Quick summary: Teenage lethal violence is not confined to a small pathological group because ordinary anger, fear and humiliation can drive action when the mind holds tightly to an experience. Cases from a single month in 2026 show how unregulated sensory and emotional fixation can turn into harm, including homicide and suicide. Schools, families and mental health services can move towards prevention by giving children daily contact with nature, breath practice, trusted conversation and absorbing hobbies that interrupt rumination before it hardens into action.
17-year-old
Arjun Aarvind kills his mother and brother in Massachusetts, United States
18-year-old
Kills a 17-year-old at a school in Fagersta, Sweden
16-year-old
Kills a 61-year-old man in Dungannon, Northern Ireland.
17-year-old
Kills an 18-year-old in Morgan Hill, California
18-year-old
Dies by suicide in India
There are many more incidents involving teenagers and violent death that could be added to this list. Is teenage homicide becoming a trend among the younger generation? If one believes that such incidents are confined to a small group of young people with mental-health disorders, violent personalities, fractured families or traumatic pasts, here is the more uncomfortable possibility.
Violence is not an abnormal feature found only in a pathological minority. Aggression is part of human behaviour and has evolutionary, neurological and psychological dimensions.
Whether it is homicide or benevolence, both begin somewhere within the mind. The human brain receives the world through sensory experience and interprets it. Even the normal mechanisms of anger, fear or humiliation can conspire an ordinary person to commit heinous crimes.
Indian philosophical traditions have long given particular importance to the senses and to the way human beings perceive and act upon the world. In the modern formulation, we speak of five sensory modalities: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. Indian philosophical traditions describe these as jnanendriyas, and include five faculties of action, the karmendriyas: the hands for grasping and manipulating, the feet for movement, speech for communication, and faculties associated with elimination and reproduction. The eleventh is mann, the mind, which occupies a distinctive position in this framework.
As long as the senses and mind are not adequately regulated, there’s every probability of violence by a human. Probably this explains the documented cases of very young children becoming involved in lethal violence: a three-year-old girl reported to have attacked a two-month-old neighbour in 1906; a four-year-old boy who reportedly shot his father in the head after being refused a PlayStation in 2012; and a seven-year-old boy who fatally shot a 32-year-old man in 2022.
How do the senses drive us towards action?
Consider something as basic as thirst. The sensation of thirst directs attention towards obtaining water. When one is thirsty, food, television or sleep may temporarily lose their importance; the mind keeps returning to the need for water. Hunger works in a similar way. A biological need produces a sensation, the sensation generates motivation, and motivation directs behaviour towards its perceived resolution.
Unless the senses are satisfied, they keep the mind restless. The same principle, in different forms, can be observed across the eleven senses. Perception generates experience, experience can generate desire or aversion, and desire or aversion can generate action.
One may argue that hunger and thirst are fundamentally different because they are primordial biological drives. So let us consider something less essential: a beautiful red rose blooming in a garden.
One person may walk past it without a second glance. Another may stop and look at it. A third may reach out, pluck it and caress its petals.
The flower is the same. The sensory stimulus is the same. Yet the responses are different.
The first person may simply not find the flower attractive. For the second, the visual stimulus creates enough pleasure to hold attention. For the third, the attraction is strong enough to generate an action. In all three cases, the eyes receive the same visual information; what differs is the meaning and intensity the mind attaches to that experience.
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras offer a vocabulary for thinking about these forces. Among the five kleshas: the fundamental afflictions described in the text, is abhinivesha, associated with deep clinging to life and fear of death. In this essay, I use the term more broadly as a philosophical lens for the way the mind can hold tightly to an experience, emotion or idea until it acquires increasing psychological force.
The question, therefore, is not whether human beings should have desires and impulses, but whether they can regulate, redirect and channel them. An untrained mind can become easily attached to its objects and remain bound to them. Strong attachment to a subject can become so persistent that a thought begins to influence behaviour.
Consider the case of 17-year-old Sarah Lindsey Santiago of North Carolina. In August 2026, she was indicted as an adult on three counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy in connection with the May 2026 shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego. Prosecutors allege that she agreed to livestream the attack, distribute the recording and disseminate the attackers’ manifesto. They also allege that she purchased and sent a Sonnenrad, a White-supremacist symbol, to one of the alleged shooters.
The case illustrates the danger of an idea becoming deeply internalised. When a belief repeatedly occupies the mind, becomes part of identity and is reinforced, its psychological force can grow. The concern is not simply that a person has a disturbing thought. It is what happens when the thought becomes fixed, emotionally charged and increasingly connected to action.
Abhinivesh, in the broader sense in which I use it here, is the tendency of the mind to hold tightly to what has hurt, pleased or moved us. Such emotional impressions can remain for days or years. When they are repeatedly revisited without being understood or regulated, they may begin to influence how we perceive the world and respond to it.
