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in people with schizophrenia, but you can also find them in people with other brain diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, and even in people with no brain disease at all. 37 Later we will see that some of the differences associated with the brains of psychopaths can sometimes be found in the brains of people with few psychopathic traits. Biological results often fall short of being completely black or white.
    However Jared’s brain differs from that of an average healthy person, we do know that it does respond to antipsychotic medication, the only means we now have for treating the delusional thought processes that led to six deaths, thirteen disrupted lives and intense suffering for family and friends of the victims. Jared’s apprehension eventually led to his being forced, under court order, to take antipsychotic medication. Only under its influence would he begin to get a sense of the horror he had perpetrated.
    Jared was charged with murder, attempted murder, and the attempted assassination of a member of Congress. A psychiatrist and a psychologist diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia following a total of sixteen hours of interviews. Loughner, they reported, was delusional and hallucinated. His thoughts were disorganized, random and bizarre. In August 2012, he pled guilty to nineteen charges to avoid the death penalty. Given a life sentence, he is now receiving court-ordered antipsychotic medication at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. 38
    Forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy has studied the crimes of people like Jared and other mass murderers, both adolescents and adults, which have occurred over the past half-century. “The majority of adult mass murderers typically are individuals who have a psychiatric history and typically a majority is psychotic at the time that they’re actually carrying out the killing,” Meloy said in a 2007 interview on NPR. 39 The minority who are not psychotic include rare depressive individuals like Dylan Klebold who want to take others with them on their suicidal journey. Another minority are individuals with many psychopathic traits, like Eric.
    It is commonly assumed that people with schizophrenia like Jared are more likely to be violent than people without schizophrenia. Criminologist Adrian Raine, for example, cites studies from around the world showing that people with schizophrenia are more likely to have a criminal and violent history than healthy people. 40
    He concludes in his book, The Anatomy of Violence , that the “relationship between violence and schizophrenia is not weak.” Later he softens his assertion by noting that “It’s true that most schizophrenics are not dangerous, and neither kill nor perpetuate violence.”
    It is true that studies show that only a small number of people with mental illnesses do become violent. The threat in the public’s imagination, however, is exaggerated by the publicity that acts such as Jared’s receive and by the public’s general lack of understanding of the disease schizophrenia.
    “The challenge for medical practitioners is to remain aware that some of their psychiatric patients do in fact pose a small risk of violence, while not losing sight of the larger perspective—that most people who are violent are not mentally ill, and most people who are mentally ill are not violent,” Richard A. Friedman, M.D., wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine . 41 It is worth reiterating that most violent people are not mentally ill—as countless acts of violence are committed every day by sane people with decidedly obvious motives: frustration, desperation, jealousy, greed, or anger.
    Crimes like Jared’s are “extraordinarily rare events,” according to Meloy. And that, the clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Diego says, is the reason they get so much publicity. The media coverage of such events skews the public perception of the threat posed by the mentally