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The purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature on mass murder and amok, and the relationship of these phenomena to murder-suicide as well as to determine future research directions.

Research literature on mass murder, amok, and murder-suicide was reviewed in the context of recent developments in the understanding of suicide, aggressive behavior, and psychiatric diagnostics.

Amok, typically viewed as a culture-bound disorder, occurs throughout the world and is best characterized as mass murder, similar to school shootings. Additionally, the phenomenon of mass murder may be best understood as a form of murder-suicide, related to the phenomenon of suicide-by-cop.

This paper provides a review of the literature on murder-suicide, mass murder, and amok spanning over 110 years in the context of modern psychological research, new insights into the possible motivations of those who “run amok” and commit mass murder and provides future research directions for this important phenomenon.

The phenomenon of murder-suicide (aka. homicide-suicide) makes a sizeable impact on current public perceptions and policies regarding mental illness and risk for violence. However, within the past 25 years, our understanding of murder-suicide has remained relatively stable, and so has our relative inability to reliably predict and prevent it. The purpose of this paper is to propose pathways for furthering a cogent understanding of murder-suicide that may inform specific predictive and preventative practices.

Research literature regarding empirical and theoretical positions in the fields of murder-suicide, homicide, and suicide are reviewed and discussed.

While murder-suicide has many similarities to both homicide and suicide, no current theories of either alone have been successful in fully incorporating the phenomenon of murder-suicide. Theories specific to murder-suicide as a unique form of violence are in need of further research.

Developing and empirically testing theories of murder-suicide may lead to a vast and needed improvement of our understanding, prediction, and prevention of these tragedies.

Search trees are a set of paths with branches or choices that enable a system to carry out the most sensible search approach at each stage of a search. A new design for subject access to online catalogs enlists search trees to identify the characteristics of end‐user queries for subjects, control system responses, and determine appropriate subject‐searching approaches in response to the subject queries users entered. The purpose of this article is to identify characteristics of the most difficult user queries and recommend enhancements to the new subject‐searching design to enable it to produce useful retrievals in response to the wide variety of queries users pose to online catalogs. Online catalogs governed by search trees are more effective than the users themselves in selecting subject‐searching approaches that would produce useful information for the subjects users seek. The enhanced search trees presented and tested in this article enlist subject‐searching approaches that are not typical of the functionality of operational online catalogs. Design and development is required to upgrade existing online catalogs with search trees and new subject‐searching functionality to be successful in responding with useful retrievals to the most difficult user queries.

This paper explores the domain of the symbolic imaginary to comprehend the mechanisms and effects of neoliberal deregulation (anomie) and reckless capital accumulation within and external to the US imperial core with special emphasis on the war on terror, the figure of the suicide bomber, and the internal manifestations of social liquidation in the appearance of the rampage shooter. The concept of the piacular developed by Durkheim is expanded to demonstrate the contrast between the “variable” or human forms of terror with “constant” or mechanized form of the piacular as it appears in the form of the unmanned aerial vehicle or drone. The apparently disconnected image of the drone flying around up there somewhere in the clouds is intimately connected with seemingly unrelated phenomenon of mass murdering martyrs and fanatics down here on the ground. Lastly, the prospects for an anti-drone movement are touched upon and suggested as a fulcrum point from which to “touch” the synthetic point where terror, rampage, and revenge unify.

Unique to this paper is the development of a dialectical, formal, conceptual “geometry” rooted in Durkheim’s classic analysis of suicide for disclosing the hidden analogs obtaining in the relationship between suicide bombings and rampage shootings and their conceptual fusion in the form of the unmanned aerial vehicle or drone.

Capitalism linked to global defense and security operations produces its own terrifying nemeses as both causes and effects. Rather than something that has to be defeated, terror is an enemy that cannot be defeated but neither can it prevail against an empire. Likewise, the rampage shooter is not merely an individual in need of psychiatric care but a product of domestic policies that sacrifice everything for security and war. These two figures are “mirror opposites” or speculative doubles of one another, which when we attempt to comprehend the image of the seemingly unrelated drone machine what were find is the unexpected synthesis of the twin logics of terror and rampage at work in the sky.

If people hope to live in a society ruled democratically rather than imperial subjects they must know where to apply moral and political leverage. Suicidal bombers and lone shooters are definite problems, but focusing on the defects of individuals diverts the critical gaze from the larger problem of foreign policy, domestic austerity, and, perhaps, the war on the drone represents a unique opening within the aggregate system to push back against the abstract, imperial system of global and domestic hegemony.

