I’m totally at a loss for words when I try to discuss this article, Critics: Don’t tie driver’s licence renewal to psychiatric history. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with the article itself. The topic, however, horrifies me. There is something really, really wrong with the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Nova Scotia.

Service Nova Scotia now requires people renewing their licences to indicate on an application form if they’ve had a “psychiatric or psychological condition.”

People who indicate yes — even if it was something such as a bout of depression — are asked to provide more specific details and then must have a doctor complete a medical, sharing what’s usually confidential information with the government.

“The contents of the medical report will be reviewed by department staff and may be referred to a committee of medical specialists who make recommendations on clients’ medical fitness to safely drive,” the province has advised affected people in writing.

The application form also asks those renewing their licences if they have had lung, heart, eye or neurological diseases, a stroke or dementia.

Doctors sometimes charge a fee for the medical and failure to comply with the request could result in drivers losing their licences.

Why, why, why would anyone ever think this is a good idea?

Paul Arsenault, the provincial registrar of motor vehicles, defended the practice, saying that his department needs to know that information for the sake of public safety.

“If somebody’s severely depressed, they probably shouldn’t be on the road,” he said.

Hiya. Manic-depressive here. Severe depression, mania, psychosis, the whole works. I’ve never had a car accident. I’m not saying that nobody ever caused an accident because they were manic and driving too fast, or that no asshole has ever committed suicide by crashing their car, but that’s got nothing to do with me. My psychiatric condition isn’t any of the provincial government’s business, and I certainly don’t see why anybody who needs to get their license renewed should have to tell the government if they’ve had a brief bout of anxiety or depression in the past.

Carol Tooton, executive director of the Nova Scotia division of the Canadian Mental Health Association… wondered why the province would require such sensitive medical information that has little to do with somebody’s ability to operate a vehicle.

“I’ve never heard of this before. It certainly doesn’t help to eliminate the stigma around someone who may have a mental illness.”

See, I’m not the only person who thinks this is screwed up.

Stephen Ayers, the executive director of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia, said he was uneasy about the requirement and found it intrusive.

“This is concerning, obviously. It’s required by law for a physician or psychiatrist to notify (the Registry of) Motor Vehicles of a medical condition a person has that would impair their ability to drive.”

David Simpson, with the Mental Health Police Records Check Coalition, an Ontario rights advocacy organization, said the practice smacks of discrimination.

“What you always have to be worried about in situations like this is if there is some sort of systemic bias in place or covert discrimination, that they believe because you have a mental illness you’re going to use your vehicle as a weapon to injure people or injure yourself.”

I would definitely not indicate yes on this form and then pay $50 to get a doctor to complete a medical.

Since that article is a week old, how about you also check out one from today’s issue of the same paper? I mentioned Howard Hyde’s death last year, and here’s the latest news:

The Nova Scotia government will appoint a fatality inquiry into the death of Howard Hyde, who died after being Tasered by Halifax police in November.

Justice Minister Cecil Clarke announced the inquiry today on the heels of a report from the province’s chief medical examiner that found that Mr. Hyde died of excited delirium, not of being zapped with a Taser.

Yeah, because you hear about so many people dying of excited delirium while they’re not in police custody, right?

My younger brother is like the poster boy for borderline personality disorder, but since mental health professionals seem to be looking only for BPD poster girls, none of them had ever considered this diagnosis for him. No, I’m not sure whether I think BPD is a useful construct, but he does fit the criteria to a T (except, as far as I know, the last one, “transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms”).

Last week, I kept mentally writing a blog post in which I would describe all the ways he fit the criteria for BPD, but refer to him as “she” until the end of the post, where I would say that there was one major lie in the post and to switch all the pronouns, I’m actually talking about a guy, not a girl. My brother can be awfully exasperating, but what really bugs me, and what that post would have really been about, is sexism in the mental health profession. About how I, a girl, have been called personality-disordered simply because I used to cut myself or because sometimes I’ve disagreed with doctors’ opinions about something, but someone who very obviously fits eight of the nine criteria for BPD isn’t diagnosed with it because he’s a guy. I’m not really interested in amateur diagnosis of anybody other than myself, but it seemed appalling that behaviour that would get a female slapped with the BPD label was ignored in a male. I never did write that post, because 1) it would have wound up being awfully long and I’m lazy, and 2) it seemed malicious to write a post delineating all of my brother’s very worst qualities when he is one of my favourite people in the world and one of my best friends.

