BREAKING: Shooting at Conn. Elementary School

[rothschild]

I think getting serotonin highs by killing people in video games is not good.

With violence I think you get an adrenaline rush. With most other addictive behaviors that don't involve substance abuse, it's a dopamine high.

What's really disturbing to me is that so much of what is promoted in our society is addictive by design, and that's where the big money is made in psychology. That, IMO, is why treating/preventing mental illness isn't a priority. 

Anyway, I agree with you that's it's problematic.

You're contradicting yourself. Above you said that people blame other things instead of addressing the problem. Millions of people play violent video games and realize it's just a game and form of entertainment. Playing grand theft auto doesn't make people want to go out and kill, if it does then there is some other deep rooted problem going on and they'd do it regardless.

No competent psychologist has ever asserted that violent videogames transform people into mass murderers. What they have done is to conclusively prove that they are not "harmless" -- which shouldn't be the least bit surprising to anyone since there is just about nothing in this world that is perfectly harmless. It doesn't work that way. Beyond that, science has given us quite a bit of insight into *how* media saturated with violence and sex impacts the human mind, and the primary finding is that we become desensitized; furthermore, people who have severe mental illness are far more susceptible to such media, so it's pretty much a certainty that a tiny segment of the general population are predisposed to acting out what they are constantly exposed to, and that tiny segment is all it takes for things to go horribly wrong.

A tiny segment of the general population has always acted out regardless. People were committing violent acts when the only entertainment was the Howdy Doody show.

You left out one important thing -- the most important, in fact: the prevalence of mental illness isn't static. Hasn't COVID demonstrated this? Yeah, it has.

Synergy comes in two flavors, positive, and negative. What we're seeing today is a "perfect storm" of negative synergy, which is precisely what's to be expected in a world where corruption has become entrenched.