Luka Magnotta Murder Case | Mental Health & Personality

hello this is dr. Ron day today's question asks if I can analyze the mental health and personality characteristics that may be at work in the Luka Magnotta case Mignogna is a convicted murderer who's imprisoned in Canada just a reminder I'm not diagnosing anybody in this video only speculating about what could be happening a situation like this if you enjoy this video please like it subscribe to my channel and consider supporting me on patreon I'll put the link to patreon in the description for this video so first I'll look at the background and the timeline of the crime those will be combined in this video and then I'll look at the mental health and personality factors so starting with the background and timeline Luka Magnotta was born on July 24 1982 in Canada specifically Scarborough Ontario his name was Eric Newman at that point he would change his name later on when he was 24 his parents were married just before he was born his mother was 16 and his father was 17 his parents did not have a lot of money Luka described his mother as having an obsession with cleanliness she would make him and his siblings wash their hands until their skin was irritated and she did not take well to his bed wedding behavior so bedwetting of course one of those signs that's tied to psychopathy he described his mother as a horrible person and described his father as an alcoholic and said his father suffered from schizophrenia Luka had challenges in school he was initially placed in special education classes because he had difficulty with reading and math the other kids made fun of him because he was shy because he was gay and because he wore inexpensive clothing he dropped out of grade 11 when he was 17 due to Mel House symptoms he said he had poor concentration and he was hearing things he had a number of lower-level jobs with many of them he only lasted a matter of weeks were months before he was fired he had poor attendance and poor work performance in 2001 he was diagnosed with schizophrenia sometime in his early 20s he started working as a prostitute it's been reported that he had five to six clients per day he had repeated traumatizing experiences in this line of work in 2004 Luka became friends with a 21 year old female who had an intellectual disability he manipulated her into applying for credit cards and then he charged over ten thousand dollars on those cards he was convicted of three counts of fraud and one count of criminal impersonation in 2005 he served 16 days in jail followed by nine months of community service after that he was put on probation for 12 months the police had evidence that he was involved in an assault of a sexual nature against that victim but they decided to drop the charges missing an important opportunity to stop Lukas criminal behavior before Luca was sentenced in this case the court was aware of a report indicating he had significant psychiatric issues in response the court simply told him he had a medical problem and always needed to take his medication that same year we see he expresses an interest in becoming a police officer who investigates homicides this is interesting because a desire and police work is fairly common among people who had become serial killers at this point he also became involved in making adult movies Luca set up a number of fake social media accounts and websites he started a rumor that he was dating a notorious murder named Karla Homolka only to go out of his way to deny this non-existent relationship suggesting the rumour that he started was destroying his reputation in 2007 we see he files for bankruptcy he said he was sick and had no job in that same year he auditions for a reality show called cover guy in an interview he tell us the judges that some people say he's devastatingly good-looking they reject him but in February 2008 he comes before judges for a reality show and tells them how he had hair transplants his nose done and how he wanted to get muscle implants in his arms given his behavior I'm surprised no one recommended logic implants in his head that would have made a lot more sense under the circumstances in 2008 Luca continued to try to attract as much attention as he could online he created these rumors about himself and then using other profiles he made post to deny those rumors so similar to what he did before his thought he may have had dozens of different identities online he desperately tried to get his own Wikipedia page at this point but he kept getting blocked in 2009 Lucca becomes a travel companion for a 70 year old Toronto man they traveled to Italy Russia and France in 2010 Luka resorts to posting violent messages and videos in a desperate attempt to attract attention in December he post one where he ends the lives of two kittens the videos are quickly taken down but not before a number of people start trying to identify Luca eventually organizing into a Facebook group with over 4,000 members in 2011 a more focused group of people formed to investigate Luca eventually they're able to figure out that he was likely in Toronto the Toronto police start an official investigation at the end of this year Luca posts more videos of the same nature that same year he also threatened a newspaper in London who published a story about the killer in 2012 the online sluice figured out that Luca may be in Montreal they do this by comparing the Google Streetview to one of the pictures Luca had posted May 24 2012 Luca murders Concordia University student June Lin the next day he posted a video featuring that murder he dismembered the body and mailed the parts to various locations around Montreal on May 30 the police named Luka Magnotta a suspect in this murder On June 3 2012 Luca spotted in Paris he's arrested the next day in Berlin he was at an internet cafe looking at stories about himself he was extradited to Canada and pled not guilty to several charges including first-degree murder Luka requested a jury trial during the trial we see that his attorney argued that Luca was in a psychotic state and should not be held responsible for his actions he was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years I imagine he spends his time designing a course called how to draw the unwavering disdain of every human being on earth he certainly didn't impress a lot of people and we see the special on Netflix about a that really hurt his reputation even more although I think his reputation was already pretty much at zero so I guess it kind of pushed it below zero it's like negative reputation now moving to the mental health and personality factors lucas behavior aligns with a number of characteristics of cluster B personality traits before I get into the behavioral alignments let's see how the mental health professionals at his trial testified there were six professionals who testified one independent three for the defense and two for the prosecution in Canada the prosecution is referred to as the crown now the independent expert said that Luca had borderline personality disorder with histrionic traits two defense experts said Luca had paranoid schizophrenia the last one said he had schizophrenia borderline and histrionic the crown experts differed in their determination one said antisocial histrionic and narcissistic and the other said borderline so between the two of them they covered all of the cluster B personality disorders now taking a look at these cluster B personality features I don't know specifically what was happening with Luca of course but what could be going on with this type of behavior in a situation like this now looking at these schizophrenia angle I was surprised that some of the mental health professionals did not believe Luca had schizophrenia