Teachers should keep an eye out for “puritanical” youths who readily submit to authority and whom adults find pleasing, suggested Dr. Clive Chamberlain, a staff psychiatrist at the centre for addiction and mental health, for they may have a dark side. Though only about two out of every 100,000 kids fit the moniker of “homicidal youth,” they have attracted much public attention in recent years.
Nearly half of them never act out at all, in Chamberlain’s experience, but one-fifth have a history of chronic violence. And when such youths do strike, it happens randomly. They go after targets of convenience-parents, siblings, or neighbours-but not anyone in particular. Most of the time, the victim is simply someone the youthful assailant knows.
The disproportionate amount of attention they garner is partly because there is no definite diagnosis, or even any identified risk factors for this condition. “Most of these kids would never have been identified as having anything at all psychologically amiss, or needing any counseling, before these events,” said Chamberlain. They are different from psychopaths, individuals who lack the ability to identify with other people, he explained, in that they simply have extreme anxieties about experiencing feelings.
Chamberlain, who has worked with such youths for forty years, shared his experiences on Sunday afternoon, as part of the Royal Canadian Institute’s science lecture series. Over the course of his career, he has treated nearly 100 such malignant angels, as he termed them.
“The overwhelming feeling you get is that it was almost as if they were in some kind of a movie, or in a state of awareness that didn’t seem real to them,” said Chamberlain. “And then … at the time that the assault takes place, or just immediately before it, they suddenly burst into the real world.
“Some kids describe it as if they had lived all their lives in black and white, and suddenly it becomes Technicolor.”
One common pattern Chamberlain has noted among them is their lack of interest in social rituals, such as recreation, humour, music, drama, and sports, activities that “make it possible for us to bear the strain of the requirements of civilization and still be human individuals,” as he put it. “These young people don’t seem to use these,” he remarked, yet they could be important ingredients for improving their condition.
After his lecture, Chamberlain surrounded by a two-dozen-strong mob, who peppered him with questions. He answered a question about his methods of treatment. “I just try to mobilize their sense of humour, and tease them, and detoxify aggression by arguing with them and showing them that you can argue and it’s not dangerous.”
Attendees also asked whether a host of factors, such as violent video games, the lack of parental affection, the discouragement of aggressive and competitive behaviour in schools, or perhaps autism or Asperger syndrome could be to blame. Chamberlain was skeptical. He cited the example of a dungeons and dragons-playing teenager who turned violent after giving up this pastime. “It seemed to me that the dungeons and dragons was a remedy that this kid had found to keep himself more ordered and in better balance.
“I think it’s awfully important not to see socially-contrived rituals as causing the problem,” he continued. “For instance, you’ll hear people talk about rock music as containing elements that might encourage violence. I’m always a bit skeptical of that, particularly after my experience with these kids, because I think that sometimes those art forms are protective rather than dangerous.”
