My Thought On The Newtown CT Tragedy

As with most people, as the events of this tragic event began to unfold by way of the various news reports and the ensuing conversations, tweets and Facebook comments, I found myself initially stunned at what I was hearing. Soon after that initial pause, I had a single thought, which is still crystal clear to me, but in my opinion seemed to be an under-current at best in this story. That single thought is compelling me to write.

But before I get to that – first and foremost, and even though this may go without saying, it still needs to be said – my sympathies go out to ALL that have been affected by this. I struggled with this as a part-time parent (and I say part-time, as I am 5 ½ hours away from my 5 ½ year old son), going through all of the what-ifs that naturally come out of an event like this. I did call my little guy, and it was comforting to hear his voice laughing away. Fortunately, he was unaware of what happened; my ex-wife decided to keep it that way, and I agreed. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a parent in that school, and I won’t try to guess.

Now, onto my single thought...

My single thought was NOT gun control. This is not a discussion I want to get into in the shadow of this tragedy, except to say that I was a little disturbed, but not surprised, at how quickly the gun control debate came into the conversation – and not just the debate in general, but the emotional extremism that invariably is part of the debate. “All guns are evil” vs. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (or any other hyperbolic argument) is not a valid debate. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and maybe if we have an intelligent non-emotional true debate about where the line should be drawn (and not if a line should be drawn), maybe we can find the best answer for all.

My single thought also was NOT the media coverage, although as usual, it bothered me. It bothered me when there was speculation over the number who died – at one point the count went from 18 to 33 to 24 in an hour – and I think that it is unnecessary and irresponsible to turn a story into a “bragging rights contest” over which outlet had the right number first. It bothered me that there were officials who (paraphrased) were making statements in anonymity because they were not supposed to jeopardize the investigation by making premature statements. Um…you don’t want to jeopardize the investigation, but, well, you’re going to anyway? And of course, it’s probably one of those the-media-needs-a-statement-to-let’s-give-one-so-they-go-away routine. The media reports speculation without calling it out as such, and then we have this:  there was some speculation released about the gunman’s brother being involved, and his name released as a “person of interest.” The brother ended up being a victim of a witch hunt until the reports were clarified. The brother in fact did not have contact with the gunman in a couple of years.

My single thought was related to a fact that eventually was buried in one of the stories I read; the gunman had been diagnosed some time ago with a personality disorder. When I heard the first reports, about four hours before I read that above story, I immediately thought that there has to be some kind of mental illness involved. My thought occurred very early, at the time when the count was only at 18 deaths at the school. This was before I read that the gunman shot and killed his mother separately. This was before I read that he eventually turned the gun on himself and committed suicide. And there is a part of me (that I am sure is going to piss some people off) that:  a, has some sympathy towards the gunman, and b, refuses to call him evil. Yes, this was very unfortunate and sad, but don’t need to compound the situation by finding a target (even if obvious) so I can direct some judgmental rage at that person, only to make me feel better about the situation. There is no feeling better about the situation; it’s a horrible situation. The best that we can do is to try to learn, and support, and move forward.

I’ve stated before, and will continue to do so – in my opinion, mental health issues are VERY understated, VERY misunderstood, and too often ignored. We need more awareness. We need more early intervention programs. We need more research. I think if there were more awareness and more early intervention, something like this MAY have been prevented.  We need to erase the negative (or worse, evil) stigma attached to the phrase “mental health.”

I have a friend that I met and worked with from 1995 until we were both laid off in 1996.  We got along really well, and we worked together on a specific three-month project where we spent a lot of time together. She was a very intelligent and hard-working person, and after we were both laid off, we remained in friends socially. Sometime in 1998, she started dating a guy, and after about a year, she broke up with him, and that's when things started falling apart. All throughout our friendship, we probably talked a few times a week, and she seemed perfectly normal for those first three years. After that relationship ended, our phone calls became more and more disturbing. She felt like she was being stalked. She called the police a few times, and eventually the police stopped taking her calls seriously. She started calling me even more often, to say that she was being followed, that people were moving in next to her and drilling holes in her walls so they could spy on her.  So, she moved to an apartment four towns away. Things didn’t change. She kept calling, saying that they were driving by her place. She told details in those phone calls that were hard to believe but hard to argue. Periodically I would go over to see if I could witness anything myself, and never could.

One day, she called me complaining of stomach pains. I went over and decided to take her to the local emergency room. A few hours later, she told me that she had miscarried, but she hadn’t realized she was pregnant. She hinted at being raped, but never came out and said it. She moved again, and the stories continued to get worse. This went on from 1998 until 2001, when I convinced her to move into the apartment next to mine. It was the only apartment open in the building, so no one could move in, and we lived on a remote dead-end street where we could easily see if anyone was stalking or driving by. My thought at that time was there if there was a stalker, we could get some proof to go to the police – this was the town that I grew up in, and I trusted the police force. If there wasn’t a stalker, then I would start to try to convince her to get some mental help.

Unfortunately, things got worse. She started dating a guy who lived in the complex. He was very abusive - I heard many of their fights, heard yelling and things breaking, and I had to call the police a few times on them, They both eventually got evicted at the beginning of 2002. All throughout that time, did some research to see what I could do, as a non-family member, to try to get her some help. Simple answer:  nothing. She had to either get help herself, or have a family member do so, or prove that she was “a danger to herself or to others” – that well-intended but vaguely-defined threshold. Her family lived three towns over, but did not want to be involved, even with my urging. Without going into any detail, needless to say she came from a broken home.

