Healthwise: The 'perverted virtue' of a murder-suicide perpetrator

Sometimes the mind’s capacity to comprehend horror is utterly inadequate. In the wake of such atrocities as 911 or the massacre in Nice just one month ago, it is natural that people look for causes, and possibly even explanations of these events, writes Dr Michael McConville.

Rarely, if ever, can reason alone provide answers. The dreadful event in Ballyjamesduff seems out of place; it does not belong to us, and we struggle to understand it.
In an important book published in 2014, 'The Perversion of Virtue: Understanding Murder-Suicide’, Thomas Joiner, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, tries to get to the heart of the phenomenon we have come to know as murder suicide.
Throughout the world, nearly 90 percent of “ordinary” murders are committed by men, who also make up most (at least 75 percent) of the victims.
With murder-suicide, the figures are significantly different: the perpetrators are male more than 90 percent of the time, while 75 percent of the victims are female. Murder-suicide is thus primarily an extreme example of female domestic abuse, which remains a shamefully common occurrence in every society.
This is only half of the story according to Professor Joiner. In his book, he makes it clear that suicide, the destruction of oneself, is the principal act that takes place. In a murder-suicide proper, the perpetrator’s decision to kill himself is the primary factor. All else follows from it, through a morbid logic in which the thought of the victim(s) continuing to live is “the final barrier to suicide in the perpetrator’s mind”. The resolution to kill himself “necessitates, through an appeal to virtue, the death of at least one other person.” The four virtues perverted in the perpetrator’s mind are mercy, justice, duty and glory. The perpetrator of murder-suicide considers the death of the other(s) as required by at least one, and possibly two, of the four virtues. The act entails “a perverted and horribly distorted version of [virtue] to be sure,” says Joiner, who also indicates that the decision is always a product of mental illness. Thus in this extreme state of mental illness, very far removed from the vast majority of patients who suffer such diseases, the victims of the murder are joined in the mind of the suicide as part of one necessary action as a solution to the problem he faces. It becomes just or merciful that the perpetrator includes his victims to explain his actions. They deserve to suffer his fate, or he is saving them too from the world be must leave. Often he feels it is his duty to remove his entire family to resolve an intractable dispute. As the rational mind cannot conceive these concepts, it is never possible to foresee these events. So far we have found no way to avoid them, but Joiner’s book is an important attempt to find such a path. No other family member, immediate or extended, is ever responsible in any way, a small comfort that must be accepted by those now suffering most from this terrible event.