Video: Mental illnesses in violent crime

Asperger’s disorder — if Adam Lanza had it at all — is unlikely to have prompted his decision to massacre children, experts say.

There are unconfirmed reports that Lanza, the shooter in the Newtown killings last week, suffered from the neurodevelopment disorder known as Asperger’s.

Asperger’s is a disorder of social communication. People have trouble understanding how other people are thinking and how they feel. They have trouble reading social cues and making eye contact. They’re often obsessed with details and facts.

But nowhere in the official diagnostic criteria is there any mention of a potential toward violence, experts say.

‘Evidence connecting Asperger’s to crimes like this is essentially zero’

“The evidence connecting Asperger’s to crimes like this is essentially zero,” said Canadian psychologist Dr. Frank Farley, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia.

While Asperger’s may have played a role, “I don’t think there’s any way one could argue that it was a key ingredient” in the psychology that drove Lanza to allegedly gun down 20 children and seven adults.

“Asperger’s as a label or a disorder can never explain what happened in Connecticut on Friday,” said Dr. Kevin Stoddart, an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Redpath Centre, a private agency that treats youths and adults with Asperger’s syndrome.

The brain disorder has been considered a mild or high-functioning form of autism. The main difference is that, with Asperger’s, there is no delay in speech and language. Individuals typically have above-average intelligence, yet they have trouble picking up social subtleties such as humour or sarcasm, Farley said. They often have difficulty developing and keeping relationships.

‘He wants to fit in, he wants to interact, but he’s incapable of doing it. That can cause frustration, and frustration can lead to aggression’

“Let’s say for the sake of argument that [Lanza] had Asperger’s. He wants to fit in, he wants to interact, but he’s incapable of doing it,” Farley said. That can cause frustration, and frustration can lead to aggression, he added.

But there could have been other ingredients in the psychological recipe that drove Lanza, Farley said, including the reported gun obsession of his mother, a woman “who may or may not have been paranoid, a gun aficionado and survivalist” who was apparently dominant in Lanza’s life.

People with Asperger’s often display rigid and inflexible, “rule-bound behaviour,” said Jodi Echakowitz of the Asperger’s Society of Ontario. “They don’t like any kind of change in routine or new environment,” said Echakowitz, whose 15-year-old son has Asperger’s.

They may act out in anger, frustration or aggression, but “it’s a completely different kind of aggression from what we saw on Friday,” she said.

The outbursts are more impulsive and reactive, and not planned. “This [the Newtown killings] is premeditated. They’re not doing that kind of thing. They’re not the kind of person who has a violent streak in them. That’s just not in their nature,” Echakowitz said.

She said her son, Kyle, was upset after hearing reports linking Lanza to Asperger’s. “He said, ‘that’s not who we are.’ ”

Dr. Wendy Roberts says the vast majority of people with Asperger’s “are real law abiders, and I think that’s the most important message.”

“There is no good evidence that any targeted violence is associated with Asperger’s,” said Roberts, a developmental pediatrician and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

If the media reports are true, Lanza was a loner who was incredibly socially anxious and whose mother took him to gun ranges.

“Maybe she thought she could connect with him through his interest in guns, and didn’t see any idea that that could ever be used in such a devastatingly awful way,” Roberts said.

With his parents separating and then divorcing, his father remarrying and his older brother leaving for university, “there were huge changes over a four-year period in his life,” she said.

“If he became more and more angry with the world, and developed a severe anxiety disorder, developed paranoia — who knows if he was developing schizophrenia — all those things, any of those things could be happening to a vulnerable brain that’s really stretched.”

Asperger’s isn’t a form of mental illness but rather a developmental difference

Asperger’s isn’t a form of mental illness but rather a developmental difference in how a person’s brain is hardwired, doctors say.

Bailey Hawkins-Haas, whose six-year-old son struggles with autism, says that the media rush to connect, even loosely, the Newtown massacres with Asperger’s is “reckless and hurtful towards families with members who are on the autistic spectrum.”

Parents of newly diagnosed children are especially vulnerable to conjectures in the media, said Hawkins-Haas of Smiths Falls, Ont.

“Imagine having a two-year-old that has just been diagnosed with autism, and suddenly this horrific event occurs and the person is tied to autism,” she said.

“I couldn’t imagine the pain that that would cause them, to think that that could even remotely be a possibility for them in the future.”