By now you’ve heard about the Omaha mall shooting; the perpetrator was said to have been depressed. The result of this is that people will associate atrocities like this, with depression … but without reason. The fact is that people with depression are no more or less violent than anyone else. In some cases, depression can be so disabling as to prevent someone who might choose to do such a thing, from trying it.

Since this shooting we’ve been treated to innumerable media stories on this troubled youth. And troubled, he was — clearly. His depression is evident in his suicide note(s).

The pertinent question here (here, being my mood-disorders blog!) is: Did his depression make him do what he did?

The answer is, no. In addition to being depressed, the shooter was also obviously sociopathic; he had a juvenile-criminal record. His sociopathy had far more to do with this than his depression.

If depression alone were sufficient to cause people to become murderously violent, such shooting sprees would be far more common than they are, because millions of people in the US, at any given time, experience depression. Plainly, then, there is no direct causal link between murderous violence and depression.

The danger in cases like this, is not in depression itself; it’s in the combination of depression and sociopathy. And sociopathy is likely the greater motivator here (and in most of the other similar cases). Without the sociopathy, the shooter would likely have been just another depressed, isolated loner. (Tragic, to be sure, since no one should be a depressed, isolated loner … but such people are no danger to others.)

That the shooter had been a ward of the state for years, and in and out of various treatment programs, underscores this point: While depression can be treated, sociopathy is more or less untreatable. Its presence makes any kind of treatment virtually impossible — sociopaths devalue other people, which includes mental-health professionals, so that no one could penetrate the shooter’s own “internal world.”

So what lesson is there, here? As far as depression and people who suffer from mood disorders, there is none … since mood disorders are not correlated to such violence. The lesson lies in separating depression from other factors in people’s lives, to find deeper, underlying causes for problems. In the case of the Omaha shooter, the deeper problem was his sociopathy. While he may also have suffered from depression, in addition to being a sociopath, that was just a minor complication by comparison.