Shortly after news broke that Representative Gabby Giffords had been shot in Tucson, the cable news talking heads were on the telephone in search of explanations from psychologists and psychiatrists. Wolf Blitzer, for example, wanted to know what kind of person would commit such a crime, and the California based forensic psychologist he interviewed was glad to talk about schizophrenia and its symptoms and to venture a diagnosis on the basis of the suspect’s Myspace postings and You-tube videos. It didn’t take long for mental illness to emerge as a likely explanation of Jared Lee Loughner’s conduct. And observers were able to adduce plenty of evidence that the young man had some problems: incoherent ramblings about a new currency he would create, a list of favorite books that included Mein Kampf along with the Communist Manifesto, and a proclivity for bizarre outbursts in classes at Pima Community College in Tucson.

The attribution of a crime of this kind to mental illness tells us more about ourselves and our culture than it does about the crime itself or the individual who committed it. When bad things like this happen, people want to know why, they want to know fast, and they want to be comforted. They want reasons they can understand -- “he did it to protest the Congressman’s vote on heath care reform”  or “he’s really a terrorist.” Absent motives for an action that people can make sense of, they want explanations -- “he did it because he’s insane.”

We feel comforted by the attribution of motives because they arouse the hope that we can change people’s minds and behavior. In coming days there will be much talk of gun control, toning down the violent images that have so often colored political rhetoric in this country, and enhancing the level of protection we accord to Members of Congress. I do not know if there are measures that would keep guns effectively out of the hands of people like Loughner, or if this would not have happened if Sarah Palin hadn’t put the cross hairs of a gun sight on Gabby Giffords, or if Members should be distanced from their constituents in the same way as the President now is. But I do know that discourse about these things will be energized mainly by a quest for reassurance -- yes, there is something we can do, a step we can take, a law we can pass.

Explanations also offer comfort, and those on which people typically rely do so in a particularly destructive, insidious way. Over the last fifty years psychological and psychiatric explanations have come to dominate our public discussion of tragic events. No doubt there is someone somewhere who attributes Loughner’s actions to spirit possession or witchcraft; and the eagerness of the Pat Robertsons of this world to explain acts of terrorism such as 9/11 as God’s punishment of our tolerance of homosexuality should remind us that bizarre religious views still flourish. But for the most part, the media will lead us in a discussion of this latest event as the result of insanity, mental derangement, schizophrenia, or some other version of “illness.” How do such explanations comfort and why are they destructive?

The answers depend in part on grasping the nature of both psychiatric and common sense understandings of mental illness. When do we decide that others are “insane” or “crazy?” What leads us to conclude that the wealthy woman who shoplifts has some kind of mental problem, or that a young man who shoots a Congressman might be mentally “disturbed.” The answer is fairly straightforward:  we call people “crazy,” “disturbed,” or “insane” when we cannot put ourselves in their shoes and find a sensible motive for their conduct. Why would a well-off person shoplift? He or she must be disturbed, perhaps have the illness we call kleptomania, or at least be acting out psychological issues.  We give some people a pass: we understand the motives of a poor person who steals food, for example. Though we may disapprove, we don’t attribute mental illness. Likewise, an infant who won’t stop crying isn’t thought crazy. Rather, we think there must be something causing the infant to cry that we haven’t yet figured out. We impute mental illness when role taking fails and we decide it isn’t our fault that it has -- when we cannot imagine the point of view of another and so understand the person’s conduct from their perspective.

There isn’t much difference between what we lay persons do in everyday life and what psychiatrists do in reaching diagnoses of various forms of mental illness. True, the psychiatrist is armed with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, with plentiful categories of illnesses, lists of symptoms, and differentiating criteria. The psychiatrist has clinical experience and the opportunity to closely observe and interview patients. And the psychiatrist has a handful of categories -- bipolar disorder, schizophrenia -- with at least a modicum of scientific evidence that something in the wiring and chemistry of the brain is ultimately responsible for the person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Yet at bottom, at that essentially “gut” level where assessments of others and their behavior are made, their criteria very much resemble ours. This person, we say and they say, must have some kind of mental illness because otherwise we can’t make any sense of why he or she feels depressed or has fired a gun at a Member of Congress. More often than psychiatrists would admit, the DSM is window dressing.

