I’m going to assume without even checking that everyone in various mental health blog circles has read this story already. The original article was published five days ago, which in Internet time is the equivalent of about eight thousand years. I link to things I find interesting more so that I can find them again if I want to than to point them out to other people. I don’t actually want to think about this ever again because it makes me feel sick, but unfortunately it’s not the kind of thing that anybody can afford to ignore. I have way too many things to do right now to take the time to make any kind of thoughtful commentary, and really, I’m glad about that, because I suspect that words would fail me if I tried to say anything about this unfathomable cruelty.

Oh, and if you want to know the name of the vile excuse for a human being who emotionally tortured Megan Meier, you can find it in the comments on this post. Her address and phone number are there, too… that is, if she hasn’t changed her number already.

Never thought I’d see the day that I’d consider myself lucky that when I was thirteen, the ex-friend who bullied me told me to my face that I should kill myself. But I got through stuff like that much better than I think I would have if her mother had also been fucking with my mind, too.

Some brief thoughts, most about the Virginia Tech shootings. Most are interrelated, but some kind of aren’t.

• Postmortem diagnosis of someone you’ve never met is stupid and pointless. This doesn’t mean that I’m entirely uninterested in it (hey, I have a copy of Touched with Fire, too), but I doubt its usefulness.
• I’m a good Canadian girl and I like gun control. I am not very interested in discussing this point any further in general, and I’m certainly not interested in doing so right now.
• I am shocked and appalled that Virginia Tech didn’t lock down campus and cancel classes after the first shooting incident at 7 a.m. I have a hard time imagining that a university wouldn’t do that. It’s terrible. I know the police thought they had apprehended the perpetrator, but shouldn’t the university have done something more just in case there was more than one shooter or the police had the wrong guy, which just so happened to be the case? I disagree with a lot of things that one of the universities I attended has done, but I’m positive they would have cancelled classes and done a better job of warning people.
• It is fucking hard to be mentally ill in university, but I think that might have had surprisingly little to do with the Virginia Tech shootings. I’m crazy, I was really ill in university, and most of the treatment I received only made me worse. But I’ve never killed anyone. My mom thinks that better mental health treatment for university students could prevent further mass murders; I don’t necessarily agree. I do think that mental health on campus is a very serious problem, though, and solutions like threatening to kick me out of residence for cutting myself superficially don’t help anyone.
• People have talked about how the people around Cho should have reached out to him. It seems, though, that some people did reach out to Cho while he was at university. He merely ignored and brushed off any attempt at friendliness. It was pretty nice of people to try to talk to him at all, since he scared the shit out of plenty of other people. I like to think I’m a generally nice person, but if there was some guy who followed girls around and repeatedly sent them emails or whatever after they’d asked him to stop, and surreptitiously took photos of girls and blamed it on other guys, and ignored people who spoke to him, well, I don’t see that there’s any problem with me being too scared of him to try to “reach out” to him. (As a side note, one of the guys who raped me, I later found out, had a previous history of stalking other girls when he took classes at the local university. This was not at the same university I have referred to previously, we were not on campus when he raped me, and he was not even a student when he raped me… but he did later get a part time job on that campus, despite the previous complaints that he was a stalker.)
• I do think, however, that Cho really could have used some compassion when he was younger. Maybe if his peers and other people had been kinder to him in high school, or junior high school, or elementary school, it would have helped him and he wouldn’t have become the twisted person he eventually did become.
• Since I’m very fond of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, it doesn’t bother me that Cho Seung-Hui’s plays were violent, profane, and bizarre. It bothers me that they were poorly-written and pointless as well as being violent, profane, and bizarre. This is not me poking fun at bad writing; this is me writing badly myself as I fail utterly in my explanation of why I do agree that they were somewhat disturbing. Mainly I guess, they seemed like the kind of thing that someone who’s 23 should have moved way beyond.
• In theory, I have absolutely nothing against the idea of briefly hospitalizing someone involuntarily if she is judged to be in imminent danger of harming herself or others. In theory, I am all for this. In practice, sometimes it even saves lives… but other times it’s extremely damaging. I could go on and on about this, but since it wouldn’t fit into point form, I’ll have to get back to it another day.
• People are responsible for their actions unless they are so completely psychotic that they honestly can’t tell right from wrong. You know, the legal definition of insanity. This doesn’t happen all that often. I have been that way only once, and this one time where I had zero chance of controlling myself lasted only for minutes. I had been psychotic nearly constantly for several months at that point, but the actual insanity lasted only minutes.
• At that point, I snapped back to being 99% out of control. And at 99% out of control rather than 100%, you are responsible for your actions. At that point, it’s extremely difficult to talk yourself out of things you’re about to do, but it’s not impossible. At that point, psychosis is an explanation for your actions, but it’s not an excuse.
• I am generally harder on myself than I am on anyone else. Additionally, not being in anyone else’s head, I don’t know how I’d judge whether they were 99% or 100% out of control. But if I did have a way to judge that, I’d hold other people to the same standards of responsibility to which I hold myself.

