The Troubled Life of Jared Loughner

Navigating the cluttered corridors of Jared Loughner’s mind will take psychiatrists months or years. We will likely never know all the reasons he took a cab to that Safeway on Jan. 8, paid with a $20 bill, calmly got his change and then killed six people and wounded 14 others.

But snapshots of his life are accumulating from acquaintances and his few friends. (His parents issued a short statement of apology, but they are said to be too distraught to speak about their son.) These snapshots depict a quiet, normal boy who had grown into a man descending steadily into serious mental illness. A partisan, highly nonscientific debate has erupted over whether extreme right-wing rhetoric could have inflamed whatever illness he may have and caused him to target Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords. We don’t know the answer, but psychological research suggests that political rhetoric could never be the single cause that leads a person with complex mental problems to commit violence.

(See pictures from a grieving Tucson.)

Case History
Pinpointing the precise moment a mental illness takes root is guesswork at best. As a young man, Loughner seemed ordinary enough — occasionally withdrawn, as all teens can be, and a little nerdy. He loved music and played the sax well. A classmate who had known him since elementary school, Ashley Buysman, says that when she heard the charges against him, “it just blew my mind.”

But a darkness began massing around Loughner sometime after he dropped out of Mountain View High School in Tucson, Ariz., before his senior year. He started drinking a lot, according to Kylie Smith, who had known him since preschool. She lost contact with him between 2006 and 2008 and was stunned by how much he had changed. “He seemed out of it, like he was somewhere else,” she says. “I could tell he wasn’t just drunk and he wasn’t just high.”

Was a psychiatric illness beginning? Maybe, but it’s difficult to tell, because Loughner had by then used a lot of drugs — not just pot but also hallucinogens like acid, according to Smith. It was at about this time that Loughner did something odd: he worked out for months so he could join the Army. Yet after traveling to the military processing station in Phoenix, he told an Army official that he smoked marijuana excessively — which meant he would never be accepted. The weird part: he actually passed a drug test that day, so he had not been using for at least a couple of weeks.

(See photos of the world of Jared Lee Loughner.)

Loughner’s behavior became increasingly erratic after the Army incident. Friends say he would occasionally speak in random strings of words. He had run-ins with police over drugs and his vandalization of a street sign. He became paranoid that the government was trying to control him — or everyone. He couldn’t keep jobs at Quiznos and an animal shelter because he wouldn’t — or could no longer — follow instructions.

When classes began at Pima Community College last year, Loughner’s behavior frightened fellow students from Day One. “He had this hysterical kind of laugh, laughing to himself,” says Benjamin McGahee, his math professor. He would say nonsensical things about “denying math.” Says McGahee: “One lady in the back of the classroom said she was scared for her life, literally.”

Such Stuff as Dreams
It seems clear that Loughner was developing a mental illness, but which one? Many signs point to one of the psychotic disorders — delusional disorder, say, or schizophrenia, for which the average age of onset is roughly 20, about when Loughner started showing symptoms. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders includes “substance-induced psychotic disorder,” which is also a possibility in Loughner’s case.

(See six warning signs of whether someone is mentally ill.)

By several accounts, Loughner had become fascinated with lucid dreaming, a dream state you can enter when you’re half asleep. You are aware while you’re in that state that you’re dreaming. Loughner’s interest in his lucid dreams is significant, because last year the European Science Foundation reported that lucid dreaming “creates distinct patterns of electrical activity in the brain that have similarities to the patterns made by psychotic conditions.” Loughner’s drug use could have kept him from falling into deep sleep and encouraged lucid dreaming. The European group said paranoid delusions can occur when lucid dreams are replayed repeatedly after the subject wakes up. Loughner was replaying his lucid dreams in an extensive dream journal, according to his friend Bryce Tierney, who spoke with Mother Jones magazine.

See TIME’s complete coverage of the Tucson shooting.

See pictures of messages for the Tucson victims.

