Disturbed, isolated and angry young men whose main contact is with cyberspace need to be reached. We must learn lessons from school shootings, writes Marie Murray
"This is the end of our world" is a stark response. It emerges from the many statements made to the media by the network of people surrounding the most recent gun massacre in an educational institution.
This time it is the Jokela high school massacre in Finland. This time it has finished the young lives of six schoolmates.
The end of the world? It is, most starkly, the end of their world.
The apocalyptic nature of such responses to the massacre indicate how utterly incomprehensible to the ordinary person is the mindset of someone who could murder their peers in an exhibitionist, public, paranoid, calculated manner out of an assumed misconstrued Darwinian ideology as if that lends authenticity to the act.
The serial nature of these incidents, their similarities and differences, their formulaic format, their grandiose hyperbole and the loquacious legacy of their perpetrators who claim messianic meaning to their acts of madness are familiar to us now. So too are the aftermath analyses of context, culture and the psychological profiles of the individuals involved.
Each new incident generates the usual media reportage detailing what is known: the location, the circumstances, the customs, the stark update on numbers dead or injured and the retrospective observations of classmates and teachers.
Reports in this instance provide ever-so-predictable pointers to the hindsight-obvious lethality of this youth's paradoxically ironic rationale for killing "to eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection" before also killing himself.
Reports provide the lyrics of influential verse to which other mass murders have been ascribed and which in copycat fashion Pekka-Eric Auvinen is presumed to have ascribed. They provide the cultural commonalities: young male, in a country that has low gun control and high gun ownership allied to obsessive internet usage with a modus operandi of articulated anger posted on a social networking site before the event.
There are always the forewarnings had they been identified. There are usually depictions and surreal fantasy, the anti-hero in warrior gun-pointing, survival pose before killing themselves.
But what the parents of young males may be most interested in is this: could this happen to my child, my seemingly ordinary, reasonably well-adjusted son?
Could he be harbouring some hidden, horrendous yet undetectable anger and plans for enactment of this upon others? Are invisible forces, of which parents are unaware, inviting him into emotional enclaves of which we know nothing until they appear as another parent's tragedy in bold and brutal headings?
Could my son, suddenly, without warning, turn into another Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold from Columbine, or Seung-Hui Cho from Virginia Tech? What can I do to protect my child?
The reasons why any one person does something at a certain time and in a certain manner from some confused motivation are complex. Single causality explanations do not serve us well.
We cannot say that the problem lies exclusively either in an individual, family, school or culture in which tragedy occurs nor can we say that it lies in a direct way in the material a person accesses on internet sites. But it is time that we recognised that unhappy, angry, vulnerable, disturbed people who do not get help and support from mental health services in time are at risk of exploding into uncontrollable anger and they are provided with alarming media-generated role models out of which to do so.
We need services for children who are distressed, for adolescents who are unable to cope and for young adults who are struggling in life. We need serious anti-bullying policies in schools and colleges. We need non-abstract but vigorously enacted mental health policies in all institutions.
Because the vulnerable, disturbed, angry, disillusioned, isolated individual whose primary contact with the world is sitting alone in his room exploring cyberspace, is at risk of harm to himself or others if his anger escalates.
Parents may also wish to know that the valid warnings for more than two decades by responsible clinicians about the impact of images of carnage on young minds and the desensitisation to violent videos are authentic. This material can be psychologically dangerous in weak hands. The tragedy of Columbine and Virginia Tech and now of Jokela is this - we do not learn from them.
For just as there is repetitiveness to these acts, there is repetitiveness to our apparent shock at what is, after all, the inevitable consequence of providing the method, the means, the ideological rationalisations and cold, detailed, imaginative quasi- directions in virtual reality form as entertainment for angry adolescents.
With the rhetoric of pseudo-intellectual rationalisation, this youth declared himself to be "a cynical existentialist, anti-human humanist, anti-social social-Darwinist, realistic idealist and god-like atheist". No, young man, you are not.
There is nothing so grandiose, so philosophically engaging or epistemologically complex in anything you did.
With the lyrics of Auvinen's supposedly revered Stray Bullet- "I am your holy totem/I am your sick taboo, radical and radiant/I'm your nightmare coming true" - these sad words and the school in which this tragedy was enacted, with the unfortunate Jokela title, is singularly without humour today and for a long time to come.
• Marie Murrayis director of student services in UCD. Her latest book Living our Timesis published by Gill & Macmillan