Stephany at soulful sepulcher listed my blog as one of her five choices for a Thinking Blogger Award. Thanks, Stephany. Since I know that some blogs have been mentioned multiple times in this meme, I’m going to attempt to list five blogs that make me think, but that I don’t believe have already gotten Thinking Blogger Awards. If I’m wrong and they have received them, well, they’re all excellent blogs, which is why I’m listing them, of course, so go visit them anyway! Oh, yeah, these are in alphabetical order.

1. Bipolar Wellness Writer - Eloquent, and focuses a lot on two of the things that interest me the most — healing and writing. Don’t get me wrong; I love good writing about illness, but there’s so much less good writing about wellness out there in any format that I really appreciate it when I find some.
2. my pockets hurt - Juniper is engaging and honest in her blog about coping with borderline personality disorder and life in general. I love reading her posts on any topic — working for a tutoring company, running into annoying people at the laundromat, whatever.
3. Pole to Polar: The secret life of a manic-depressive - I don’t know how she does it. Seaneen’s posts are so long and so frequent, but they still manage to be jam-packed with interesting, thought-provoking content. I like to imagine that I would write posts like she does if I had any patience or attention span.
4. Roller Coaster - Honestly, I’ve only skimmed over some of the posts in Marja’s blog, because I just discovered it today, but I’ve owned a copy of her book for years and I love her book, so I already know I like her writing. The book is actually one of the main inspirations for the title of this blog! Many of Marja’s posts are about bipolar disorder and Christian faith.
5. Spanglemonkey - Speaking of “I don’t know how she does it,” Jo is one of the most prolific bloggers I’ve ever come across. Multiple posts every day and she has been doing this for years. About bipolar disorder and BPD, parenting, writing, life, the universe, and everything.

These are the rules of the Thinking Blogger Awards:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

Marissa at depression introspection posts about the Virginia Tech shootings, bullying, compassion, and prevention. It’s titled The Most Controversial Post You’ll Ever Read Today, but it’s hard for me to see it as controversial, when I agree with much of what she says, especially the parts about Columbine. When I was in junior high, I never considered killing the people who bullied me, but I certainly understood where Harris and Klebold were coming from. What I’ve never understood is why school shooters also tend to kill absolutely anyone that’s around — why wouldn’t they just target the bullies? Why do they also kill people who’ve never done anything to them?

Gianna at Bipolar Blast posts about labels: Patient, Client, Consumer, User, Ex-User, Ex-Patient, Psychiatric Survivor, the Psychiatrized. My big problem in finding a term to use is that I’d like for there to be an umbrella term for those of us who are “mentally interesting” or who don’t believe they are but who have been in the psychiatric system anyway. I am currently in the psychiatric system and I’m not looking to leave it, so for me, that rules out a bunch of those terms like ex-patient. I’m not technically anti-psychiatry, but I’m definitely against bad psychiatry, and there’s an alarming amount of it out there. I’m not a Psychiatric Survivor, I’m a Survivor of Bad Psychiatry. Anyway, all of these terms focus on the relationship between the individual and the psychiatric system, and I’m more interested in finding one for just the individual, who, in his or her search for wellness, relates to many other people and institutions — family, friends, work, school, society as a whole, etc. — and isn’t defined solely by his or her relationship to psychiatry.

The thing that really bothers me about the term “consumer” is that it makes it seem as if we purchase a product and then do nothing else to further our wellness, that we aren’t active participants at all. Of course, this is what some people do — take the drugs and don’t think about eating and sleeping properly, having good relationships with others, expressing themselves creatively, and all of that. “Consumer” takes the fact that I work damn hard in all areas of my life and reduces it to a simple financial transaction, and that is grossly inaccurate.

You know you are hypomanic when…

…you have thirty-two tabs open in your browser window because you keep jumping from topic to topic, page to page, yet you can’t bring yourself to close any of them.

It’s so depressing. From the Times Online, Bullied girl ’stepped in front of train’.

A 14-year-old girl stepped in front of a train after her stepbrother confronted a classmate accused of bullying her, an inquest heard yesterday.

Kay Miller, who suffered from anorexia and a borderline personality disorder, panicked after her brother, a Welsh Guardsman, pushed the alleged bully over a wall and warned him to leave her alone…

…In a written statement her sister, Chloe, said: “I was with Kay, my stepdad and Geraint when we saw Scott Walker.

“He was in Kay’s class at school and he was saying things to her. Geraint went over and said, ‘Leave Kay alone.’ More of Scott’s friend’s came along. Scott’s sister slapped Geraint across the face. But he didn’t react. Tim told us to go home but Kay just ran away crying. She was a bit hysterical.”

God, I hate bullying. I’m so glad I’m not in junior high anymore. I’m so glad I got through it without killing myself, even though one of the bullies suggested that I should commit suicide. Yeah, like I was going to do anything that they said to do.

The inquest heard that the teenager had suffered from “borderline personality disorder” for six years. But she was tackling her problems and had lectured to more than 300 people on her eating disorder.

Also, how much do you think it helped this girl to diagnose her with borderline personality disorder at the age of eight? Would you say not at all? I would. Would you say it probably hurt her more than it helped her? I certainly would.