Bad, Not Broken: The Psychology of Excusing Harm
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Today, we're talking about a habit that's become so baked into our culture, most people don't even notice that they're doing it. Something awful happens like a mass shooting or a serial killer gets caught or a political figure enacts policies that devastate entire communities and someone inevitably says, oh, they must be crazy. It sounds simple.
Leslie Poston:It even sounds empathetic sometimes. Like, maybe we're trying to understand the incomprehensible, but this reflex we have to explain away cruelty, violence, and abuse of power by reaching for mental illness labels, it's not harmless. It's a deeply ingrained psychological response with far reaching consequences for how we see justice, morality, disability, and the people around us. This episode is about understanding that impulse, naming its harms, and pushing for a better way to talk about mental illness and responsibility. It's not about denying the reality of mental health struggles.
Leslie Poston:It's about drawing a sharper line between illness and intent. Because when we blur that line, we don't just misunderstand what's happening. We excuse it. Let's start with why this impulse happens in the first place. When something horrific or incomprehensible happens, our human brains scramble for a framework that helps them make sense of things.
Leslie Poston:It's part of how we maintain our sense of psychological safety in a chaotic world. If we believe people who commit atrocities are fundamentally different from us, say mentally ill, broken, or unstable, that allows our brains to feel protected from the idea that, quote, normal people are capable of evil acts. Psychologists call this a form of cognitive dissonance reduction. It's also related to what's known as the just world hypothesis. That's the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.
Leslie Poston:When a seemingly ordinary person commits an atrocity, it disrupts that belief system. To restore the feeling of balance, we need to manufacture a story that puts that person back outside the realm of the ordinary. And that's where the word crazy comes in. It gives us a box to put people in, to say they're not like us. They're not responsible.
Leslie Poston:They're mentally ill. There's also the role of attribution theory. This psychological framework suggests that we're constantly trying to make sense of other people's behavior by assigning a cause either to internal traits or external circumstance. When the behavior is shocking or incomprehensible, people lean heavily on internal explanations. Labeling someone as crazy is a form of dispositional attribution.
Leslie Poston:It places the cause inside the person, not in the systems, ideologies, or material conditions that shape their choices. And this bias is intensified by what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. We tend to overestimate internal causes when evaluating others' behavior, especially in high stakes or emotionally charged situations. That makes it so much harder for us to consider social context, ideological indoctrination, or calculated evil as real possibilities. Mental illness becomes the default explanation, not because it's true, but because it feels intuitively satisfying.
Leslie Poston:The problem is this instinct doesn't reflect reality. Most harm, especially systemic harm, isn't chaotic or irrational. It's calculated. Methodical even. The worst atrocities in history weren't committed in a fit of madness.
Leslie Poston:They were often carried out by people following orders or driven by ideology or just pursuing power and money. And that's the scary part. It's not madness. It's intent. The crazy label doesn't get applied equally either.
Leslie Poston:When a white man commits mass violence, media coverage often focuses on his mental state, saying he was troubled. He had a hard life. He was quiet, withdrawn, or maybe a little strange. We hear about his childhood trauma, mental health issues, or isolation. These details are used by the media to humanize him, to suggest that something must have been broken inside him that made this happen.
Leslie Poston:And now compare that to how black or brown people are treated in similar situations. Their mugshots get shown. Their criminal records, real or alleged, get highlighted. Their communities are blamed. There's rarely room in the media narrative or dinner table discussions for their complexity or humanity.
Leslie Poston:They aren't described as mentally ill. They're described as dangerous. And this isn't just about individual bias. It's baked into how our media and institutions operate. It's a pattern, and it's not limited to mass violence.
Leslie Poston:Think of current events when Donald Trump spreads lies that get people killed or Elon Musk empowers harassment and white supremacy on his platform. People often say, oh, he's lost his mind or he's clearly unwell. That narrative frames their harmful actions as symptoms and not choices. There's also a psychological benefit for us, the public, when we frame destructive leaders as mentally unstable. It allows us to preserve a belief in the legitimacy of systems.
Leslie Poston:If a leader's harm is due to mental illness, then that means to us the institution isn't broken. It's just temporarily infected. It gives us an emotional out, a way to avoid grappling with the possibility that corruption, racism, or violence might be structural rather than accidental. This is what psychologists call a system justification theory, our tendency to defend the status quo even if it's harmful because the alternative feels too destabilizing the process. Labeling the elites, so to speak, as crazy instead of corrupt also reinforces the myth of meritocracy.
Leslie Poston:It suggests these people rose to power on ability alone and then somehow lost their way rather than acknowledging that systems often reward harmful traits like manipulation, coercion, and exploitation. Mental illness becomes the scapegoat that keeps us from seeing the machinery behind the behavior. But these men aren't stumbling around in confusion. They're strategic. They're doing harm with intent and consistency.
Leslie Poston:So much intent that they published a book about it a year ago. And when we dismiss that as madness, we excuse it. We minimize the threat and let powerful people off the hook. The data's clear: people with mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. And this isn't new research.