Now there is another reason to never write that post, which is that a doctor has finally considered that he might have BPD. Until the other day, my brother’s official diagnosis was generalized anxiety disorder, but he’s been in the hospital for a couple of days because of suicidality. One doctor is saying bipolar spectrum disorder and another is saying borderline personality disorder.

As for how he is doing in there, it varies. He went voluntarily, but then when he said he wanted to leave and it was stupid and he should have just killed himself instead of going to the hospital, of course they changed his status to involuntary. For a while he was really mad that he’s stuck there because he wants to go online and see if his girlfriend is terribly worried about him, as he wants her to be. He was doing a countdown online to the day he planned to kill himself and dramatically telling his friends that it would be his “last day on Earth.” His girlfriend has a good summer job on the other side of the country and he is upset about that because he would prefer that she come home to her apartment and work at the part time waitress job that she had before she found the better job. He thinks that her wanting to make money to pay the rent for her apartment, where he sometimes lives with her for free as he has no job, means that she doesn’t really love him. My mother said today, though, that he is feeling less angry about being in the hospital now because he thinks he should stay until he feels safe.

Feelings can shift so rapidly in the hospital sometimes, can’t they? Most of the time, it’s very boring, so when anything at all happens, sometime it seems monumental and you can overreact.

This is not an anti-BPD post. My brother behaves like a stereotypical, worst-case-scenario borderline, and of course I’m going to vent about that. I realize that most people diagnosed with BPD aren’t actually like him, and I’m hopeful that whatever the hell is wrong with him, whether it’s BPD or something else or BPD and something else, he will soon get some appropriate help and will feel better and not be such a pain in the ass. Even if he is bipolar without BPD, I’m glad that somebody has finally noticed that something other than GAD is going on.

If people are going to be diagnosing Anakin Skywalker and Winnie-the-Pooh, then why not Diagnosing Lear, right? This article from The New Criterion is actually a fairly serious piece of literary criticism focusing more on things like personal responsibility and expression of emotion, but the bits at the beginning that actually are directly about psychiatric diagnosis are pretty funny:

Doctors have been trying to diagnose King Lear for more than two centuries. They haven’t succeeded, of course, for a couple of reasons that are not mutually exclusive: first, King Lear does not exist, and second he is not available for tests or examination. The latest technology, no matter how sophisticated, will never settle the matter. No imaging studies for King Lear: he was born much too soon for them, and now will never be diagnosed properly.

Not, of course, that that puts doctors off, far from it.

I know it’s not at all uncommon for people to try to diagnose fictional characters, but when a friend of mine sent me the link to this article today, I just felt like sharing it.

Psychoanalysts perceived in Lear a case of thwarted incest (they would, wouldn’t they?). A variety of diagnoses have been offered from senile dementia to manic-depressive psychosis. (No one has suggested General Paralysis of the Insane, the last stage of syphilis.) Dr. Truskinovsky, writing in the Southern Medical Journal in 2002, makes a powerful case for mania, and suggests that Lear had been suffering from bipolar affective disorder all his life.

Personally, I am against all this diagnostic effort. It is not just that, as Dr. Truskinovsky dryly remarks, it is not altogether easy to decide what constitutes the symptom of grandiosity in an absolute monarch like Lear, so few of us having either experienced or witnessed that condition of man. It is rather that the medicalization of Lear’s behavior deprives it of moral significance.

I don’t see King Lear as being manic-depressive, but then again, it’s been an awfully long time since I’ve read the play.

