Julia Shaw

And if you don't follow those, you will hear those voices forever.

They're profoundly distressing.

And they are one of the aspects of schizophrenia that if you have it does make you more prone to violence.

And so for these kinds of cases, if you don't have someone intervening, whether that's a family member or a therapist saying,

How can you tell whether this thought is real?

Maybe that thought, maybe you're not hearing that voice, right?

Maybe that aspect of what you're thinking isn't true and bringing you back and closer to reality, you can just wander off to whatever alternate universe that you might live in in your head.

And it's the same with radicalization in other contexts, is that you see that people who drift more and more into a certain group that has certain beliefs that are maybe divorced from the evidence, divorced from reality, you can see that people...

will get more extreme over time.

And unless you have a tether that brings you back that allows you to do reality monitoring, it's going to be very difficult to find your way out of that.

So with serial killers, we find this reality monitoring problem.

And I think part of that's related to the lack of social networks that people have.

The untethered goes to a dark place, and it then is often combined with some of these other dark tetrad traits.

So you've got someone who maybe is high on psychopathy, low on empathy, someone who's high on sadism, someone who thinks that it's okay to pursue your own goals.

And your own goal can be

like with Jeffrey Dahmer, you can be wanting to create the perfect partner, which in some ways seems to be what he was trying to do by killing people and piecing them together and sewing up a sort of new version.

There's something in that where I can't help but go...

That's so sad.

I don't go, oh, my God, how terrible, how awful.

And of course, it's atrocious.