Leslie Poston:Study after study has shown that the vast majority of people living with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or PTSD or depression are not dangerous. And when violence does occur, it's much more often tied to socioeconomic factors, trauma, substance abuse, or access to weapons and not mental illness itself. But that's not the story we hear. Sensational media coverage consistently links violence with mental instability. When someone commits a violent act, especially if they're white, mental illness becomes the dominant narrative.
Leslie Poston:The question becomes not what did they do, but what was wrong with them. And this false link between mental illness and violence also plays into availability heuristics. The more dramatic or memorable an event is, the more likely we are to overestimate how common it is. Because violent acts committed by people with psychiatric diagnoses get massive media attention, mistakenly believe those events represent the norm. In reality, those are statistical outliers.
Leslie Poston:But when our brains rely on vividness instead of data, our beliefs become skewed. The American Psychological Association has warned for years against the danger of this misperception, noting that fewer than five percent of violent crimes are committed by people with serious mental illness. And that statistic bears repeating. It's a tiny fraction. But it dominates headlines and fuels fear based policy.
Leslie Poston:And those policies tend to criminalize rather than support. And this matters. It shapes public perception and influences policy, creating a false sense of threat around mental illness, which, again, drives stigma, fear, and discrimination. And it distracts us from the real risk factors that lead to violence, most of which have nothing to do with psychology. When we conflate cruelty with mental illness, it hurts everyone.
Leslie Poston:It distorts public understanding of mental health, fueling stigma and making life harder for people who are already struggling. People become afraid to seek help. They fear they'll be labeled dangerous or unstable. Employers and landlords and even family members buy into the idea that mentally ill people are unpredictable and unsafe. This leads to isolation, unemployment, homelessness, and more untreated suffering.
Leslie Poston:This dynamic also feeds a broader psychological pattern called symbolic threat. People who are perceived as different, especially when they're framed as unpredictable, are often seen as threatening even if they pose no actual danger. This is part of how stigma operates. Mental illness becomes a symbolic stand in for chaos or disorder. The person becomes a walking metaphor stripped of their individual humanity and treated as a risk category.
Leslie Poston:And, again, that perception shapes not only personal relationships but public policy. If the public believes people with mental illness are ticking time bombs, then restrictive, punitive, and even violent interventions start to feel justified, whether that's institutionalization, forced medication, or surveillance. The psychology of fear becomes a tool of control. It also misdirects our precious resources. Instead of addressing the root cause of violence like poverty, inequality, racism, or rampant access to guns, we pour money into speculative security systems and mental health screenings that often don't work.
Leslie Poston:It's theater. It looks like action but solves nothing. Worst of all, this mindset weakens our collective capacity for moral clarity. When we treat every form of evil as a pathology, we forget how to recognize greed, cruelty, abuse, and power hungry behaviors for what they are. And we forget that people can choose to do harm even when they are fully aware of what they're doing.
Leslie Poston:Social media has made us all amateur diagnosticians. People throw around terms like narcissist, sociopath, or psychopath without understanding the nuance of what they mean. Entire political takes are built on speculative diagnoses of public figures, but this isn't analysis. It's deflection. Calling someone a narcissist doesn't tell us anything about what they've done or why it matters.
Leslie Poston:It just gives us a way to disengage from the specifics. It blurs the line between description and judgment and makes real psychiatric terms into moral insults. And the truth is some people are just unethical. They just exploit others intentionally. They lie, manipulate, harm, or destroy because it benefits them, and some just because they like it.
Leslie Poston:That doesn't make them sick. It makes them responsible. We need to get better at describing behavior clearly without leaning on diagnostic labels. Was the person violent? Did they abuse their power?
Leslie Poston:Did they incite harm? Did they encourage others to incite harm? That's the conversation we should be having. This issue hits especially hard for marginalized communities. Black children are far more likely to be punished for behaviors that would result in a diagnosis or support for white children.
Leslie Poston:Instead of being referred to counseling, they're suspended or arrested. They're treated like mini adults. This tracks them into the school to prison pipeline and locks them out of the support systems they need. Indigenous people have a long history of being labeled unstable or unfit as a way to justify institutionalization and land theft. Government records show that mental health labels were often weaponized to remove indigenous children from their families or justify surveillance, sterilization.
Leslie Poston:Immigrants too are frequently denied access to mental health services while simultaneously being policed for instability or deviance. They're painted as threats to national security, radicalized or dangerous, which creates a double bind where they are both excluded from care and targeted for punishment. There's also a long psychological history of using pseudoscientific language to justify the oppression of marginalized communities. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, fabricated diagnoses like drapotomania, a so called mental illness said to cause enslaved people to flee captivity, were used to pathologize resistance itself. These weren't fringe ideas.