There’s a Wired article called Anakin Skywalker: Borderline Personality, Bipolar or Narcissist? that I found via stir-crazy, they found via Mind Hacks, and they found via Omni Brain. I’d especially recommend reading both the Wired story and the Mind Hacks post.

I only have a few comments to make:

1. Hee.
2. Hey, I’ve been told I have bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder, just like they’re saying about Anakin Skywalker. This can mean one thing, and one thing only: I AM DARTH VADER!
3. The article reminded me right away of a humorous article I’d read years ago in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, “Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne”, so I was extremely happy to see that the Wired story linked to it.

Admittedly, though, I don’t actually think I’m borderline, and I know I’m not histrionic or narcissistic.

According to the authors, who reported their findings at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in San Diego, Skywalker meets the criteria for the condition: He has difficulty controlling anger, stress-related breaks with reality (after women in his life die or leave), impulsivity (dangerous pod racing), obsession with abandonment (those women again) and a “pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of ideation and devaluation” (hello, Obi-Wan).

In another sign that he’s borderline, the authors argue that Skywalker suffers from an “identity disturbance.” After all, he did become Darth Vader after being “very unsure of who he was and what he wanted.”

I don’t have difficulty controlling anger, obsession with abandonment, an identity disturbance, or a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of ideation and devaluation. I am impulsive and have had stress-related breaks with reality. Well, I can live in hope that those two things are enough to MAKE ME DARTH VADER, can’t I?

What is the best treatment for one who has been drawn to the Dark Side of the Force? The opinions of professionals are mixed:

Study co-author Bui said psychotherapy — “long term,” he added with a laugh — would be the best treatment for Skywalker, although he might prescribe a drug to help him sleep.

Bui had mixed feelings about prescribing an antidepressant like Prozac and said he’d avoid tranquilizers like Xanax that could leave Skywalker addicted or send him into “disassociation” (a rupture with reality).

But would Skywalker even go into therapy? “Because of his narcissistic tendencies he would perceive himself as ‘above’ that,” said Sultanoff, who thinks Skywalker also suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, at least in Star Wars Episode II.

I’m going to assume that by “disassociation,” Randy Dotinga means “dissociation.”

Not that there’s much point in trying to help Anakin at this point. He’s dead, yo. Remember?

thememoryartist recently made an excellent post, A new proposal for the DSM, which “outlines and categorizes the features of Mental Health Professional Personality Disorders.” It’s funny because it’s true. Which also, of course, makes it sad. I’ve seen plenty of mental health professionals whose behaviours and attitudes are outlined very well by those criteria.

In a comment, Gianna mentioned that the post might be educational for mental health professionals. I’ve met some MHPs who would appreciate it very much… but they’re not the ones who tend to exhibit any of the listed behaviours. I think the ones who actually exhibit the “symptoms” would see that piece of writing as an example of a patient being narcissistic and overly hostile, and would never recognize themselves in the criteria.

There are also a lot of interesting comments on this post about PTSD misdiagnosed as BPD.

I am doing okay physically with the Zoloft and Epival withdrawal. I didn’t even have any of the brief dizzy spells yesterday. I was, however, staring at a word on a computer screen when I saw it suddenly jump several inches to the left, even though this did not really happen. I am hoping that this is just a regular hazard of the twenty-first century, as opposed to a withdrawal thing.

As I mentioned in a comment on my last post, medication withdrawal has made me kind of stupid lately, though. I can’t remember anything, my attention span is even worse than usual, and… um, I already forgot what I was going to write in the last part of this sentence. Oh, yeah, I’m constantly almost late for stuff. Since none of this has been interfering with my work performance, it’s not really all that important. It just bugs me.

Tomorrow I get to see my GP and I hope I’ll get my prescriptions. I have to pay forty freaking dollars for the cab ride there and back, because there’s a shortage of family doctors here, no bus service to the neighbouring town where my doctor is, and I don’t have a car.

