We’ve all heard of declarations before. We learn about them in school. We create them in our deviance of our parents’ rules and sometimes as we get older we formulate personal declarations that guide the way we expect life and people to treat us. You may have heard people call it a creed, a system of beliefs that they hold true about themselves and the world in which we all live. But few have gone as far to call it a “manifesto” until recently when we learned that’s what mass murderer, Dylann Roof, called it.
Dylann Roof is a 21-year-old man who two weeks ago beastly killed nine adults in the historic Mother Emmanuel AME’s church in Charleston. One of the reasons I thought it best to address the way the media has painted his terrorism as lack of mental health intervention and poor gun policy is mainly to inform the public about the disordered way in which, Dylann Roof by clinical judgment, a sociopath operates. This is in no way to undergird the rationale of a killer. Instead, it’s a way to provide the language and information to better equip ourselves in the future with what to make of people like Roof.
Hate Is Hate: What’s Mental Illness Got To Do With It? was originally published on blackdoctor.org