So, what about political rhetoric? If Loughner had developed a psychotic condition, such rhetoric might have sounded more extreme to him than it really was, according to Jeffrey Swanson, a psychiatry professor at Duke University School of Medicine. “Take something you or I might find mildly threatening. For the person with impaired perception of reality, that can get exaggerated to the point of being incredibly threatening.”

We also know that delusional patients in different cultures have different kinds of misperceptions of the world. One study, by the Tokyo Metropolitan College of Allied Medical Sciences, compared schizophrenic delusions among patients in Tokyo and Vienna and found that European patients tended toward fantasies about poisoning and odd religious ideas, while the Japanese had delusions that they were being “slandered,” which the authors surmise “may derive from the group-oriented self in Japanese ‘shame culture.'” Such studies suggest that the broader culture — which would include the political climate — could affect the content of a psychotic person’s delusions, including what or whom the person perceives as threats.

But those who say right-wing rhetoric was the one factor tipping Loughner misunderstand the complex nature of psychosis. “No single variable explains violence in schizophrenia,” write Swanson and eight colleagues in a 2006 paper published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. “Rather, violent behavior occurs within a social-ecological system involving a ‘whole person’ with a particular life history and state of health.” In short, saying Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck caused Loughner’s actions is, to put it charitably, completely idiotic.

Looking for Risk Factors
At some point, Loughner did something few people with psychotic disorders do: he began buying guns and planning violence. Last year he bought a shotgun from Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson. On Nov. 30, he went back and purchased the Glock he used in the Safeway massacre.

(Read “Why Are the Mentally Still Bearing Arms?”)

Many people are blaming mental illness for the massacre, but a more reliable set of predictors of violent crime are age (arrests for violent crime peak at about 18), gender (each year men commit roughly 80% of the violent crimes in the U.S.), lower socioeconomic status and history of arrest. (Loughner fits all four.) Still, Swanson’s data show that the lifetime prevalence of violence in those with schizophrenia or a mood disorder is 33%, compared with 15% for those with no major disorder. Combine schizophrenia or a mood disorder with substance abuse and the prevalence soars to 65%. One reason is that psychotics and addicts exhibit a high level of what psychologists call arousal; they get agitated very easily.

Psychiatrists who treat Loughner will look for other risk factors that predict violence aside from (and better than) psychosis: childhood abuse, alcoholic parents and, again, heavy drug use. And the rest of us will wonder whether more could have been done to recognize Loughner’s warning signs before he got to that Safeway. According to the American Association of Community Colleges, most of the nation’s nearly 1,200 community colleges do not employ a psychologist to treat troubled students. Virtually all have campus counselors, but their level of training varies.

(See pictures of people mourning the victims of the Arizona shootings.)

Still, one imagines that someone at Pima Community College should have responded more directly to Loughner’s warning signs: the paranoia, the jumbled speech, the scary outbursts. According to Charles Arnold, an Arizona attorney who specializes in the state’s mental-health laws, the college had a legal responsibility to refer Loughner to authorities for possible commitment to an institution if officials there thought he had a “substantial probability” of causing harm. Instead, when Loughner displayed persistent behavioral problems that indicated a possible psychotic illness, Pima asked him to withdraw from school until he got outside mental-health help.

The Loughner case is similar to that of Seung Hui Cho, who in 2007 shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. For at least 18 months before the massacre, Cho had shown disturbing signs: bizarre class essays that included revenge fantasies; the stalking of at least three women; near total silence, including with roommates; and even involuntary commitment to a mental institution. The university did little to follow up after Cho returned to class. Schools should devote more resources to students with obvious problems. They could, at the very least, ask them to check in with counselors on a regular basis.

It will never be possible to stop every unhinged person from committing awful crimes. But in the wake of the Tucson tragedy, we should be talking about how to provide more mental-health care to those who display signs of needing it, not having a debate about whether rhetoric on TV and Twitter killed those six people.

This article originally appeared in the Jan. 24, 2011 issue of TIME.

Read “What Motivated Giffords’ Shooter?”

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