Everybody has already read about this study and its claims that there is something called “subthreshold bipolar disorder,” and as far as most of us can tell, SBD equates to “simply being human, but big pharma thinks you need antipsychotics for it anyway.” I’m lazy, though, so I haven’t commented upon it until now.

CL Psych posts about the incredibly loose criteria for SBD and the media’s claims that there is “appropriate” medication for it in Subthreshold Bipolar: The Giant Sucking Sound and Subthreshold Bipolar: Media Blitz and Lilly.

Philip Dawdy has also written several posts about subthreshold bipolar disorder, including Name The New Bipolar Disorder, in which he urges people to come up with a better name for SBD. I haven’t come up with anything yet, or rather, I haven’t come up with anything that no one else hadn’t thought of and posted already!

I am vastly confused by the stats from the article in the Archives of General Psychiatry. No, they’re not too complex for me to understand; they’re too stupid for me to understand. Only a 2.4% prevalence of Americans who, twice in their lives, meet half of the criteria for hypomania? I would expect it to be more like 99% than the 4.5% it winds up as in this study once you add the 2.4% to the 1% prevalence for bipolar I and the 1.1% for bipolar II.

I am more of a fan of the bipolar spectrum than some people in the blogosphere are, but this subthreshold nonsense is taking things way, way too far. Honestly, sometimes I like the things that Akiskal has to say, and he’s one of the authors of this study. Some doctors overdiagnose bipolar disorder, and most people who diagnose it overmedicate their patients. But there are still plenty of health care professionals who don’t recognize bipolar disorder. Sometimes, it’s not their fault — they don’t see the patient when he or she is hypomanic, and even if they do ask him or her about past symptoms of hypomania, the patient, in the middle of a depression, is pretty much unable to remember ever feeling okay, let alone hypomanic, and doesn’t — can’t — answer accurately.

Then sometimes there are shrinks who think you’re not manic-depressive if you haven’t, like, married someone you’ve just met and then bought five cars. Doctors who think mania equals euphoria and if you’re having a dysphoric mania, you’re just an asshole. Who think that mixed states or rapid cycling must always be borderline personality disorder instead, and even, believe it or not, doctors who are always going to assume that if you’re psychotic, you’re schizophrenic.

Yes, this “subthreshold” stuff is ridiculous, but within limits, I like the idea of the bipolar spectrum because it makes people aware of things that actually are bipolar symptoms but aren’t necessarily the most classic ones. It’s when you start pathologizing mild things that occur infrequently that it gets to be harmful.

No, I don’t know where the line should be drawn. But I’d say somewhere way before “subthreshold bipolar disorder” as defined in that journal article, anyway.

Philip Dawdy’s post Texas Teen Commits Suicide After Taking Lexapro contains a link to a streaming video of a newscast. At one point in the news story, the dead girl’s father talks about how Kayla was going from highs to lows, typical of most teenagers. Then the newscaster’s voiceover says, “But when the highs became higher and the lows lower, a doctor placed Kayla on Lexapro.”

Now, it’s very likely he could have gotten this wrong. The media gets quite a lot of things wrong. But if he’s right, and Kayla was vacillating between abnormally low lows and abnormally high highs, then it’s not just Forest that her parents should be thinking of suing. Prescribing an antidepressant alone for someone who shows signs of being manic-depressive is criminally stupid, especially if you don’t provide them with adequate information and follow-up care.

I am tired of tragedies happening to families all because of people who should know better, or who should care, and don’t.

Welcome to Rapid Cycling. Population: me.

(The image above is a magnet I have on my refrigerator.)

Lately I have been up-down-up-down-up-down. Usually rapid cycling is a February-March-April thing for me, and I start easing out of it around this time of year. Susan at Bipolar Wellness Writer recently wrote two good posts about seasonal aspects of depression and manic depression, Ebbs and Flows and Seasonal Affective Disorder. I can relate, as there is definitely a seasonal component to my illness.

