apos;s statue.&lt;p&gt;If a gene could be isolated for &quot;suicidal tendencies&quot; and also for intro/extro we might be able to reduce future events like this. But just because someone is a suicidal extrovert that hates everyone it doesn&apos;t necessarily mean they&apos;re going to start killing people. Maybe the ones that don&apos;t are just pussies and the gene for &quot;guts&quot; or &quot;courage&quot; would also have to be isolated?&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t know I&apos;m just rambling. I ask myself why I don&apos;t kill my neighbors. Is it because I&apos;m &quot;sane&quot;? Well I guess so, if &quot;liking others&quot; and not wanting them to be sad is a characteristic of sane people. But I firmly believe that there&apos;s a tiny slice of murderer in all sane people, and I like to think of people like Adam Lanza as having just a bigger slice, because putting them in a different category of &quot;mentally ill&quot; sort of feels like I&apos;m denying a part of my own nature.</text></comment>
<story><title>Thinking the unthinkable</title><url>http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/12/thinking-unthinkable.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joonix</author><text>This may be politically incorrect to say right now, but I think the genes associated with mental illnesses that have a tendency to lead to violence will be phased out by a future generation sometime within this century and the next.&lt;p&gt;We&apos;ll soon enough try gun control. That won&apos;t stop mass killings. Then we&apos;ll try increased mental healthcare access. That won&apos;t do much because we&apos;ll struggle with the Constitutionality of locking people up in mental hospitals when they aren&apos;t &lt;i&gt;yet&lt;/i&gt; a threat to anyone.&lt;p&gt;By this point in the future, genetic screening will be ubiquitous and affordable, possibly mandatory. Cultural attitudes will shift with this, and it will be expected for people to study their genome and compare openly when dating. People will pass on mates due to a high risk of major issues occurring should they have children together (this already happens in the Jewish community with Tay Sachs). Eventually people will be a lot more picky and aware of heredity and we could see a lot of hereditary mental illnesses removed from the population.&lt;p&gt;(I want to make clear I&apos;m not expressing an opinion on or endorsing this, merely trying to make a prediction)</text></item><item><author>forrestthewoods</author><text>Post like this terrify me. What if there isn&apos;t anything that can be done? It seems like there are some people that are just born broken or at some point they break.&lt;p&gt;Men who experience schizophrenia it often stars in their late teens or early 20s, and late 20s/early 30s for women [1]. I had a friend in high school who was completely normal in every way. During his first year in college he literally just went crazy. It wasn&apos;t a singular event but over 6 months he lost it and he&apos;s never been the same. He has access to mental health care and after several years his parents even had him committed for a few months. Nothing helps and even his parents have finally accepted that he will never be the same or even normal.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t know what we as a society are supposed to do in these cases and that&apos;s what terrifies me above all else.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/healthlibrary/conditions/mental_health_disorders/schizophrenia_85,P00762/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/healthlibrary/conditions/ment...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>draq</author><text>The truth is that humans, like all other animals, have been selective breeding all the time, it&apos;s called evolution. We select our mates based on their phenotypes (like aggression, intelligence etc). It was more so in the past than now. People used to abandon infants that are born &quot;defective&quot; (we now have abortions). Parents selected the mates for their children because they are believed to be better judges of &quot;good&quot; phenotypes. It was customary to ensure that the family of the respective mate has no members with mental illness. Yet, after millennia of selective breeding, we still have all the crazies among us. The fact that those &quot;bad&quot; genes still exist must mean that they confer some benefits to the carrier.&lt;p&gt;The interplay between genes, RNA, proteins and other macromolecules is so complex that I doubt we can pin down a mental illness to a single gene or safely remove a mutation that causes mental illness from the gene pool without reducing other collateral beneficial traits.</text></comment>