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activities.
    In her brilliant book
An Unquiet Mind
, noted psychologist and mood researcher Kay Redfield Jamison describes one of her own manic episodes, during which she marched to the pharmacy and purchased dozens of earthquake survival kits. Manic individuals may also get involved in foolish financial schemes, both as perpetrators and as victims, and their mood shifts can be so severe that their grasp of reality is impaired, leading to a variant of what Jamison unsparingly terms “madness” (26).
    There is a slightly increased risk of violence among some manic-depressives, particularly during untreated manic phases, but once again, mania does not account for a high proportion of habitual criminality. And manic-depression is one of the mental illnesses for which there is consistently effective treatment.
    Most manic-depressives and at least a third of schizophrenics can be managed very well using medication and backup psychotherapy. Another third of schizophrenics respond partially but may continue to require institutionalization. The remaining third are resistant to treatment.
    To sum up, psychotics are the people we think of as crazy. Untreated or incompletely treated psychotics may explode one day and do something terrible, but they are generally too disordered to plan, plot, or calculate repetitive felonies and too cognitively fragmented to achieve
any
kind of stable career, including that of habitual crime.
    Look to the psychopaths for that kind of thing.

V
    Evil as an Affliction?
    Psychopathy is something quite different from madness. Classified by psychiatrists and psychologists as
a disorder of character or personality
, psychopathy involves no loss of reason nor any increase in depression, agitation, and anxiety. On the contrary, psychopaths are lucid and free of angst, inner doubt, insecurities, or neurotic torment.
    Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden were described as unruffled when apprehended. (Later, though, when locked up, they cried for their mothers. The charitable interpretation of this emotional display was that the boys had suddenly gotten in touch with the enormity of the evil they’d caused. A more cynical though perhaps more reasonable spin is simply self-pity.) This remote coolness was also shown by Kipland Kinkel and is common in many killers, young or otherwise. It is also characteristic of psychopathic criminals in general.
    How many times have we heard the postoutrage cry of astonishment from neighbors and casual acquaintances: “He was always so quiet. Didn’t seem upset at all”? No surprise there. Psychopaths often appear to be preternaturally calm (more on this later).
    Psychopathy baffles psychiatrists and psychologists, and as stymied experts so frequently do, they have responded by
relabeling
. And because we’re talking about the fractious world of mental health, where pseudo-religious dogma and economic motives often masquerade as science, the labeling process has also been impacted by politics.
    Consider the linguistic shift that occurred during the late sixties and early seventies, when psychopathy, with its implication of disease and individual irregu-larity, proved a poor ideological fit with then-reigning, Marxist-derived social science norms that cast crime as a consequence of economic and social oppression. (Remember “All black men are political prisoners”?)
    According to Marxist and neo-Marxist criminological doctrine, society was sick and oppressive, while deviant individuals, even violent offenders, were poets, urban guerrillas, and freedom fighters—Promethean heroes struggling against institutional fascism. Today this malicious apologia is clung to most enthusiastically by the far right: Blow up hundreds of people in the Oklahoma City Federal Building and you’re a latter-day Tom Paine. But back in the late sixties and early seventies, social liberalism had its way with the criminal justice system. Prison sentences were radically