Serial Killers Essay

Serial killers are everyday people one would never notice until it was too late. They can be your neighbors or your coworkers, but what really is to wonder is what is it that made them commit such heinous acts. There is the long, talked about controversy of whether a person is born with genetics that make them be “born to kill”, or if the person has gone through experiences in their life that have made them lash out in murderous acts. Many psychologists will support the idea that the person’s environment plays a significant role in their psychological development. Psychologists give the ideas of a head injury, abuse, neglect, abandonment, or alcohol having damaging effects on the child as they develop. Other psychologists argue that people are born with genetics that lead them to lives of crime, including the acts of murder. These psychologists think that if a father or mother commits a crime then they end up passing that gene on to any or all of their children. They also believe that there are ways to categorize the types of people who will be serial killers or to have future generations who will be serial killers. There are also psychologists, though, who believe that a person is an equal mix of both genetic and environmental makeup that makes them the type of person they will become. Serial killers are not born to be bad; they are simply made bad because of events featuring abuse, neglect, and abandonment in their younger years which cause them to take out their anger later on in their lives.
In order to understand a serial killer one must know what defines one. According to Neustatter in Mind of the Murder a person who is a “constitutionally unstable individual, and their main characteristic is an inability to profit from ex...

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...hem with school and they didn’t have anyone helping them through a rough time. Some psychologists believe that stress can trigger diseases of the mind that can lead to people commit such terrorizing acts.
John Dowling states in his book, The GREAT Brain Debate, “excessive stress, can predispose to neurodegenerative disease” (154). The idea is that a person can actually become sick from too much stress on them. When someone becomes stressed “an increased release of glucocorticoids from the adrenal glands” is released throughout the body (Dowling 154). If there is an excessive amount of stress on a person, a disproportionate amount of glucocorticoids are released, which could lead to severe damage (Dowling 154). Some of the effects that can be brought about by excessive stress are depression of the immune system, gastric ulcers, and high blood pressure (Dowling 154).