his history was fairly well documented we see disorganized speech hallucinations delusions and flat affect now it could be that these experts were working for the crown and a lot of times prosecution experts come up with disorders not related to psychosis but here we see the independent expert also did not report schizophrenia so going back to a personality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual the DSM all the personality disorders fall into three clusters a B and C as I've talked about before cluster B personality pathology has four personality disorders antisocial narcissistic borderline and histrionic it's not unusual to see situations where a person has more than one of these disorders but it's rare that someone's behavior could align with all four considering what the mental health experts said in this case let's take a closer look at these for disorders looking at antisocial personality we see criminal behavior lying impulsivity aggression a reckless disregard for safety being irresponsible and having no remorse down one could make an argument for all of these but it's worth noting that only one expert thought that Luca had antisocial personality I think the real question here was did these symptoms represent a pervasive pattern so he may have lied and been reckless and had other symptoms but was this really a tendency for him or just behaviors he engaged in occasionally so were they really part of his personality as far as narcissistic personality we see grandiosity fantasies of success and beauty believing oneself to be special requiring admiration entitlement manipulation lacking empathy having envy and being arrogant I think one could make a good argument for an alignment with all these behaviors but again we see most of the professionals did not think he had narcissistic personality and one could also question his skills at manipulation he didn't really seem to have a lot of social skills he was more introverted as opposed to grandiose so perhaps he wasn't really manipulative he just happened to be able to convince some people to do what he wanted it may not have been again like a personality trait something that was pervasive over time now moving to borderline personality I think much of this is really based on Lukas answers to questions during the assessment he said that he had frantic efforts to avoid abandonment an unstable self-image that he was impulsive and he had chronic feelings of emptiness but he did not endorse any of the other symptoms now moving to histrionic personality here we see eight features I will go through these in detail because we see so many examples in his behavior first symptom is uncomfortable when not the center of attention this is described by some is actually being physically painful for the person who has it so it's much more than a desire if something really rooted in their personality with Lukis behavior this seems to be one of the primary motivations he just wanted to be in the spotlight all the time and for any reason when he was not successful at getting attention or something positive he moved to something negative like ending the lives of animals and eventually killing a person the second symptom interactions with other people are characterized by inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behavior Lucas behavior may fit with this feature his travelling companion by mentioned before indicated that when Luca would walk into a room it was like he was a model on a runway symptom number three rapidly shifting and shallow expression of emotions there's not a lot of information about this but it's not a stretch to think he was shallow number four using physical parents to draw attention to oneself this really ties in with the other behaviors I talked about symptom number five a style of speech that is excessively impressionistic so this is when somebody talks like they are giving the impression of something like they don't really understand it they just talk about in a superficial way without really demonstrating a detailed knowledge of whatever they're talking about this is somewhat related to being shallow and again there is evidence of this symptom six is self traumatizing and theatrical we see an exaggerated expression of emotion based on his online presence it makes sense that this behavior would be endorsed now the last two symptoms are being suggestible and evaluating friendships as more intimate than they actually are there's really not enough information about his behavior to connect to those symptoms so in stepping back and looking at this one can make a good argument for an alignment with antisocial narcissistic and histrionic maybe even borderline it's just hard to know because of the possibility of psychosis it's hard to know what's explained by personality and what's explained by losing touch with reality I think the astounding part of this case is really how Luca was capable of doing anything necessary to have people pay attention to him it's really tragic how pervasive this problem was for him he was just desperately looking for anything to validate his feeling of being special and I think that's really what this is about his narcissism was not solidly in place which explains why the professionals really couldn't agree about him being so Cystic so we don't really see grandiose features but we see vulnerable features which of course don't line up well with the official diagnosis and a DSM narcissistic personality disorder that disorder is more related to grandiose narcissism when somebody's narcissism is solidly grandiose they automatically believe other people are admiring them so often when narcissists see other people looking at them they assume those people are in admiration right is kind of the default stance the narcissism we see here is more vulnerable it wasn't stable Lucca needed Casa attention so he could keep lying to himself to keep a living he was actually special the level of validation he required was unusually high even for a narcissist with behavior like this we could think of the need for admiration the sense of entitlement and the fantasy as being central and the other characteristics are allowing Lucca to meet his goals if he needed aggression to meet his goal that was available if he needed a lack of empathy that was there if he needed to have a disregard for safety to be responsible to be impulsive to lie all those behaviors were available to him personality traits and psychosis can potentiate other personality traits they can increase the power or effect of each other they're like fuel on a fire so the question becomes is this what histrionic Personality would look like without limits separate from reality and separate from society's norms narcissism and histrionic traits infuse the self-centered desire and psychosis and antisocial features unlock the potential of that desire allowing it to express with lethal consequences the real question with cases like this really always comes down to psychosis versus extreme personality traits that was really the focus of this trial which one is primary is he somebody with schizophrenia who has abnormal personality traits or is he somebody with pathological personality who also has some psychosis because that question can't really be answered his true level of culpability can never be accurately calculate so those are my thoughts on Luka Magnotta if you have any opinions or thoughts please put them 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: 240,070

Keywords: Luka Magnotta, histrionic, borderline, schizophrenia, narcissism, grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, mental health, counseling

Id: YClPHl4Dj6c

Length: 15min 49sec (949 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020