why our systems wait for "monsters" instead of healing people

a rabbit hole with questions yet to be answered - the space between psychology, justice, and prevention

I used to linger on the gentle side of psychology—the parts that mend, the theories that promise growth. Recently, though, I slipped into a darker side of articles, case files, and autopsies that for a second cracked my faith in humanity.

How can a single person hold so much rage, so much chilling indifference toward life? Criminal profiling is meant to name that darkness by tracking a pattern, track its footprints find what started it, find justice and ideally keep it from striking again.

Yet the headlines keep bleeding.

Ask the scholars, and they’ll trace every cruelty back to childhood. From the moment someone chooses for you to exist, you surrender autonomy to parents, guardians, the entire matrix to adults.

Erik Erikson mapped eight psychological stages. Hope, Will, Purpose, Competence, Fidelity, Love, Care, Wisdom. Stepping‑stones that should guide us toward a grounded adulthood.

But miss even one stone and the river can swallow you.

Stage 5 (Identity vs. Confusion, age 12‑18) and Stage 6 (Intimacy vs. Isolation, age 18‑40) form a hinge: first you decide who you are, then you decide how—or whether—to let others in. When those hinges snap, doors stay permanently shut. Anything can drift through.

Any delusion.
Any repressed thought.
Any silent, bubbling wound.

With the right (or wrong) trigger, a once-intact psyche can splinter.

There’s always stressors. There’s always catalysts. But sometimes a person reaches a point where none of that matters anymore.

Teresa Wallin was a 22 year old girl, killed in a gruesome fashion. Hunted like a prey. Nothing human about it, there will never be an explanation what kind of person takes away another human beings life with zero to no consideration to what there life could have become. Daniel Meredith, Evelyn Miroth, and Jason a 22 month old. Fatally shot and killed. I will not go through the details of the murder scenes that's not my focus right now. The point is before anything to say the victims name, it is about them at the end of the day, their lives were taken away by a killer,

Their killer was, himself, a casualty of a system that saw the warning lights blinking and shrugged. Calling him a victim doesn’t absolve; it indicts the scaffolding that failed everyone.

Treating victims like collateral damage to the inevitable takes away our humanity. Calling the killer a casualty of the system, doesn't mean I justify his actions, it's to bring awareness what could have been done. No those lives won't come back, but it could save lives that could be gone in an instance. The warning signs — when the extraordinary happens. Where rules and laws don't exist anymore. A world not imaginable in our eyes, because it’s that person’s diluted state of the world and sense of self.

Because before the extraordinary, there’s always something ordinary. A moment. A crack in the surface. A break from reality that gets shrugged off as eccentric, or troubled, or just “having a bad day.”

Behavioral analysis is there to determine the patterns on minor breaks and their relation to higher risk offences.

The cases I read were from different places, different years—but they shared one thing: they could have been prevented.

The issue is that the mental,educational,reformative institutions and resources, aren’t enough. We need to aim for more. Not only focusing on putting out fires, but preventing the match from ever hitting the ground.

It starts small, of course. But looking at the better pictures, our needs have evolved.

As we’re being introduced to new ideologies, lifestyles, substances, traditions — our needs evolve too.

The obvious is mental‑health funding shrinks when economies shrink; preventative programs vanish first. Accessing care when you are already in crisis is hard—getting help before the crisis borders on impossible. We’re constantly craving community with no leads. We’re so focused on what’s ahead (yet not enough), that we’re forgetting the now.

How do we prevent evil. How do we preserve humanity.

I understand the logic of triage: help the sickest. Attend based on urgency. But if we’re constantly putting out fires, and not preventing the match from ever hitting the ground — what’s it all it for?

We glorify the spectacular. Lawyers angle for headline cases. Doctors crave the incurable. Researchers hunt the unprecedented.

If we keep glorifying the ones we catch while overlooking the ones crying out for help, we’ll keep creating both the feared and the forgotten.