Jim Jones (Jonestown Massacre) | Mental Health & Personality

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel closest doctor grande today's question asks if I can take a look at the mental health and personality factors that may be at work in the tragedy at Jonestown and specifically I've seen questions about Jim Jones just a reminder I'm not diagnosing anybody in this video only speculating about what could be happening in a situation like this so I'm going to buy this video into the background of Jim Jones then look at the timeline of the crimes and then look at the mental health and personality factors so starting with the background James Jones was born on May 13 1931 in Crete Indiana his family had financial struggles his mother claimed that she had visions when she was pregnant that indicated Jones would be a great religious leader she would remind Jones of this remarkable destiny quite regularly so what could go wrong with that strategy as a child Jones was described as odd obsessed with death and highly interested in religion he killed several small animals and he regularly held funerals for dead animals he often shot friends with a BB gun so like an air gun that shoots babies and he even fired a real gun at one of his friends I don't know why they remained friends with him he was able to memorize long passages from Scripture this kind of reminds me of David Koresh from the Waco tragedy Joan's father died in 1947 Jones did not attend the funeral and neither did his mother because of his father's death and the loss of financial support that came with that Jones had to take a job at a local hospital people reported that he seemed to tolerate aspects of that job that other people did not like for example handling corpses in the early 1950s he gained experience working with different church organizations and eventually started his own church he promoted racial equality but it wasn't clear if he genuinely believed that or if he saw an opportunity to gain power and influence for example many of the anecdotes he talked about where he fought for racial equality turned out to be false as he progressed through his career as a religious leader he became known as the mind-reading preacher he would pay attention to all the details that people talked about and bringing them up later as if he was able to read their thoughts Jones grew in popularity because of his altruistic acts and his message of social justice members of his congregation noted that he reached out to minority communities and he often cared for the elderly Jones staged an assassination attempt he made it look like somebody tried to kill him but the police didn't believe it the members of his congregation however did believe it he then came up with this conspiracy theory that the government was trying to destroy Indianapolis with a nuclear weapon he moved to Brazil for a while but that didn't work out he came back to Indiana to find that his People's Temple as he called it was in disarray in 1965 still using the conspiracy theory about Indianapolis exploding as motivation he convinced 100 of his followers to come with him to California eventually establishing churches in San Francisco Los Angeles and other cities by 1973 his membership increased to almost 3,000 people during this time he was extremely popular with other religious leaders politicians and some celebrities it's interesting that he could fool those groups so easily he started to use fear tactics to his members to keep them loyal for example one of his female members died in a car accident so he told his congregation that he had asked her to meditate for a few minutes before she left in her car she refused and Jones said that's why she was killed so kind of like an idea of reference but he was using it to manipulate his followers by this point he was having multiple affairs Jones would tell his wife that he needed to have sex with other women in order to retain his spiritual powers and this resulted in Jones fathering a number of children this is right out of the deranged cult leader handbook Jones started to distinguish his spiritual leaves from traditional beliefs that the members may have had coming into the congregation he started to say that he was a deity that he needed to be worshipped by the members interestingly he told his wife that he was an atheist so if a deity is an atheist does that mean they don't believe that they exist I'm not sure how that works his drug use started to increase dramatically this caused his eyes to be red so he started wearing sunglasses all the time he explained that the reason he wore them was because he was so holy that if somebody looked into his unshielded eyes they would burst into flames I bet his optometrist was scared of him that's one appointment you don't want to see on your calendar if you're an optometrist I imagine it's kind of like the fire-breathing dragons dentist right so maybe they were in a support group together Jones started to draw scrutiny from newspapers there were allegations that he was mistreating members and this brings us to the timeline of his crimes by 1977 the attention of the media was too much for Jones to handle he was afraid of losing power he moved his congregation to an agricultural settlement in the country of Guyana he referred to the settlement as Jonestown construction had started on Jonestown several years before Jones proclaimed the settlement was a sanctuary from the media and a socialist paradise the Jonestown settlement would expand over 900 people as Jones targeted vulnerable individuals for example those with substance use problems and histories of crime Jones continued to perpetrate fraud claiming to have the ability to heal people and predict the future he staged these elaborate events which really