The 18-year-old Kunal Chandwade was disturbed by his parents’ constant fights. The stress, resentment, frustration and anger arising from those conflicts continued to build within him, becoming deeply embedded as abhinivesh until they developed into a force that drove him to jump off a cliff.
Arjuns, Sarahs and Kunals are not isolated from the society around us; they are among our children, waiting to manifest if accumulated emotions take the form of deeply rooted and destructive patterns.
How can we help our children?
Build an association with Mother Nature
Most teenagers growing up in metropolitan cities have remarkably little interaction with nature in their everyday lives. Their days are spent largely between homes, schools, coaching classes and screens, surrounded by concrete, glass, artificial lighting and paved surfaces. Even gardens are often landscaped without allowing children to touch the soil, walk barefoot on grass or experience the textures of the natural world.
This matters because the human brain is highly responsive to the nature and changes taking place within it. A beautiful flower may momentarily draw attention away from anger. The movement of a bird may interrupt a repetitive thought. Sunlight can influence alertness and mood, while birds chirping have been associated with stress reduction and psychological restoration. These effects may be brief, but even brief shifts in attention can create a pause between an emotion and the response it demands.
A child who observes a tree, touches its bark, watches a butterfly, listens to birdsong or follows the changing phases of the moon is continuously receiving varied sensory experiences. Such experiences can redirect attention, interrupt rumination and support emotional regulation.
Perhaps the problem is not always the absence of nature, but the absence of attention to nature. A child may have flowers in the garden, trees outside the window and birds in the neighbourhood, yet remain completely disconnected from them. Nature has to be experienced.
This is why meaningful and sustained interaction with nature should become part of a child’s education. Schools can give children opportunities to observe trees, buds and leaves; follow their growth cycles; plant and care for them; walk on soil and grass; play in the mud; observe insects and butterflies; and listen to birds rather than merely learn their names from a textbook.
A relationship with the biodiversity around us helps prevent the mind from becoming trapped in repetitive and destructive patterns of thought.
Build an association with one’s breathing
There is a subtle but important relationship between breathing and the mind. When a person is anxious, frightened or under stress, breathing often becomes faster. When a person is calm, breathing tends to become slower and more regular. The relationship works both ways: the autonomic nervous system influences breathing, and deliberate changes in breathing can influence autonomic activity.
This is one of the principles underlying pranayama and other controlled-breathing practices. The benefits of controlled breathing appear more from its influence on respiratory rhythm, autonomic arousal and the body’s stress response. Research has associated controlled breathing with reductions in perceived stress and anxiety.
For a mind caught in repetitive thoughts, anger, fear or emotional fixation, attention to the breath can create a pause between the internal impulse and the external response. During the practice, the mind is given another object of attention, like the rhythm of inhalation and exhalation, rather than remaining continuously absorbed in the thought or emotion.
Build communication with friends, family or a therapist
It is important that children have a support system in which they can express themselves freely, without fear of being judged or condemned. A trusted conversation can introduce a different perspective to a thought or idea that is taking shape within the mind. It can challenge rigid thinking, reduce emotional isolation and, at times, restore a sense of hope.
For children struggling with persistent distress, anger or emotional difficulties, a trained therapist can provide a structured, non-judgemental space to understand and regulate those emotions.
Build an association with one’s hobbies
There can be something restorative in doing something one genuinely enjoys. Enjoyable activities engage the brain’s reward and motivation systems and can help regulate stress and mood. A meaningful hobby may provide the mind with another pathway of engagement, interrupting the repetitive cycle through which an emotion or thought can become increasingly dominant.
Music, reading, drawing, sport, gardening, making things or simply learning something out of curiosity can give a young person experiences of attention, competence and pleasure that are not tied to the troubling thought or emotion occupying the mind.
These are not merely activities to keep children occupied. They are ways of developing attention, emotional regulation, empathy and, most importantly, the ability to pause between an impulse and an action.
If abhinivesh is the mind holding tightly to what it has experienced, perhaps the task of childhood is to teach the mind how to let go. Emotional support systems and engagement with hobbies are increasingly being encouraged in schools, yet meaningful interaction with nature is still often considered unnecessary, something peripheral to the academic curriculum rather than one of the many experiences that can contribute to a child’s psychological and emotional development.
If romanticising nature as a cure for violent behaviour seems merely idealistic, consider a more unsettling possibility. All the incidents described above occurred within a single month, August 2026. That, in itself, is frightening. But what if the incidents that took an entire month to unfold were to occur in a single day?
That day may not be far if we begin normalising violence in the same way we have normalised climate change, corruption and pollution. We discuss them, debate them, watch them become news cycles, and then move on. Repeated exposure can make even disturbing violence feel familiar and therefore less shocking.
Perhaps the real urgency is to prevent destructive emotions from taking root in the first place.
Nirali Vaidya is a former physiotherapist and advertising copywriter who now writes long-form essays on literature, art history and political thought. She is working on her debut book after a study of the Patanjali Yoga Sutras and interviews with the editor of Kumar.
