Over the course of hundreds of hours beginning in 1959, Ted Kaczynski, the future unabomber, participated in an intense psychological experiment conduced at Harvard by Dr. Henry A Murray. During World War II, Murray had worked for the Office of Strategic Services in developing personality assessment techniques designed to test potential recruits on how well they would endure interrogation and torture by the enemy. At Harvard, Murray went on to further develop his method, transforming it from a diagnostic assessment of mental anti-fragility, into the basis of a radical personality modifying procedure he hoped could be used to forcibly evolve human consciousness in order to prevent the nuclear annihilation he feared was inevitable in light of mankind’s petty national prejudices and self-interest during the period of the Cold War. Kaczynski was among his unwitting test subjects, and though his personal, radical Luddite beliefs would ultimately diverge from the kind of technocratic globalism Murray intended to inculcate in Kaczynski, in a strange way, Murray was also more successful than he could have possibly anticipated.

More than fifty years later, on the night of July 20, 2012, James Holmes was booked into the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Detention Facility for the mass shooting at Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado which he had perpetrated earlier that night. He had killed twelve people and injured seventy others. Controversially, a fellow inmate in the facility that fateful night, Steven Unruh, has claimed that he spoke to Holmes about the shooting from an adjacent cell. During their conversation, Unruh reports, Holmes told him that he had been “programmed” by an “evil psychologist” to commit the shooting, making further reference to a behavior modification technique known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Unruh’s story has been disputed by the Sheriff’s department, who insist that prisoners are not capable of communicating with one another between the cells. This denial has been enough for the majority of the media to completely discount the episode without any further attempts at corroboration from other detainees, or through an independent inspection of the facility. Unruh’s strange tale of his encounter with Holmes has, like so many other details, slipped through the cracks, and has subsequently become fodder for conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, who was banned by nearly every social media platform in the world in 2018 for the similar claims he at times entertained about the Sandy Hook massacre.

There is no reason to take Holmes’ statement at face value. Perhaps, as he emerged from the dissociate state under which he perpetrated the killings, he was desperately groping for some defense that would get him out of the situation he now found himself in. Perhaps this was simply a paranoid delusion he had begun fostering in the weeks preceding the attack. The claim doesn’t have to be taken as literally factual for it to still attract our attention. There is a period following every school shooting where those that knew the killer come forward and lament that they didn’t see the ‘warning signs,’ and the Aurora shooting was no different in this respect. At least three different mental health professionals had been involved in the deterioration of Holmes’ mental state in the lead up the incident. They saw the warning signs, and it simply didn’t matter. Furthermore, in light of Holmes’ comments to Unruh, one might even go a step further: maybe this wasn’t a case of dedicated, well-meaning psychiatrists failing to help a gifted, but troubled young man, but just the opposite… Maybe in some twisted way, the treatment came before the disease.

No case provides better evidence of this possibility than that of Adam Lanza, the 2012 Sandy Hook shooter. After years of denied requests, more than 1,000 pages of evidence relating to the Lanza case were finally released to the Hartford Courant in December of 2018. Lanza, who killed himself following the attack, left behind no manifesto. He had even taken the precaution of smashing his devices’ hard drives prior to the shooting. In the end hundreds of pages worth of Lanza’s writings were ultimately recovered by the police, and it’s only from these scattered fragments that his beliefs and opinions emerge. Like Holmes in the weeks and months leading to the Aurora massacre, Lanza was no stranger to psychiatric evaluation. Throughout Lanza’s entire life, from the age of 3, when he was first diagnosed with speech and developmental problems, he knew little else but the offices of therapists and counselors and psychiatrists. A rotating cast of mental health professionals drifted in and out of his life. They all recognized the so-called ‘warning signs’ all too well, but even with a lifetime’s worth of treatment, they completely and utterly failed to prevent his transformation into mass murderer.

In online postings Lanza expresses horror at what he calls “enculturation,” the process by which individuals are socialized into their societies. He writes that culture “inflicts arbitrary prejudiced perspectives onto people. It dismisses the differences between individuals to contrive an artificial group, to which people are coerced into submission. It enables baseless bigotry between other arbitrary cultural groups and cohesion among people in the group for which there is no reason to associate.” The idea that his mother, teachers, and psychiatrists were conspiring together to brainwash him into joining a society he disdained under the pretense of mental health seems to have disturbed him on a deep, visceral level.

Lanza goes even further, and characterizes the years of psychiatric treatment he received since childhood explicitly as abusive: “I was molested at least a dozen times by a few different adults when I was a child. It wasn’t my decision at all: I was coerced into it… What do each of the adults have in common? They were doctors, and each of them were sanctioned by my parents to do it. This happens to virtually every child without their input into the matter: Their parents sanction it.”

Of course Lanza’s doctors were well meaning people, who only had his best interests at heart. Regardless of this, however, at the same time, his identification of them as a system of psychological control designed to suppress his own individuality formed the core of the resentment that drove him to violence. Can we really conclude that more mental health treatment would have prevented what happened? Like Dr. Murray’s personality modification experiments at Harvard, perhaps the attention Lanza received backfired in exactly the right way needed to twist him around into the very thing his doctors worried he would become. Perhaps their treatments, in the end, formed a self-fulfilling prophecy of social isolation and violent, vindictive bitterness. Maybe James Holmes never meant to claim he was some kind of Manchurian candidate brainwashed by DARPA to carry out false flag attacks. Maybe he meant only to say, as Adam Lanza did, that the psychological treatment and “enculturation” his counselors hoped would bring him back from the brink, were the very thing that pushed him over the edge.