had a number of like magic tricks that he would use even the members that helped him pull off these fraudulent exercises believed Jones was a deity they thought he was saving his real supernatural powers for important tasks so this really borders on delusional itself if not totally there Jones held drinking the poison rehearsals so he would have like liquid that the members would drink and he would tell them that it may be poison it may not be and he kept doing this to condition them essentially to end their lives at some point so he wanted to see from these exercises who would be trouble how they would react when confronted with the end of their lives and this really facilitated what he would do later on he used brutal methods to keep members in line including drugging them and causing them sleep deprivation he told them that he had infiltrated the community with secret agents who would come to them and say things like they wanted to escape or the living conditions were terrible if the members did not report these communications or they agreed with them they would be severely punished so he really kept everybody separate and somewhat paranoid of each other Jones also didn't allow talking for a significant portion of each day when voice recordings were being played across this settlement all these factors we made it difficult for members to band together against Jones other members were kept in line by Jones stories of how dangerous leaving the settlement would be he told them the jungle was full of mercenaries and tigers makes me wonder when the Tigers eat the mercenaries I guess they were the tiger proof variety of mercenaries Jones also had a way of maintaining control over his inner circle he forced them to prove their loyalty by signing blank power of attorney forms false confessions that they had harmed children and statements saying they had conspired to overthrow the government of the United States he would hand them a firearm so their fingerprints would be on it and they would take it back and say he was going to frame them for murder using that weapon evidently the conditions at Jonestown were horrible it was hot there were snakes and mosquitoes and they could not grow much food because of the nature of the soil in the jungle many had expressed an interest in leaving but again they were afraid of Jones there were many who stayed voluntarily some believed that being in Jonestown gave them a sense of purpose expanded their understanding of reality and alleviated feelings of isolation a dispute over a child who was in Jonestown named John Victor stone as well as complaints of several relatives of Jonestown members started to attract the attention of California Congressman Leo Ryan by the summer of nineteen there are also complaints of substandard living conditions and violations of human rights Leo Ryan reporters and several relatives of those in the congregation travelled to Guyana in November 1978 when November 17 they entered Jonestown and the group noticed there was a lot of tension there but overall that evening the group did form a positive impression of Jonestown evidently Jones had coached the members of the congregation and told them to say positive things and told them how to defuse popular accusations he thought would be occurring because those accusations of course were true eventually though some of the members communicated to that group that they wanted to leave Jonestown one member specifically used a note he handed a note to one of the reports so this really indicates the level of fear that some of the members had the group noticed that Jim Jones appeared paranoid weak and disorganized evidently he would go on these tangential rants talking about how the United States government was out to get him the next day November 18 one of the members attacked Leo Ryan with a knife which understandably eroded the positive impression formed the night before after this Ryan's group and 14 defectors drove to the airfield intending to start their journey home they also had with them a man named Larry Layton he was posing as a defector as the group was boarding two airplanes a group of armed men from Jonestown arrived on a trailer being pulled by a tractor they opened fire on the group they killed Ryan three members of the media and one defector at the same time Larry Layton who was already in an aircraft with some of the group members opened fire with a pistol Larry Layton would eventually go to prison for that attack he was the only member of this crime that actually served a time in prison he would be released in 2002 after the attack Jones told his members they had no choice but to end their lives so Jones made sure that his soldiers killed Leo Ryan he did this not to protect the secrets that Ryan would have revealed but rather to create a narrative whereby the members believed that the US government would be sending troops to wipe out Jonestown so he was essentially fulfilling the conspiracy theory that he had been pushing for such a long time Jones told the members that it wasn't worth living like this and he said that without him life had no meaning he said that after they died they would live with him on another planet I find this interesting this was supposed to motivate them to and their lives right so I guess they wanted to live with him on another planet you would think that they would just step back and say hey you go ahead and we'll catch up with you later but of course there were other factors at work here Jones guards were standing around with crossbows and Firearms members of Jones inner circle prepared poison it was flavor aid cyanide and Valium this is where the popular phrase drank the kool-aid comes from even though of course they were using the lower-cost flavor aid Jones had the guards