Leslie Poston:They were treated as legitimate psychology, taught in medical schools, and used to justify violence and control. Unfortunately, these legacies haven't disappeared. Today, black children are still disproportionately labeled with conduct disorders instead of autism or ADHD, which delays or blocks access to services. Immigrant communities, especially undocumented people, often avoid seeking care for fear of deportation or surveillance. We've seen a lot of that in the news this weekend.
Leslie Poston:Indigenous populations continue to experience generational trauma, but their mental health needs are frequently minimized or medicalized in ways that strip them of cultural context. When people rise up against injustice, those in power often respond by questioning their sanity. Peaceful protesters are called unhinged, irrational, or out of control. Recall after George Floyd was murdered, Black Lives Matter demonstrators were labeled as anarchists and terrorists. That language wasn't just dismissive.
Leslie Poston:It was strategic. It was used to justify military style police crackdowns and surveillance. This is a pattern that has deep roots. During the civil rights movement, leaders like Martin Luther King Junior were surveilled under the pretense of being dangerous or unstable. Activists at Standing Rock were targeted by counterterrorism units.
Leslie Poston:The idea is simple. If dissent can be framed as madness, then it doesn't have to be taken seriously. This framing isn't just discrediting. It's also isolating. When protest is seen as irrational or dangerous, people feel discouraged from joining movements that could lead to change.
Leslie Poston:They don't want to be seen as unstable or radical, especially if they rely on employers, schools, or social services that might retaliate. This kind of psychological chilling effect, the fear of social punishment from moral engagement, keeps bad systems in place by silencing dissent before it begins. Psychologists studying political repression have found that labeling resistance as madness is a common tactic in authoritarian regimes. It severs people from their communities, makes them easier to discredit, and reframes ethical courage as psychological disturbance. And we're not immune to that in The United States, even if the language is more polished.
Leslie Poston:But protest is not a symptom. It's a response. A response to injustice, violence, and systemic harm. And when we treat it like instability, we delegitimize the pain and the courage behind it. In The United States, we treat suffering like a crime.
Leslie Poston:Instead of care, we offer punishment. Instead of therapy, we offer jail time. Psychologists studying punishment attitudes in The United States often point to the phenomenon of moral absolutism, an all or nothing thinking style where people are viewed as either inherently good or irredeemably bad. This binary worldview makes rehabilitation feel naive or even dangerous. It supports harsh penalties and strips away empathy, especially when combined with racial and class bias.
Leslie Poston:We also see echoes of what behavioral economists called just desserts reasoning, the belief that people get what they deserve. If someone is suffering, it must be because they failed morally. Or if they're in prison or living with mental illness, the logic goes they must have done something wrong. And this just deserts mindset leaves little room for compassion, care, or reform. Our largest mental health institutions in The United States are prisons.
Leslie Poston:People in crisis are more likely to encounter police than a counselor. And what happens next is often fatal. People with untreated mental illnesses are killed by law enforcement at disproportionately high rates, not because they're violent, but because they're misunderstood and criminalized. The carceral system doesn't just lock people up. It locks society into a way of thinking, one that says people are either good or bad, functional or broken, worthy or disposable.
Leslie Poston:And when you believe binary thinking like that, it's easy to justify any form of violence as long as it's framed as justice. It's not just mental illness that gets misused. Disability language has long been a tool of dehumanization. Terms like feeble minded, defective, degenerate, or retarded have been used to label entire populations as unworthy of rights, autonomy, or even life. In recent years, we've seen echoes of this in the treatment of immigrants, incarcerated people, or marginalized groups.
Leslie Poston:Think about the ICE detainees being forcibly sterilized under the guise of protecting public health or the disabled parents who had their children taken away because of unproven assumptions about their capacity to parent. When society labels people as mentally or cognitively deficient, not because they are, but because it's politically useful, it opens the door to horrific abuse. Surveillance, institutionalization, family separation, medical violence, all of it becomes, quote, justified through a pathologizing lens. And this isn't just history. It is happening right now.
Leslie Poston:There's also the concept of disability drag where disability language is metaphorically applied to people who are not disabled in order to mark them as deviant, defective, or threatening. This metaphorical framing primes audiences to devalue and fear certain groups, whether or not the label has any clinical validity. It's a form of linguistic stigmatization that weaponizes diagnosis as a social tool. The slippery slope from metaphor to policy is steep. When people are labeled unstable or defective, intentionally or rhetorically, it opens the door to state control.
Leslie Poston:Psychologists studying mass compliance and systemic harm have pointed out how language can desensitize people to oppression. If someone is seen as mentally broken, then forced treatment, removal, or sterilization starts to look like a public service. This is how atrocities get bureaucratized. When we mislabel cruelty as illness, we don't just get the story wrong. We let the wrong people off the hook.
Leslie Poston:We turn victims into villains and power into pathology, reinforcing a culture that punishes pain and excuses abuse. And the truth is some people are just cruel. Some systems are just built to harm, and some harms are chosen, not suffered. So let's stop reaching for crazy as our explanation and start telling the truth because the stakes are far too high to get this wrong. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace.
Leslie Poston:I'm Leslie Poston signing off. Until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
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