When severe violence becomes a script: a vulnerability-script integration model of media exposure and the form of psychosis-associated maternal filicide

When a publicized act of severe violence is followed by one that resembles it, the resemblance is often read as contagion. This paper argues that resemblance is weak evidence of influence and asks a narrower question: under what conditions can exposure to a publicized crime narrative shape the form of subsequent violence in a person whose antecedent state has already made such violence conceivable? The Vulnerability-Script Integration Model (VSIM) is developed for psychosis-associated maternal filicide. It is an organizing framework with an attached evidentiary protocol and three new propositions: antecedent vulnerability selects exposure as well as moderating its effect; exposure primarily shapes the form rather than the origin of violence; and media influence is inferred only from a dated post-exposure change in narrative-specific behavioral information (acquired or activated) that the documented antecedent state does not parsimoniously explain. The model specifies five functional stages, two moderators, a clinically defined and non-circular vulnerability construct, discriminant coding rules, a causal diagram with explicit estimands, and six predictions with stated classification, test, disconfirming, and inconclusive evidence. A closed, adjudicated case in which a court-tested claim of media scripting proved false illustrates the evidentiary rules. Clinical and reporting implications are framed as research questions.