This paper represents a new and unique synthesis of Durkheimian and interpretive sociologies with various strands of critical social theory providing new optics for the analysis of international terrorism, domestic mass murders, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in the wars on terror.

The recent spate of farmer’s suicide in Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, India has left many of those households in the charge of widows. These are the women left behind to live for their children after their husband committed suicide, unable to bear the burden of their debts anymore. The surviving family members of those who killed themselves in distress are prone to depression and tend to have suicidal tendencies too. They are experiencing exclusion in day to day life. This research paper is based on empirical study. Hundred Respondents from Wardha district of Vidarbha region are interviewed. For these widows, life is a tale of suffering and Harassment. Their relations with their in-law soured to a great extent after their husband committed suicide. They have to struggle for basic human rights. They are facing physical, sexual, mental, emotional and economic exclusion in day-to-day life. Sexual exploitation is not a common occurrence, but it does exist. The mental and emotional violence is much more. According to them, ‘The humiliation is greater than the pain of husband’s suicide’. The village social system has many pitfalls for such women. Because of widowhood, in several arenas her quality of life and capabilities have worsened.

This paper deals with suffering and various aspect of social exclusion faced by widows of the farmer and the role of social fabric in handling these problems.

The Jonestown massacre of 1978 was the largest such event in modern history; it assumes the status of a prototype in many discussions of cult dynamics and mass suicide. This paper aims to make the case that Jonestown should be memorialised and made into a dark tourism attraction.

This paper is principally the outcome of secondary research conducted over a number of years on the theme of dark tourism. The paper also benefited from direct interviews and conversations with political and ex-military personnel in Guyana who were in some way involved with Jonestown.

The research establishes that Jonestown remains a matter of great sensitivity and even national embarrassment, with many in the tourism sector reluctant to highlight what they regard as a very negative association, in the market, of Guyana with Jonestown and Jonestown only.

Expressed in context, the paper discusses the place of Jonestown in dark tourism and proposes an operational formula by which the semiotic of Jonestown, as contained in the tourist narrative, transforms tourism into catharsis.

For the author, Jonestown is tourism-imperative because not much longer after that apocalyptic event, the “Jonestown massacre” became a reference in the discourse on dark tourism. Jonestown is too large and archetypal an event to escape research and discussion of its place in the realm of dark tourism. This paper therefore explores, from both theoretical and policy perspectives, the ways in which the narratives of dark tourism can serve to expiate guilt by confronting it and therefore still deserve a place in the tourism imaginary of 2025. As such, the paper should be of value to not only scholars and researchers but also those engaged in tourism planning and destination management.

The purpose of this study is to provide mental health practitioners with a framework for conceptualizing individuals who may be at risk of targeted violence, mass shootings in particular.

Through the lens of the Path to Intended Violence model, a non-experimental descriptive design was chosen to explore the characteristics and behaviors of perpetrators who had engaged in mental health treatment within six months before their attacks.

The perpetrators in this study demonstrated behaviors included in each of the stages of the Path to Intended Violence model. Thus, it may be important for practitioners to be familiar with this model, especially the earlier stages, to potentially identify and intervene with individuals who may be at risk of committing mass violence.

This paper highlights how the Path to Intended Violence model can provide practitioners with a framework for identifying progressive warning signs in patients and how to take action to stop them from continuing their journey toward violence.

The purpose of this paper is to review several major components of hostage negotiation including: the different types of hostage situations; the prediction of the behavioral patterns of the hostage taker; the collection and the use of police intelligence in hostage incidents; and the application of forensic psychology during the hostage negotiations process.

Emphasis on the social psychological aspects of creating attitude change and gaining compliance with the hostage taker are introduced to assist in developing an effective crisis communication approach during the hostage negotiations process.

The paper also discusses trends in hostage negotiation strategies within incidents of domestic violence, suicide by cop, school shootings, and suicide/homicide bombings.

Limitations and advancements in the field of hostage negotiations are also discussed as well as suggestions for the use of tactical entry to resolve unsuccessful hostage negotiations.

Explores the current trend of “suicide by cop,” but also introduces the concept of homicide by cop in relation to police shootings.

The use of criminal psychology in developing hostage negotiation strategies to engage hostage takers with personality disorders, PTSD, paranoid schizophrenia, and suicidal depression is also discussed.