After a couple of months out of touch, I got a call from her. The call came from a battered women’s shelter in Philadelphia. She told me that she moved in with that same boyfriend into a house, where one day he attacked her with a knife. She wasn’t severely injured, but did leave that night. With nowhere to go, the shelter was the only place to go. The problem with the shelter was this; she could only stay there 30 days. They were going to try to place her in a halfway house.  A month or so later, I got another call; this time, she said she was homeless and living on the streets of Philadelphia.  Over the next year, I would get calls periodically; first she was homeless in Philadelphia, and then Washington DC, and then she managed to get out to Santa Monica CA in the summer of 2003  There, she said she spent a few nights sleeping on the beach. Why did she leave each time? She said that people were chasing her, most times in a white van, trying to steal her organs for the black market. She told me that they did get her one night, and drugged her, cut off her ankle and re-attached it, and that the only way she knew was the scar - a jagged line that went around the ankle. 

Now, I have to admit, I’ve told this story a couple of times, and when I get to this point, there is usually some laughter, as this sounds completely ridiculous. But at this point, I had been getting calls like this, ranging from weekly to monthly, progressively worse and more outlandish, but always serious, for five years at this point.  So, finally, early in 2004, I got a call from her, from a mental institution in suburban Chicago. It seems as if she was taking the train back to Washington DC when the train stopped overnight in Chicago. The next morning, a police officer saw her in the train station bathroom sitting on the floor cutting her wrists, so he had her committed for up to 30 days. She voluntarily agreed to stay another 30 days, and then repeatedly for six months, at which time there were going to release her.  She called me to see if I was willing to fly out to Chicago to bring her back home, but in order to do so, she had to (and was willing to) sign Power-of-Attorney over to me.  I told her I didn't feel comfortable in doing that, which she said she understood, and it turned out that her parents ended up being willing to go out.  That was the last that I heard from her; at least for 18 months. 

(I promise I am going somewhere with this long road of a story…)

In early summer 2005, she appeared out of the blue at my job. She looked good, she sounded good. She told me that she had some intense therapy, and that she was on medication. She had been diagnosed as paranoid delusional. She was working two part time jobs and was looking to move out on her own. She had lived with her parents after being released from Chicago.  She did move out in June, and since her birthday was in June, I took her out to dinner, and it was a nice dinner. Three weeks after that, the same old phone calls started creeping back into the picture. I would get a coherent phone call, and then an incoherent one. One of the coherent phone calls, she admitted that she stopped taking her meds, as she “felt like she was recovered.” The last phone call I got from her, she called me to tell me that she called the police to tell them that I had broken into her place, stole her bicycle and some clothes, and that I was coming to get her. She was calling me to warn me. I had to decide at that point that I could not have any more involvement with her, and in reality, there wasn’t anything I can do.  A few days later, as I was away on a rare business trip, she went to my apartment and asked my then wife if she could stay there for a few days, as people were trying to attack her. My then wife (who is a licensed Occupational Therapist) called me to tell me that she was going to allow her to stay that night, which made me quite nervous.  The next morning, they went to the local mental institution.   My then wife was not allowed to admit her, and my friend refused to admit herself, so my then wife asked my friend what she was going to do. Her answer was that she didn’t know, probably to take the bus somewhere. And that was that.

Just to close that story, I didn’t hear from her from that point in July 2005 until this past winter, when she called me from an apartment in Washington DC.  In her paraphrased words, she was living with a crack head but trying to make ends meet. She said that she had bounced around from homeless shelter to mental institution, but was again on medication and trying to function in society as a waitress. We talked about a lot of our past, which she remembers with good clarity – she remembered some things about our original job that I didn’t remember. We talked maybe three times in the span of a month, and then I haven’t heard anything since.

___

Mental health is a concept that is hard to understand, because at its core, it deals with an abnormal brain. Those of us with normal brains try to fit everything into some form of logic, but if I oversimplify mental health, something has occurred where the abnormal brain follows a different set of “logic.” We can’t possibly make an illogical situation logical, but that’s what happens when someone suffers from a mental health issue that goes undiagnosed or untreated. And again, that is a very over-simplified and probably unfair summation. In the long example above, everything that happened over that almost ten-year span is something that would have found hard to believe, if I had not witnessed it first hand. And it was surreal (still surreal when I think about it) how someone could progress from a normal individual into what I witnessed.  But it happened.  Fortunately, in this case, no one was harmed, including herself.

But my point:  whenever I hear a tragic story like this one in Connecticut, because of my experience, I tend to default right to the mental health issue.  To me, it offers an explanation. It’s not meant as an excuse, or to excuse what happened. As a quick side note, I do believe that there are some cases where the “possibility” of mental illness IS used as an excuse, and when that happens, not only does that bother me to no end, but it takes away from successfully dealing with those who do truly suffer from some sort of mental illness.

Calling out mental health in a situation like this, again, is not meant as an excuse, or to excuse what happened, but it does offer an explanation, and a call; a call that we all need to be more aware of the fact that many mental illnesses exist. Maybe someday we can get to a point where tragedies like this are far more fewer than it seems like they are today. For even though I offer mental illness as a potential explanation here, that doesn’t change the fact that something really sad and really unfortunate happened that makes us all take a step back and re-evaluate everything. For even though I offer mental illness as a potential explanation here, that can’t, and won’t take away the pain that was the end result.

My hope is that we all can move forward as best we can, to cherish what we do have, and to strive to make things better with everything we do, for as many people as we can. And with that, maybe we won’t have to question why it seems like the world is getting worse. It doesn’t have to be this way.