The DSM will keep being updated based on politics, research, and experiences. Many crime experts study psychopathy/sociopathy as personality and behavioral traits that are not a "mental illness". Because, again, many people take "mental illness" to mean something outside of the person's consciousness and cognition.

Research is ongoing and nonstop for a very good reason. :)

Thanks for these tangents.

Wow, I didn't know Slender Man is "a thing" on the internet.

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet...et-age-n121741

I say give them the max they can get. I have a 10-year-old daughter and the things that went through my head when I saw this on the news.........

Dr. Drew on Call on HLN is having a good discussion.

They are spending a lot of time discussing Slender Man.

I think this has to be a combination of many things working together. Violent media doesn't cause people to kill. Mental Illness doesn't normally cause people to kill. Bad home environments don't routinely cause people to kill. However, horrible things like this still happen. My husband and I wonder if things like this happen more now or if we just hear about it more now?

Changes in reporting crime to law enforcement and the media.

These types of offenses remain rare.

I think it happens way more now, and seems to get worse. It's becoming out of control.

This Guardian article shed a little bit of light onto this issue.

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/...-minors-us-law

I don't practice juvenile delinquent law, so a lot of this surprised me--that in the U.S., a juvenile can (and in this case they were) be interrogated without a parent present and without a lawyer present. They have to be Mirandized, but what effect does anyone think that has on a 12-year-old with probable mental health issues?

And it really shocks my conscience that Wisconsin law REQUIRES anyone over the age of 10 to be tried as an adult in homicide cases. Insane.

I'd have to agree with this. At first I thought they were doing that because of the nature of the crime. But the fact that it's a required state law? So an 11-year old can be tried as an adult? Really? Yeah, that is insane.

An 11 year old was tried as an adult in Michigan years ago. Nathaniel Abraham- http://murderpedia.org/male.A/a/abraham-nathaniel.htm

Still, I just can't see how an 11-year old kid who isn't an adult, can be tried as one. Makes no sense.

I was curious about whether or not there was an expression of remorse, so I dug into it.

Morgan Geyser, whose idea it was and who did the stabbing:
Anissa Weier, the accomplice:

Kids. I can't wrap my head around these words coming from kids. SMH

I work almost exclusively with 12-year olds in a middle school all day, every day. I believe that
1) You never know what they will do or say next.
2) They may or may not have a reason, either valid or invalid, for stuff they do, mental illness or not.
3) They are as large as adults, with the strength to overpower many adults, and show no fear when they are angry or determined. Last week I saw a 12-year old girl fight off 3 grown men who were breaking up the fight she was having with another girl. These "children" were considered adults in Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages and most of the known world up until "modern times."

While I have personal issues with them being automatically tried as adults, after reading about this, I can visualize many of my students doing exactly this, and having no remorse, because they have been told over and over and over again that they are wonderful, special and can do as they please with no consequences. If they are going to do the "big girl" crimes and end someone else's life, then they can face trial and prison as an adult and learn the hard way, since no one was able to get through to them during their first 12 years of life.

I know this may sound a bit callous to some who still picture little girls in pigtails and dresses with baby dolls, but the 12-year olds I work with can be very frightening, angry, hateful, manipulative and emotionless. They will deliberately lie on the adults, set each other up, manipulate their parents and work the system without ever considering right from wrong. I can picture these two girls fitting right in with the ones I work with.
I'm not a expert, and can't distinguish between psychopathy and ASPD, but I meet regularly with mental health professional who are working with individual students, and am learning far too much about the negative side of treating mental illness.

I work in a regular, urban public middle school- not a treatment center of any sort.

I saw the same things that tcsparky did when I recently taught middle school. One girl wanted to sext some boys and she used her mother's phone. The boys' moms intercepted the sexts, the cops traced them back to the girl's mother, and all hell broke loose. The girl, who was a well-behaved and high-achieving student, showed no remorse regarding what she had almost done to her mother. We were all horrified.