PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS
Tell me the reality. Once you first heard of the mass shooting in Monterey Park after a celebration to welcome within the Recent 12 months of the Rabbit, and if it was before the perpetrator was identified and died by suicide, who did you’re thinking that did the shooting?
A. White male
B. Black male
C. Asian male
D. Another cultural identity
I picked A. I used to be mistaken. I used to be almost mechanically assuming we were coping with the leftover white anti-Asian hate from the pandemic. The reply is C. A couple of hours later, the mainstream media said the escaped perpetrator was an Asian male who was aged between 30 to 50. He actually turned out to be 72, an unusually advanced age for a mass killer. The motive is uncertain to this point.
What does this say about me and my personal biases? As a specialist in cultural psychiatry, where was my cultural humility, the watchwords of this special area of concern?
An Asian American woman author of the Recent Yorker made the identical mistake.1 Were we primed by triggers to most—though not all—of the past anti-Asian hate crimes being done by white and Black Americans.
It looks like we are inclined to hear of intergroup conflict and violence most frequently, like white against Black. News about shooting the opposite seems to verify that we’re hard-wired to fear those perceived as the opposite, after which to scapegoat them and protect our own safety and power in the method.
Nonetheless, there actually are common examples of intragroup conflict, but they’re less discussed publicly. They may very well be a type of self-hating. Or, a psychological identification with the aggressor, on this case white Americans generally.
One explanation for the relative silence is that we don’t “air our dirty laundry,” taken to an extreme by not snitching on one’s own, as within the Mafia, resulting from concern about how we and our group are viewed. Furthermore, groups often have subgroups which can be much more emotionally powerful because they’re more intimate. Families may count here.
There’s a lesson here, at the very least for me, a lesson I believed that I had already learned. Be cautious about making cultural assumptions, especially with patients.
What a contrast this was to our enthusiastic video last week on “Hop on the Chinese Recent 12 months of the Rabbit,” a yr anticipated to be related to comfort and security. On the astrological optimistic side, the shooting occurred right before the official starting of the Recent 12 months, so we will place it still within the 12 months of the Tiger, a yr more related to aggressive risk. Whatever the truth of astrology, psychology ethically requires our lively involvement with reducing and treating anti-Asian traumatic hate.
Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who has specialized within the cultural and ethical features of psychiatry. A prolific author and speaker, he received the one-time designation of Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Assembly of the American Psychiatric Association in 2002. He’s an advocate for mental health issues related to climate instability, burnout, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism for a greater world. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times™.
Reference
1. Luo M. The specter of anti-Asian violence within the Monterey Park shooting. The Recent Yorker. January 22, 2023. Accessed January 23, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-spectre-of-anti-asian-violence-in-the-monterey-park-shooting