I tend to have an overarching mood pattern of being very depressed from late September to early February, then hypomanic/manic until mid-May, then relatively normal or mildly hypomanic until late September. But I also tend to have cycles within cycles, especially in the February-to-May cycle. Then I often bounce from euphoric to dysphoric hypomania (and occasionally mania) to depression and back again, in random order, for random periods of time. The spring is my prime rapid cycling time, but that doesn’t mean it never happens at other times of year. I usually feel good during the summer, but sometimes I have episodes of depression then. I’m usually depressed during the fall and early winter, but sometimes I’ll be Doing Just Fine or I’ll have brief periods of hypomania.

For nearly five months, I have been Doing Just Fine with some ventures into mild hypomania now and then. For the past few days, though, I have been up and down frequently. I know some reasons why, of course. My current jobs have very variable hours and I don’t do so well when I’m not following a stricter schedule of sleeping and eating and working and leisure time. My problems with finding adequate treatment have also been frustrating me lately. (Experimental Chimp does a good job of blogging about his struggle to find adequate treatment, by the way.)

You ever notice that if someone already has you tagged with borderline personality disorder, then any time you admit that an actual life stressor is affecting your mood somehow, it’s seen as further confirmation that you have BPD? I know there’s supposed to be a “marked reactivity of mood,” but aren’t manic-depressives, or, God forbid, even people without any psychiatric diagnosis, permitted to have some reaction to things that have actually happened to them? And when some of those things are clearly physical reactions rather than psychological ones, too? It’s not rocket science that I’m going to be more unstable when my eating and sleeping and general living patterns are irregular.

Just an observation. I mean, I know that I currently don’t make a strong case for my own point at all, as my extreme rapid cycling as of late is actually typical of someone with BPD. I mean “extreme” in the sense of frequency/length of episodes and not at all in the sense of the behaviour that I am exhibiting. The most “extreme” I’ve been behaviour-wise lately was that Tuesday I cried a bit, and only the mental health nurse saw it the first time and nobody saw the second time.

At this very moment, I feel great, just so you know. At this very moment, I can’t imagine being depressed about anything. Don’t you love how even in the middle of rapid cycling, somehow I manage to firmly believe that whatever mood state I’m in is permanent?

I love Stephany’s post Who is a mental health advocate? Read it.

If you know where the title of my post came from without having to Google it, then I love you.

Ruth at Off-Label wrote a post titled A stigma wrapped in a history inside another stigma - that will probably never make it onto a t-shirt, about the stigma of the borderline personality disorder label within the c/s/x movement, and since my worrying about being an attention whore helped trigger it, I thought I’d talk about it. On and on and on about it. My post might not make much sense if you don’t read hers first, so you should read hers first. Some of this I first posted as a comment on her blog, but when I realized how long it was getting, I decided I’d take it over here:

Oh, don’t worry. It’s already made it onto a T-shirt. If I believed I had BPD, I would be perfectly willing to wear that shirt to any place that I would be willing to wear my “BIPOLAR PRINCESS” shirt.

I don’t think I have BPD, but I am well aware that I have some BPD traits, namely that I have mood swings, I used to cut myself, I am sometimes impulsive, and occasionally psychotic and dissociative. Although I think these are better explained by my diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD, I’m open to the idea that maybe I could have BPD, or am possibly a recovered borderline still exhibiting some traits, or that DBT skills might help me regardless of diagnosis. I’ve got two volumes of Linehan and a copy of Get Me Out of Here by Rachel Reiland sitting in a pile of books on my floor, that’s how seriously I take these ideas.

I often wonder if BPD is a useful diagnosis at all… but I’ve met people both in real life and online who were diagnosed with BPD, who agreed with this diagnosis, and who are wonderful people. Because they feel that BPD is a useful construct for explaining some of their feelings and behaviours, and because some of them have received treatment for BPD that they feel has been effective, I don’t feel qualified in saying it must be purely complex PTSD, or it must be purely a different form of bipolar disorder, or it must be ONLY a label docs slap on women they don’t like. Since I don’t identify myself as having BPD, who am I to invalidate the experiences of people who do identify as such?

