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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Oy. Odd that's missing from the headline since it changes the context from "passionate" to "psychopath".

The story seems balanced, but the headline is too generous.

Ahh yes, nothing more respectful or justified than smugly calling a deceased person who had mental health issues a "psychopath" while you barely knew anything about them or their personal issues.

You have any kids? Maybe recognize that killing your own kids is hard to rationalize for people that do?

I do get your point, but my comment wasn't flippant. I mulled on it a bit, and tried to put myself in his shoes. I didn't find much there.

I'm honestly not trying to be smug. I have close relatives with issues like schizophrenia, manic depression, etc. So, I'm not completely uninformed. But there is a line where things aren't fixable.

Fair enough, but reducing the sum of a man's life to a single word describing his final few minutes maybe isn't the best system of taxonomy. He was a father and a husband for far longer than he was a murderer.

Thanks. I'm trying to not be HN typical and reach for hyperbole. I'll think on that.

I don't think rationality is the top priority for suicidal people. And I don't care how much you mulled on it or how many black friends you have so you can't possibly be racist—flippantly calling someone with mental health issues a "psychopath" betrays a huge lack of empathy and only serves to further stigmatize mental health conversation.

"how many black friends you have"

I feel like I'm mostly being reasonable in this discourse. However, on this point, fuck off.

in a few decades we're going to look back on terms like "psychopath" with the same disgust we look back on victorian labels for notions of inherent racial criminality

In a wider view, I agree. But I'm not feeling terrible about using the term for someone that offs their own children. In what context is that not some serious and notable mental disorder? Is "sociopath" somehow kinder?

It depends on whether the connotations of "evil" remain attached to the word, vs. "seriously dangerously malfunctioning".

Depending on how much you twist the logic, there IS a semblance of an ideal of "doing them a favor and sparing them the evils of the world". Not defending, but to the truly hopeless it probably provides some weighting for the decision making.

Psychopathy is a specific kind of mental illness and I don't think it's self-evident that anyone who would kill their children is a psychopath rather than afflicted with some other form of mental illness.

I'm open to that. Just not any rationale that it was justified. Or that it excuses the headline wording.

Who's saying it was "justified"?

Whoever decided the headline should say "ended his life" with no mention he murdered his children.

I disagree completely. Psychopaths are as psychopaths do. If anything I expect we'll get better at diagnosing/detecting them and perhaps discovering sub-classes of them, of which perhaps some are problematic and some are not. We'll most likely continue to call the problematic ones psychopaths since we'll need a label to discuss people lacking in empathy who commit terrible crimes or make people's lives hell for fun and profit. Maybe some of the people we now call psychopaths will be called something else and redeemed in the popular imagination. But as long as the worst people we now call psychopaths continue to exist I think there will be no strong drive to retire or sanitize the word.

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