start with the children because he knew that once the children died the parents would lose hope and be more agreeable to end their own lives as the poisoning went Owen Jones continued to talk and pressure the members to take the poison there is this theory that those who would not comply were injected with the compound the evidence for this is the presence of injection sites on some of the members Jones died of a single gunshot wound to the head the best evidence supports that it was self-inflicted by the time I was over nine hundred nine people would be dead and roughly three hundred four of those individuals were under the age of eighteen there's another theory about Jones that he had been sick for six weeks he had a temperature of 104 that long so that may have been a factor in this as well but that hasn't been confirmed as far as I know moving to the mental health and personality factors now so before I get specifically to the behavior Jim Jones I want to take a quick look at the definition of a cult because it's pretty clear that he was operating one there are many definitions out there but the one I use has seven items a cult is authoritarian and manipulative it uses mind-control strategies it tends to target middle class citizens it is based around communal goals it uses aggressive version methods it attempts to indoctrinate members using a system and it employs a relatively new belief system in the culture of origin so all seven of these seem to line up pretty well with what we see in Jonestown now the classic starting place for cult leaders like Jim Jones would be narcissism it's easy to align his behavior with eight of the nine symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder so grandiosity fantasies of unlimited power a belief that one is special and arrogance are all met by the fact that Jones established Jonestown so he established his community and he named it after himself also he thought he was a deity so again all four of these are covered with that an excessive need for admiration is the next symptom we see this all the time with Jones a sense of entitlement could be supported by the fact he stole from members and really he did whatever he wanted he was manipulative and that's another symptom probably this is the characteristic that really stands out the most with Jim Jones we see Jim Jones had no empathy no real empathy any way he was good at feigning empathy and we look at the symptom of having envy or believing other people envy you this is the only one that's not really clear with Jim Jones I don't know if he would have manifested this even if he had it because he was able to obtain everything he wanted so it makes sense that he would have been envious but we just don't see it in this context so I left that one out so again eight of nine symptoms now some cult leaders also appear to be psychopathic more specifically they have a number of traits from primary psychopathy we see this as well here with Jim Jones it's not surprising that his behavior aligns with antisocial personality because of that disorders relationship to psychopathy we see alignment with five of the seven symptoms repeated criminal behavior now he wasn't held accountable for a lot of the wrongdoing he did as a child but he did involve himself in a number of crimes deceitfulness we see this was really constant with Jim Jones aggression and a disregard for safety murder qualifies for both of these lack of remorse there was no evidence of remorse at any point with Jones and with impulsivity and irresponsibility here we don't really see an alignment like many people with primary psychopathy these symptoms don't really seem to appear even though otherwise they qualify for antisocial personality disorder now after looking at narcissism and antisocial personalities they don't seem to capture all his behavior for example yet extreme paranoia maybe even delusions irrational thinking and an obsession with death there are a few possibilities here to explain this he could have had a comorbid psychotic disorder but he also consumed a lot of substances so much of this could have led him to paranoid thinking as far as the delusions it's hard to know if he was delusional or lying which is a common problem when somebody lies all the time so kind of stepping back from this we see two key takeaways from the tragedy at Jonestown first Jones wasn't particularly convincing to most people that met him many people just thought he was a garden-variety con artist but what he understood just like all cult leaders is the importance of finding individuals with whom you can connect and once they are identified it's about control he was a master manipulator he controlled every aspect of the lives of those members in California and in Jonestown second what happened in Jonestown is better described as a homicide on a large scale as opposed to a suicide without Jones none of those people would have died he caused all of it those that complied believe that they were going to be murdered by the government and they also believed that they would be on this new planet with Jones so Jones had a frightening combination of characteristics that made him incredibly deadly and resulted in this horrible tragedy I know if I talk about controversial cases there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate an interesting dialogue as always I hope you found my analysis of this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 180,655

Keywords: Jim Jones, Jonestown, Guyana, Leo Ryan, narcissism, grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, primary psychopathy, secondary psychopathy, factor 1 psychopathy, factor 2 psychopathy, sociopathy, mental health, counseling

Id: OY38AWiM2Cw

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020