Attributions of mental illness thus do not really explain much about a particular individual’s conduct, nor in many cases lead to useful actions. Is Jared Lee Loughner “crazy” in lay terms? Perhaps so, but is this “knowledge” of any particular use to me? I don’t think so. My classifying the people I see on the streets muttering to themselves or cursing the world as “disturbed” or “off their meds”  is of use mainly because it leads me to cross the street to avoid unpleasant contact with them. Is Loughner, in psychiatric terms, a schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies? Does he have a distorted view of reality? Perhaps so. But this knowledge is similarly not of tremendous value, either before or after the fact of his shooting Gabby Giffords. Had authorities known that he was mentally ill, could they have taken actions that would have interfered with his plans? Possibly, had he made specific threats against her, they could have investigated him more closely. But note that in that event it wouldn’t be a formal diagnosis of mental illness (or a neighbor’s tip that “this guy is crazy”) that led to police intervention, but his actual behavior in making a threat that might have led to the diagnosis. A person’s mental illness does not in itself provide a basis either for preventive confinement or for predicting violence. Institutionalization requires due process to establish danger to self and others, and the statistical correlation between mental illness and violence is extremely low. And if we now know or believe that Loughner is “insane” or “paranoid,” how exactly does that enable us to do anything about future tragedies?

At an interpersonal level, the function of mental illness categories -- as of deviance categories more generally -- is to create distance between onself and others. In some cases, the creation of distance is a practical matter: one does not want contact with those whose previous behavior has been violent or unpleasant. But more generally, such categories create social distance -- between the sane and the insane, the normal and the deviant, the clean and the unclean, those whom we will admit to our company and those we will not. Toward the mentally disturbed we profess concern and human sympathy, of course, in contrast to the criminal, whom we want to punish. But in either case, we make a distinction between them and us, and the satisfaction we take in the fact that we do not share their stigma, while usually unspoken, is nonetheless real.

At the level of political discourse, the social function of mental illness explanations of violence is to terminate discussion or at least to direct it along safe lines. If Jared Lee Loughner is a person who speaks in complete sentences and articulates a political philosophy that valorizes assassination, we have a problem that no amount of denial can escape. In that case, his words and deeds fit into larger contexts of political discourse in which the Sarah Palins and Glenn Becks of this world have to bear responsibility, along with the Tea Partiers and their enablers in the Republican Party, and perhaps all of us who do not speak against the rhetoric of violence. If he is a man with rational motives, then he might be, heaven forfend, much more like us than we would care to acknowledge. But if he is crazy, if we can find evidence of paranoid tendencies, if there are voices telling him to act as he did, if his thinking seems disordered, then all of us are off the hook. He’s crazy, he’s different, he’s not like us. We need take no responsibility for him.

Mental illness explanations individualize and particularize problematic behavior and isolate it from the social contexts in which it develops. A diagnosis of schizophrenia does, of course, displace responsibility for conduct from the individual and locate it more ambiguously in the individual’s “illness.” But of far greater import, such diagnoses divert our attention from the social and cultural circumstances in which illnesses arise, become defined, flourish, and shape conduct. We will, no doubt, learn that Loughner was a loner, not socially adjusted in his school days in Marana, Arizona. People will wring their hands over what can be done to help such individuals, to bring them healing therapy before things get too far out of hand. No doubt armies of grief counselors are at this moment marching toward Tucson with healing therapies on their minds. Perhaps therapy at some point would have helped him; perhaps it could help others who have not yet had occasion to do harm to others.

But this young man’s mind, deranged or not, did not emerge in a vacuum. Jared Lee Loughner is, I fear, tragically representative of the culture that spawned him. And not just the culture of Arizona, although I do hope there is an especially hot place in hell for its many politicians who seem hell-bent to put a gun in every hand in every bar and to administer severe punishment for the sin of breathing while Hispanic. Too much of America is too much like the Arizona that I came to know in a decade there: filled with inchoate anger, punitive, politically uninformed, inarticulate, racist, selfish, fearful of outsiders, gullible in the face of Fox news and internet hoaxes, economically illiterate, obsessed with guns, always ready uncritically to wave the American flag. The Great Recession has made  matters worse, but this pot has been simmering for a long time.

Do not therefore be comforted by the conclusion that Jared Lee Loughner is “crazy” or a “paranoid schizophrenic.” We will, of course, never know if he “really” is or is not, for once the psychiatrists get their hands on him, the world’s view of him, and his own view of himself, will be set in whatever mold they decide. It doesn’t matter whether he is or is not mentally disordered, for it is the inevitable conclusion that he is that matters. “Crazy,” he can be set apart from the rest of us and his behavior viewed as tragic, but not indicative of who and what the rest of us are. “Insane,” he lives in his reality, not ours. He is not one of us.

To say this is not to lay responsibility vaguely at the feet of “society” rather than place it squarely either on Loughner’s shoulders or on those, like Sarah Palin, whose words arguably goad people like him into reprehensible actions. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he is insane. Weak-minded, yes, gullible, perhaps, inarticulate, possibly narcissistic, angry, confused, ill-informed -- maybe all of these things. I think he’s responsible for his actions. (And, alas, in his presentation of self on the internet his disorganized mind too closely resembles the minds of too many students I encountered in nearly forty years of university teaching for me to be persuaded easily that he’s crazy.) But even the insane and the weak-minded live partly in our world; they resemble us more than they differ from us. Jared Lee Loughner is, alas, one of us.