What I want to say when I'm interviewed on the T.V. news; what I really want to get across when I'm asked about yet another kid committing a heinous act with a firearm at a school is this: it didn't start with just that kid---so stop asking me about how that particular kid could have done such a thing. Systemic problem: It started with the combination of our culture's skill-less parenting epidemic (more on that later), along with the steady decline of basic humanity and substance in our culture. It didn't start with just that kid. It started with the adults who raised that kid and with the adults who raised that kid's parents. And so on, and so on, back through the generations of trauma and skill-less parenting. The culture piece: And it started with our increasingly disposable and distracted culture; our increasingly aggressive, miserable, and savage culture that's devoid of real meaning and real value in favor of bottom-line profits, sales and marketing, quick fixes, various addictions (including cell-phone addiction), and self-glorification. A culture whose industries---from healthcare to clothing, from education to food products---care only about bottom-line profits and sacrifice real quality. Nobody cares and nobody matters. People don't matter. Relationships don't matter. Products and services are disposable, fake. And people are too. Sell, sell, sell. Buy, buy, buy. Don't stop. Don't think. Don't reflect. Stay numbed up. Stay dumbed down. Keep your head down in your cell phone. No eye contact. Expressionless faces. And don't forget to take a selfie and post how great you and your life are. Smile for that. A culture of knee-jerk reactions and no real leadership---from homes to offices, from government to corporate boardrooms. A polarized, out-of-balance culture that uses logic without heart to fight all the time. Pure logic fights without relationship. No relating. Just arguing points. Out-logic-ing one another. No core: Our culture has devolved into convenience over what's actually right; we lack integrity in order to grow the bottom-line. We lack a basic moral core. We have no common-sense morality at all. No loyalty. No commitment. No patience. No self-sacrifice. No leadership. We are a short-term, "gotta get mine" culture. Instant gratification. We are a culture of addicts. Selfies, porn, reality-shows, media and sports heroes, money. Here's the point: We burn out, just like drug addicts burn out. And kids see and feel no real in any of this. On some level, they know. In their numbness, they feel it. They have no hope. The see no future. They can't acknowledge and talk out loud about thoughts and feelings (fear, hopes, anger, shame, guilt, love, hate, self-hate), because nobody has the time or energy---or the knowledge or skill-set---to talk to them about anything of substance. Logic and goals without heart: The adults around them only have their weird language of "goals", "consequences", and "actionable items"---but are not actually alive and sentient themselves; they might try therapy, but the therapists are talking the same non-sentient language because that's all the insurance industry will let them do. Nothing gets processed and no healing gets done. Kids are exposed early on to disposability; of relationships, of careers, of products and services. Of life itself. No meaning. No actual substance or joy. No learning to deal with emotions and with the pain of life. No heart. No soul. Hopelessness. Anger. Abandonment by and no leadership from their parents or their institutions. This is how we create killer kids.
About the Author: Dr. Ferraioli is a physician specializing in psychiatry. He has written eight books dealing with numerous aspects of human emotion and behavior, as well as economics and greed in our culture. He attended Princeton University and later earned a medical degree at the Albany Medical College where he did his internship in Internal Medicine and residency in Psychiatry, serving as chief resident. He regularly serves as a media expert in his field, and has served in various capacities including expert witness, forensic/prison psychiatry, and community psychiatry. He currently runs a private practice in New York State.