Recently, I chatted with a man single-handedly trying to restore the notion of amok to its rightful place in the pantheon of known psychotic maladies.
For that, we have Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter to thank.
With victims who were white, black, Latino and Asian American, it was truly an assault on diversity.
But Cho may also be the person who helps the mental health field begin to understand the idea of amok beyond the colonial way that sees it as a culture-bound syndrome limited to Asians.
In fact, amok may aptly describe a horrendous act that is carried out by a more diverse group of perpetrators.
That’s the belief of Dr. Manuel Saint Martin, a Los Angeles-based forensic psychiatrist. A unique hybrid of lawyer/doctor, Saint Martin sounds like he should be a character in a CSI: Someplace show. His academic paper in a clinical psychiatric journal in 1999 remains one of the few on the subject of amok — a phenomenon whereby someone, as if in a trance, is catapulted from a quiet state of pent-up anger into a murderous rage.
When the Cho story broke, Saint Martin had no doubt. Cho had gone amok, at least behaviorally.
But to what degree was it a bona fide mental illness?
That is the woeful place in which we find the state of amok, and I’m sorry to say I have played a small part in that.
It seems that yours truly, with the metaphorical use of the term, has helped to hasten the layman’s use of amok. It is now a description of a helter-skelter approach to just about anything in life; a pop cliché for crazed rage.
For that reason, among hard-core white coated mental health clinicians, amok has lost its medical currency as an official form of lunacy. No Freudian worth his caloric weight in Viennese pastry ever writes down on a patient’s chart: “AMOK,” and then prescribes a straitjacket and mood elevator.
No, amok, in that branch of medicine, whose mission is to root out the loon in lunacy, has been marginalized to a paragraph in an appendix of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition, the official dictionary of mental disorders.
Basically, the term’s been ghettoized, seen as culture-bound to Asia only, irrelevant to the West.
Given that limitation you can see why U.S. clinicians, even Asian American ones, barely mentioned amok during the height of the Virginia Tech story, though I suspect it was more due to the racial implications of having an Asian American killer as a subject and the fear of enlivening the dormant stereotype of “crazy, murderous Asians.”
But frankly, wouldn’t that be better than an image of being “docile, servile Asians,” at least metaphorically?
Still, clinicians were so careful not to use the term, I’d say it was a classic case of amokophobia: the fear of being called racist for connecting Cho to amok.
AMOK UNBOUND
Enter Dr. Saint Martin, the forensic psychiatrist based in Los Angeles, who boldly declares that amok is not a culture-bound state limited to Asia, but is a modern condition found in industrialized, westernized societies like the U.S.
“If you’re saying it’s culture bound, you’re saying it doesn’t affect us,” Saint Martin told me by phone. “But that is not my experience.”
Saint Martin said he’s researched and interviewed people connected to nearly 50 cases in Southern California between 1999 and 2002. They show a diversity of rage killers from all backgrounds, but especially among whites. Not all are Asians.
Saint Martin said his research shows that amok is a final stage in rage killings that are linked to common mental disorders like schizophrenia. He says people tend to explore those underlying conditions and dismiss that all important final stage. Part of the reason for this is that there’s nothing left to study — the amok usually kills himself.
In one case Saint Martin studied a Korean man who killed his wife and three children in Los Angeles’ Koreatown in 1999. The Los Angeles Times described him as a “volatile drinker who kept to himself and was sardonically nicknamed ‘Psycho.’”
The establishment isn’t fully embracing Saint Martin’s research just yet. But if it continues to ghettoize the term as “culture-bound” that would be a real mistake.
“If they keep thinking it’s a rare disease and not in North America,” warned Saint Martin, “You’ll miss cases and not intervene appropriately.”
Now isn’t that the case of Cho? Even with all his red flags, not enough was done.
Amok should be unbound lest we miss new ways to help us understand the potential dangers of a diverse group of people in need of help.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS RUN AMOK
Irrational fears about race appeared in the Cho story from the start. Journalists were even hesitant to mention Cho’s race, even though race was simply one fact in the story.
All I cared about was accuracy. For example, if the person is Asian, call him that if he’s an Asian national, an immigrant visa holder or resident alien. If he’s born in the U.S., call him an Asian American.
It took a day to get that right. But not before an erroneous report by Michael Sneed of the Chicago Sun-Times, who reported the shooter was a 25-year- old Chinese national from Shanghai who came into the U.S. via San Francisco last August.
When Cho was finally named, the Chinese were relieved, but the irrational fears shifted to the Korean American community, who suddenly feared some kind of retaliation.
For what? The act of a crazy person?
The hesitance on the part of the media and the psychiatric community to talk about race illustrates the bizarre mental state of America: We can’t talk about it but we can’t escape it.
I’m with Dr. Saint Martin. If it might prevent another shooting tragedy, let’s discuss amok.