Mass Murderers Anonymous: How Recovery Groups Could Stop the Next Mass Shooting
Names are changed in this story to protect identities.
Tom was in his second year of college when he began planning his attack. Tom doesn’t live in the USA where gun laws are more lax, and he couldn’t acquire firearms over the dark web, so he started buying materials for a bomb. He kept an axe in his room. He knew exactly where he would enact his massacre: the biology center of his university, specifically ending his spree in the anatomy labs. Such an attack would make a statement about his hatred of life and his obsessive “preoccupations” on the living versus the dead.
“I wanted to hurt people to really see life fade away from the body, to feel power over being human,” Tom tells Countere. He slept little, was drunk or high constantly, and regularly “joked” about killing people with online friends, some of who were homicidal themselves. “At this point I went out almost every night until 3 to 5 am, peering into people’s windows, doing drugs, going over the plan in my head,” Tom says. “I felt like such shit, but at that time, it honestly felt like [an attack] was my only hope. It was the only thing that made sense to me.”
One night, high and terrified, Tom texted his parents and confessed his plans. He was hospitalized quickly. After speaking with doctors about his homicidal ideation (HI), Tom was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, Drug Abuse Disorder, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He was given several medications and assigned mandatory dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), which he attributes as his “saving grace.” DBT, Tom says, allowed him to express his homicidal urges and rein them in with mantras: “You haven’t done anything wrong, things that happened to you in childhood are affecting you feeling this way, take it one step at a time, and stay in the present moment.”
While he still experiences brief bouts of ideation, Tom has regained control of his brain and now actively helps others recover from homicidal ideation. (His online friends are also in recovery.) Tom has nearly 40,000 followers on his TikTok, where he talks about HI and comments on the motivations of mass killers; in one video, he recalls coming across the TikTok account of a future killer and how he could predict from the murder-heavy content that they posted that they did have such urges—same as him once. Tom is also the creator of the r/homicidalrecovery subreddit, a tiny community nevertheless filled with substantive, concerning, and recurring posts by users trapped in homicidal ideation—and crucially, are looking for help.
One poster on the forum, Ralph, writes:
“It’s so difficult being obsessed with murder. My brain is always thinking about it. I wish I could pull away from it but I can’t. I’ve tried too many times but it always comes back.”
Dutifully, Tom responds:
“Yeah, I get it, it can feel super discouraging but nothing is constant. It took me 3-4 years of dropping absolutely everything in my life and focusing 100% on therapy, meds, and refocusing my life to actually improve.”
Some of Tom’s entries on r/homicidalrecovery wouldn’t be out-of-place on a drug addiction forum. “Things look so much prettier when you’re not homicidal,” begins one post.
“One of the first things I noticed when I began recovering was that the trees are so much brighter, such a deep green. When I was doing bad, it was…grey.”
Mass shooters are an enigma. Unlike serial killers from the 70s and 80s who were chased away by modern forensics, the mass murderer only leaves one crime scene—by then it’s often far too late. The act itself is a form of suicide, and its perpetrators are unconcerned with capture or death.
A mass murderer does leave clues, though. Years of posts and Google searches by killers reflect an addiction to homicidal thoughts—yet oftentimes, glimmers where they reveal that they don’t want to think those things. The Parkland shooter posted comments on YouTube wouldn’t be out of place on r/homicidalrecovery: “The last part makes me scared. What happens when I have no one? I am 18, still in high school and everyone is on their way to college. I am there [sic] thinking about killing people and ending their lives…I hate my life and I want to take people with me.” The Uvalde shooter’s email history reveals attempts at receiving treatment for sociopathy. The Aurora, Colorado shooter, whose psychiatrist testified at trial that he “thought obsessively about killing,” called a crisis hotline before walking into the theater with an assault rifle.
There’s no Mass Murderers Anonymous. There are no sponsors who can talk to young people and let them know, “Hey, I was once planning a mass shooting myself. But here’s why you shouldn’t do it—and I can help you.” Other than random viral content like the powerful TED talk by Aaron Stark, “I Was Almost A School Shooter,” there are few sites featuring people who have recovered from homicidal ideation. Hardly anyone could say they were an expert on treating the condition; Wikipedia admits as of July 2022 that “Not much information is available regarding the management of patients with homicidal thoughts.” Not at least due to the huge stigma attached. Countere interviewed Jimmy, one poster in r/homicidalrecovery, who says that he hasn’t “talked to anyone irl [in real life] about my HI. I’m too afraid of getting a negative response…I plan on not telling my therapist due to her legally being required to call the police on me.”
Jimmy’s homicidal ideation started in middle school when he was being bullied. He says that it started as a “coping mechanism for stress that felt good.” The thoughts themselves were addictive; he began planning out murders in detail. As he grew older, he began to hate his HI and try to rid himself of it, but he was unable to find support in real life or online. “For obvious reasons, nobody wants to talk or be around someone who feels homicidal,” he says. Like Tom, Jimmy actually created his own subreddit, r/homicideprevention, in an unanswered call for help; it has two posts.
Online mass killer content is divided into two camps: sites which condemn the killings but are fascinated by them, such as r/masskillers, a subreddit with over 100,000 subscribers and counts among its users everyone from the Buffalo shooter (who name-dropped the subreddit in his manifesto, saying it was “really helpful”) to the Parkland shooter’s prison pen-pal to the Greenwood Park Mall shooter; and sites which indulge in death, such as Documenting Reality, a website which hosts videos of murders, suicides, beheadings, autopsies, and more (frequented by the Highland Park shooter among others). In lieu of recovery groups, these are where would-be shooters fester.
No one knows how many people are actually suffering from HI. Going forward, new mental health approaches are needed to tackling this condition, especially when many attackers represent an extreme of the malaise and rage that many people nowadays feel, especially young men. Tom cites r/malementalhealth as a “great community with similar goals which often addresses the largely male problem of anger, irritability, and rarely homicidal ideation.”
[Suicide Forums in a Dying Society]
In this era of a daily mass shooting, completely ignoring or stigmatizing HI could be making the problem worse. Instead, we could proffer whitepills. Tom attributes his healing process to “being able to express [his HI] and having my therapist assure me that I haven’t done anything wrong and that there are explanations for this. I also learned about things in my childhood that traumatized me—mostly seeing people die at a young age.” Tom strongly believes in DBT, a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy that gave him mental rituals to practice during periods of ideation, and thinks that more research should be done into treating HI “as a problem independent of other disorders that needs its own systematic approach.” As this article approached publication, Countere learned that Jimmy’s therapist had called the police on him for his homicidal ideation and he had been hospitalized for 3 days. After a few group therapy sessions, he was prescribed schizophrenia medication and sent home.
The first psychological profiles of serial killers were created by Robert Ressler, an FBI agent who actually coined the term “serial killer.” Ressler has been credited for his novel approach of interviewing the killers directly, people such as John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Ressler’s profiles led to the apprehension of numerous murderers and criminals; one wonders what we might learn from speaking more with imprisoned shooters, or people like Tom who’ve recovered from the spell of HI but are still able to identify, predict, and prevent its machinations.
In fact, those who’ve recovered—just like with drugs or other addictions—arguably can give back the most. “When hoping to get help for homicidal ideation, the most important thing is to forgive yourself,” Tom says. “Let yourself get help. The thing that held me back for so long was the belief that I was useless in society and was destined to do this. But despite feeling like a bad person, I had done nothing wrong yet.”
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If you are having homicidal ideation and you’re reading this, know that you’re not alone and that help is possible. We urge you to reach out to a mental health specialist, a trusted mentor, or a loved one.
