OPINION

No, Luigi Mangione Didn’t Have ‘Political Motivations’

Ignoring the complexity of mental illness demeans us all

From X: A wall in Venice, Italy — “Luigi Mangione our hero”

** edited on 12/13/24 as more facts about Mangione are reported in the press. I’ll take those apologies later.

Working in the legal field, I interact with lots and lots of people with mental illness. We accept “court-appointed” criminal defendants, meaning people who can’t afford to hire their own attorney.

Socioeconomic status in a criminal setting often coincides with mental illness or drug addiction.

Often, it’s both.

Even my boss, who passed the bar in the late 1990s, still blames the mental illness in our clients on the drugs they take, rather than the other way around — that the mentally ill often self-medicate (poorly) to alleviate their symptoms.

Right now, Twitter is the usual dumpster fire of people screaming conspiracy theories about Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. That he was “set up by the police”, or that there’s somehow a connection to Jeffrey Epstein, or that the “American education system” made him this way.

I’m not a doctor, but Luigi Mangione is clearly paranoid schizophrenic. And the public’s obsession with…