You might remember him. He was a computer programmer and graduate student who killed himself last year. His suicide note was widely publicized because of how eloquently and agonizingly it described the source of his pain: a long and horrific history of childhood sexual abuse. Bill's note spoke of a darkness inside of him, one he couldn't shake, one which followed him and tormented him and kept him from living his life. He described himself as feeling a darkness that destroyed his relationships and kept him from feeling any joy or human connection.
I knew Bill, a little. We went to the same high school; he was a freshman when I was a senior. My older brother was friends with his older brother. We knew each other's names, chatted a few times, but we didn't know each other well. Like I said: he was a freshman, I was a senior. When he died, I thought of him often, but I never wrote about it. I didn't know what to say.
I bring this up because I've been thinking a lot about difference, and mental health, and pain. And I've been thinking about the history of school shootings. I was in high school when Columbine happened. And the immediate aftermath saw a host of oppressive security measures imposed on children and teenagers across the nation. As Michael Moore pointed out in Bowling for Columbine, it was open season on anyone who was considered different or strange or unusual or unpopular in high school. I was saddened and disturbed to hear some draw connections between Adam Lanza's unpopularity and his crimes. An article in the Times: "Still, after hearing of the news on Friday, Ms. DeVivo reconnected with friends from Newtown, and the consensus was stark. 'They weren’t surprised,' she said. 'They said he always seemed like he was someone who was capable of that because he just didn’t really connect with our high school, and didn’t really connect with our town.'" If anyone who doesn't "connect" with their town or high school were capable of mass murder, there would be massacres every day. But this is the basic logic of harassing anyone who doesn't fit in. I know of no evidence that the increased security following Columbine prevented a single school shooting. We have plenty of evidence that tons of good kids who had the misfortune of not fitting into the norm or being popular were unfairly and unnecessarily vilified.
Bill speaks, in his suicide letter, about social difficulties, and I'm sure they were debilitating. But it's important to say that he was not an Adam Lanza figure; I remember him as a gregarious and fairly popular guy, with many close friends and a tight-knit group. But suppose he had ever divulged the thoughts he expressed in his letter. Suppose he had talked about a darkness, about an evil inside of him. In the post-Columbine environment? In the context of our country right now? I'm willing to bet there would be police at his door in short order, or at least a heavy-handed meeting with school administrators. Perhaps such an intervention would have resulted in him getting some help, but I'm not optimistic. Likely it would have made him feel more alienated than before.
I have often thought of Bill and his suicide and how much it challenges us. As someone who knew him and who read his note describing his pain, I want so much better for him. As someone who believes in the right to take one's own life, I am challenged by both the knowledge that the horrific pain he endured must have distorted his decision making process, and by his repeated insistence that he was making the only rational choice. I think about his admissions that he might be mentally ill, that he has been broken in a fundamental way by what happened to him. How could he make a rational choice? Is that not itself a kind of mental illness? But I think also about how psychiatric treatment didn't help him, how little respect he had for his doctors. And I wonder whether he was medicated, or how.... Reading his note after this tragedy, I think about mental illness, and trauma, and choice.
Bill invoked his fear of hurting others specifically in his note.
I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don't kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don't know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I'm capable of.I want to believe, quite desperately, that there was a third way, that Bill had another option beyond killing others or killing himself. And I'd also like to believe that he chose the latter option over the former because of his goodness, because of his character, because of his toughness. But then I think about trauma, and I think about the brain, and I think about all we know and don't about mental health. The truth is, it might just have been chance that Bill killed himself rather than other people, random chance that he turned his pain inward rather than outward, as hard as that is to say. I think we're still so powerless to fix broken people, or to even understand them. We have a shamefully inadequate mental health system, one where people who feel themselves at risks to themselves or others have no consistent access to treatment. In a country with such a deficient social safety net, I don't know what to do to help them. In a country awash in guns, I don't know how to help them from hurting other people. I just have no fucking idea.
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