Originally published on May 13, 2026, by Brian LeBlanc for Security Magazine.

In the aftermath of targeted violence, organizations often find themselves pulled into a familiar debate: Was this a mental health issue? It is a natural question. It is also incomplete.

For security leaders, the problem with the diagnosis-first narrative is not that mental health is irrelevant. It is that the diagnosis does very little operational work. It may describe part of a person’s condition, but it does not explain escalation, target selection, fixation, or movement toward violence. When leadership teams rely too heavily on that frame, they risk overlooking the warning behaviors that are far more actionable for prevention. The more useful question is this: What warning behaviors were present before the event?