Lots and lots and lots of people have mental illness at some point in their life.
For a lot of people (me) luckily it takes the relatively mild form, depression, which is easily treated and managed.
For others it is not so easy, they have paranoid delusions, visions, hear voices, all sorts of terrible stuff.
These people are overwhelmingly non violent...or, only violent to themselves.
They too can live a normal life but it takes a whole lot more medical intervention and managing to do so.
There is a section of mental illness also called Narcissistic Personality Disorder, NPD. We ALL know someone with this...or hypochondria, or borderline personality disorder, or even psycopathy or sociopathy.
It is very, very common.
What is not common, is to become a raping, dismembering hunter.
If ARS was truly "mentally ill" as we commonly define it, he would have shown a great many signs of his illness. His previous behaviour would have been bizarre, not fairly normal and productive as it seems so far. He would have likely been hearing voices, perhaps talking back to them, doing other strange acts, and be clearly in the grip of a some sort of episode.
This did not happen.
He is a perfectly sane teenage boy who just happens to have decided to become a rapist and murderer. He seems to show no emotion about the whole thing apart from boredom and possibly annoyance at being caught.
If he does have a mental illness as such, it would fall under the banner of sociopathy. I imagine he was just born wired wrong, and maybe it didn't come out till his teens...or maybe we will find the sociopathic behaviour was there from infancy.
:dunno:
There is more and more research indicating that this tendency can be a symptom of brain damage.
If one or another parent used a lot of recreational drugs, even before he was conceived, he could have inherited damaged DNA.
Either way, he needs to be kept out of society permanently. He has lost his right to be "one of us".
But we really need to stop using the blanket "mentally ill" when discussing this freak...it's offensive to a lot of people.