The school stabbing in Bandar Utama has left many of us shaken. A 16-year-old girl lost her life, and a 14-year-old boy now faces the unimaginable weight of having taken it.
In the days since, social media has erupted with speculation on motives, upbringing, and mental health. There are armchair diagnoses, sweeping conclusions, and the kind of forensic curiosity that, while human, risks something far more insidious: the erosion of compassion.
As a psychiatrist in higher speciality training in the United Kingdom, I am reminded of the Goldwater Rule — an ethical principle that cautions psychiatrists against publicly speculating on the mental state of public figures they have not personally examined.
It arose decades ago, after members of my profession in the United States offered armchair diagnoses of a presidential candidate. Though few outside psychiatry may know of it, its spirit feels newly relevant — not just as a professional boundary, but as a moral one the world needs to relearn.
Because we have all become amateur diagnosticians: we watch a few seconds of CCTV footage, scroll through a handful of social media posts, and declare verdicts.
She was unstable. He was narcissistic. The parents were negligent. The school failed. But what we are really doing is distancing ourselves.
If we can label the perpetrator as “mad,” we can tell ourselves this is something that happens to other people’s children, not ours.
In doing so, we avoid harder questions. What are we feeding our children’s minds? What kind of world are they absorbing through their screens?
I have watched, in airports and clinics and waiting rooms, toddlers handed devices to keep them quiet, eyes glued to reels that flash faster than their brains can process.
I have seen primary schoolers scrolling past cruelty as if it were comedy. I have seen teenagers measuring their worth in likes, or learning about love through the lens of rejection and revenge. Some parents now expose their children to the world of social media for likes — or for income.
We worry about what our children eat, but not what they consume emotionally. Then we are shocked when something in them fractures.
The truth is, the human mind — especially the adolescent mind — does not mature well in echo chambers. It needs conversation, guidance, correction, containment.
But in homes where both parents work long hours, or where technology has become the new babysitter, those buffers are thinning. The result is not only emotional dysregulation but moral disconnection — the quiet numbing of empathy.
Compassion is what separates tragedy from atrocity. It is what reminds us that even when faced with horror, we do not lose our humanity.
But lately, that compassion seems selective: reserved for people who look or sound like us, or for causes that trend online. The same shrinking empathy is evident in how we treat animals — the strays beaten or poisoned, or even paid to be shot, the casual cruelty most of us scroll past without outrage.
Local councils coming up with directives asking strays not be fed without coming up with strategies to control their population. Paid to be shot but not to be neutered? Sometimes compassion need be learnt from beyond our borders — perhaps look to Bhutan.
A society that loses compassion — for children, for animals, for each other — will eventually lose its balance.
Perhaps that is the real illness here: not something diagnosable by psychiatrists, but something collective. A society that has grown quick to judge, even quicker to dismiss, but slow to listen and dangerously desensitised to suffering.
So maybe the Goldwater Rule needs an update, not just for psychiatrists, but for all of us:
Do not diagnose what you have not understood. Do not condemn what you have not tried to heal.
Dr Loshi Rajen is a former Ministry of Health (MOH) doctor with a passion for psychiatry and writing.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
