‘Dark Knight Rises’ Sets Box Office Record Despite Tragedy: Surprised?

I didn’t say anything about Holmes other than that he’d planned it out months in advance, and that it was thus not “snapping.”

But planning and carrying out such detailed schemes is indeed part of hypermania (the medical literature calls it “overproduction of ideas”). Hypermania is not insanity per se, in the sense of someone losing rationality. A person with hypermania is still rational, in the sense of forming rational thought. They just have a vastly overinflated sense of self-importance to the exclusion of anyone and everyone else (imagine megalomania and monomania combined and amped up to the nth degree on refined Kryptonite-based steroids from LexCorp Labs on Smallville), inflating real or perceived slights all out of proportion, loss of empathy and conscience and emotional ties to others, etc. — a very dangerous combination.

SSRI-induced hypermania has been implicated in the very sudden and statistically steep rise in premeditated multiple-random-target school shooting sprees that began shortly after SSRIs were allowed to be prescribed to youth (the first such incident in recent decades happened on February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington — prior to that there was an average of less than one such incident per decade in all of U.S. history. The next one after that was less than a year later. Less than one year after that, there was a single month [May of 1998] in which there were two nearly-consecutive days [only one intervening day] that each had multiple such incidents! Nothing gradual can explain such a sharp, steep, sudden statistical climb!), as well as in the rash of postal worker violence a decade previously (not long after Prozac, the first SSRI, started being prescribed to adults, most notably to government employees such as postal workers of the time thanks to their government-funded mental health care) that so shocked the nation that it added a brand-new two-word idiom to our language: “going postal.”