I couldn’t say whether the stigma of being an attention whore is greater than the stigma of being bipolar in the general population, but there’s definitely a stigma in the c/s/x community against borderline personality disorder. I don’t think, however, that this is usually because those of us in the c/s/x community actually look down upon people who have been diagnosed with BPD or who we perceive to be attention whores (note the “or” there: I’m not saying that these people are one and the same). In some cases, I’d say this is true, but honestly, I think most of us, including myself, are terrified of ourselves being misdiagnosed, or even correctly diagnosed, with BPD because we know that most mental health “professionals” will see it as a license to treat us like crap.

Last year I had the particular misfortune of being seen by doctors who didn’t seem to think it was possible to suffer from personality disorders and Axis I disorders at the same time. I’ve got no problem with someone dx’ing me borderline as long as they also are willing to treat my other issues, because there are some things that are big problems for me, mainly bipolar disorder and PTSD. The first half of 2006 was so traumatic for me that so far in this blog, I’ve just skirted around every mention of it. Well, it’s partly how traumatic it was, and partly because I know I’ll have to write some long, detailed posts about it, and I’ll have to set aside time for that.

Really, I don’t think most of us who are mentally interesting are prejudiced against people with BPD, we just desperately want to avoid the diagnosis ourselves, and with good reason, since the diagnosis virtually guarantees we’ll be insulted and mistreated by some of the “professionals” who are supposed to help us. This has the unfortunate side effect of making people with BPD feel like pariahs, since we so badly want to avoid either having BPD or being told that we do. I guess we should stop crowing about how glad we are that we haven’t been diagnosed with BPD if we don’t want to make other people feel like crap. Although I don’t really mean “we” there — I’m young, female, and a former self-injurer; of course there were some speculations that I have BPD.

And okay, if I ever decide that I agree with that suggestion and I am borderline, I will wear one of those T-shirts. No, I’m not kidding.

I might be less tolerant than I should of people whom I believe to be willfully manipulative, but I have thought that about very few people I know, and none of them carried a borderline diagnosis. I guess there are some borderlines who do fit the stereotype of being purposely manipulative, but I think most are just coping in the best ways they know how and other people misinterpret their actions. People who do have contempt for anybody with a BPD diagnosis — well, they shouldn’t. It’s disgusting to look down upon people with a different psychiatric label from yours, and it doesn’t help anybody.

Honestly, the part of my shirt I was so worried about? “PRINCESS.” Because if you’re going to go to the trouble of making a shirt that says you’re mentally ill, is it right to be so damn frivolous about it? It would be nice to make a shirt with a slogan that is serious and stigma-busting and actually wear it in public and actually teach people something. But I haven’t thought of one yet, and “BIPOLAR PRINCESS” amused me. (I couldn’t afford to buy enough packages of letters for “MANIC DEPRESSION HAS ITS UPS AND DOWNS.” That has six s’s and there were only two to a package.) The word “PRINCESS” just by itself could seem snobby and spoiled, which I’m not. Don’t get me wrong — I still don’t know if I’d ever wear a shirt that says “BIPOLAR” in public, but my “attention whore” comment referred more to the “PRINCESS” part. I don’t think it’s attention-whore-y when people make LJ icons that say “BIPOLAR PRINCESS,” so I don’t know if I worried about this because it was something I did offline, or just because it was me.

I also have very different standards for myself than I do for other people. I am very shy and usually try to avoid being the centre of attention. In the past, I have been accused of attention-seeking behaviour when I was doing nothing of the sort, and it really upset me. I also hate asking for help from anyone, even though I know that my frequent refusal to do so is just another weakness.

The really odd thing is that as I am sitting here typing this, I am wearing a T-shirt that says “WHAT WOULD FREUD DO?” on it. (It was a gift from a friend. I swear I don’t have a whole stack of psych-related T-shirts, just these two. No, wait, three. I’ve got one from a university psych department pub crawl.) I can guarantee you that most things Sigmund Freud would do, I would not do… but I wore this T-shirt in public today with absolutely no qualms about it.

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.