When a PhD from Harvard -- the first detail mentioned, note -- goes postal, they are suffering in an academic pressure cooker.
Dumbly applying the nearest pop-psych explanation to hand to explain the inexplicable only makes it more difficult to show respect for the victims and sympathy for the grieving.
We don't know if this woman lost control because of mental illness, or stress in her personal life, or simply because her superiors were assholes. But if it's the latter, I'd rather hear a discussion about the ugly realities of academic life, than another cliché conversation demanding "respect and sympathy" from total strangers.
Really? I've had some of this kind, and even when I was in a very stressful personal situation, I've never even thought of resorting to any kind of violence, even less shooting anyone.
These cases seem to be caused by mental illness. I agree with the person you're answering to that trying to "explain" a shooting this way is plainly wrong.
The question of whether this is called "mental illness" is open for debate. As far as I'm concerned, it's an academic question, unless the distinction can somehow lead to prevention of the act.
If describing this tragedy as "someone going postal" isn't dumbly applying pop-psych, then I don't know what is.
"Going postal" is comparatively mum. It's a hybrid of "Going crazy" and "disgruntled postal worker," and suggests only that we think the perpetrator is not sane -- that we can't understand why they would do that. Where is the pop psychology?
Are you implying that tragedies have no cause.
It seems like human to try understand tragedies as they are significant part of our human world. Moreover, tragedies usually do have causes.
Claiming that there is no cause to an event may serve some psychological purpose...
Usually, if you do a root cause analysis of anything, you come up with so many contributing factors that the resulting document is hundreds of pages long. Think of industrial postmortems or court proceedings. Everything is more complicated than it seems at first.
Saying "This was because she was denied tenure" does a disservice to everyone involved. It was probably partly because she was denied tenure. It was probably partly also because she had easy access to guns, and she was super focused on her research, and she didn't get along with the school administration, and she had once accidentally killed her brother, and plenty of other factors that we could never know about.
But the need to "help the victims grieve" by labeling every killing "inexplicable" and so casting maximal moral unction on the killer is also just a variety of pop-psychology.
However, this doesn't seem to be an "inexplicable" event. There's probably no single, easy explanation but there seem to be a variety of causal factors we can trace.
"People with a history of violent behavior don't do well in situations of all-or-nothing achievement".
When an event like this touches your life, very few stimuli from outside your own personal bubble of pain and confusion have any chance of registering with you [1].
But having the national paper of record print headlines half-excusing your friend or family member's killer [2] because she's the right kind of people would definitely do it.
[1] Some people express surprise that there are other people "out there," still going about their lives as if nothing had happened.
[2] allegedly.
Or...
In what way was does describing the factors influencing a person's behavior excuse it?