school suicide...

[tiny]

I find this curious, as well as heartbreaking.


Coroner's officials today identified Jeremiah Finton Lasater as the 14-year-old student who appears to have committed suicide at Vasquez High School in Acton.

Lasater was found dead Monday in a boys' restroom at the school at 33630 Red Rover Mine Road.

"The cause of death is a gunshot wound to the head," said Ed Winter, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner's office. "The case is being investigated as a possible suicide."

No one else was in the bathroom at the time, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. His body was discovered later by students, said Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-acton22-2008oct22,0,5808444.story

I saw this on the news this morning. The reporter interviewed several kids, most pointing out the fact that this young man had been teased and tormented at school... one young man seemed devastated by the thought that he'd participated in this boy's death.

What I find curious, in the light of all the school shootings around the country (and the world), is this boy took a gun to school and only killed himself. As horrible as this story is, my first thought was thank God he didn't follow the trend. But why? What makes one tormented soul choose to kill only himself while another takes several with him?

[Toothpaste]

I think a lot of it depends on the loathing the person feels. If one is so depressed, thinks that he is pathetic and does not deserve to live, then he will kill himself. If one is depressed and angry, blaming the school social structure, the kids and teachers who never gave him the respect he deserved, then it is more likely he will act out on them.

Either way I find it very upsetting and so sad that these individuals feel so hopeless that they can't see any other way.

[stormie]

^Wow, good understanding of the human psyche.^ I agree with Toothpaste.

[Del]

I've been that depressed. Only my son kept me from doing it. He was a cute wittle kid. :)

I've learned a lot since then. Depression is a chemical imbalance. If you realize that then there is hope to fix yourself. But it can change all of your thinking patterns. Even the best of things can seem meaningless. Where character has a lot to do with if you go out alone or take someone with you, I think there is a certain amount of chemestry coupled with the current events that drive ones intentions.

The boy took a gun to school. What was his initial intent? Did he intend revenge and why did he not exact it? Might have been he couldn't bring himself to hurt anyone. Might have been just a spontaneous moment of excessive despair. Maybe his intended victim just wasn't around.

We'll never know.

As toothpaste said, you aren't going to kill other people unless the anger is present...baring sociopathic mentalities, which can be a complete lack of empathy. If you can't care, then you can do anything.

[JoNightshade]

This is sort of a side-note, but I feel like a lot of these things could be prevented if we had some sort of counseling or support program for kids who do get bullied, to teach them how to deal with it effectively. I was frequently teased and bullied as a small child, but fortunately my parents gave me the skills to deal with it until people lost interest, and by the time I was in Jr hi I was fine. Having that experience made me very sympathetic to people who were ostracized, so I always made a point of trying to befriend the perennial punching bags. None of my attempts were successful, because the victims themselves had such poor social skills that they actively pushed people away. My genuine, persistent attempts at friendship were always met with disfavor and eventually I'd get the message and go away. Most of these kids had crappy home lives, too. So it wasn't just that people decided to pick on them; they became targets for a reason. I think maybe school systems need to develop some sort of curricula that tries to give these kids social tools to help them deal with the present circumstances, but also to help them integrate socially in the future. I see it more as a group problem than "a bunch of mean kids picked on him."

Which is not to say the kids who bullied him shouldn't feel guilty. I hope that lesson stays with them for the rest of their lives.

[donroc]

When I went through the public school system in SF (1937-49), I never heard of anyone at the schools I attended committing suicide.

My first year teaching in Los Gatos, one of the most popular scholar-athletes hanged himself. No one could understand why. If there was a note or reason it definitely was hushed. It was a sort of Peyton Place community anyway at that time, with many secrets.

[ricetalks]

I find this curious, as well as heartbreaking.


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-acton22-2008oct22,0,5808444.story

I saw this on the news this morning. The reporter interviewed several kids, most pointing out the fact that this young man had been teased and tormented at school... one young man seemed devastated by the thought that he'd participated in this boy's death.

What I find curious, in the light of all the school shootings around the country (and the world), is this boy took a gun to school and only killed himself. As horrible as this story is, my first thought was thank God he didn't follow the trend. But why? What makes one tormented soul choose to kill only himself while another takes several with him?

In the end, the desire to kill yourself and/or take others with you still extends from the same suicidial impulse. It is a statement of desperation. Random murder is just suicide turned inside out.

[AncientEagle]

I've been that depressed. Only my son kept me from doing it. He was a cute wittle kid. :)

I've learned a lot since then. Depression is a chemical imbalance. If you realize that then there is hope to fix yourself. But it can change all of your thinking patterns. Even the best of things can seem meaningless. Where character has a lot to do with if you go out alone or take someone with you, I think there is a certain amount of chemestry coupled with the current events that drive ones intentions.

The boy took a gun to school. What was his initial intent? Did he intend revenge and why did he not exact it? Might have been he couldn't bring himself to hurt anyone. Might have been just a spontaneous moment of excessive despair. Maybe his intended victim just wasn't around.

We'll never know.

As toothpaste said, you aren't going to kill other people unless the anger is present...baring sociopathic mentalities, which can be a complete lack of empathy. If you can't care, then you can do anything.

Comments (my bold) are particularly pertinent, in my view. I have a very close relative who has suffered repeated bouts of severe depression, almost requiring hospitalization on occasion. Even though he has handled it successfully with medication, once the medication stops working or some other factor causes the depression to return, he is unable to believe he can ever be normal again. I have spent many hours on the phone with him, talking, mostly listening, hoping to keep him from going totally off the deep end until we can get meds changed, or whatever is required. I have learned to understand the second two sentences in bold, above, through these repeated bouts. Right now, everything is on an even keel again, and it's almost hard to remember how bad it was in the past. But it is chilling to know how close he has been to the position of that kid with the gun.

[Phoebe H]

The thing about depression is that it is a low-energy state. It sounds kind of weird to say, but if you are really depressed, the effort involved in figuring out how to go about killing someone else would just be too large a barrier to overcome most of the time. Thankfully, killing yourself often seems to be too much trouble as well.

(BTW, this is one reason why you tend to see a rise in suicides immediately after treatment with anti-depressants start. You can start feeling just enough better to take action against your problems, but still feel so bad that suicide seems like a solution. It *doesn't* mean that there is anything wrong with any particular anti-depressant, and *does* mean that one shouldn't just substitute drugs for therapy.)

Dysphoria is the name for the high-energy negative state, and it's very different. It's a different mindset, it's often a different chemical imbalance, and it tends to be way more destructive. Having suffered from both at different times, I have to say that dysphoria is much less fun -- but at least you get out of bed in the morning.

Anyway, sheer baseless speculation on my part would be that depressives would tend towards suicide and dysphorics would tend towards murder-suicide, and that there really wouldn't be much crossover.

[stormie]

When I went through the public school system in SF (1937-49), I never heard of anyone at the schools I attended committing suicide.

My first year teaching in Los Gatos, one of the most popular scholar-athletes hanged himself. No one could understand why. If there was a note or reason it definitely was hushed. It was a sort of Peyton Place community anyway at that time, with many secrets.
That's just it: back even twenty years ago, if a person committed suicide, it was hushed-up. The family told everyone that their relative died of natural causes or some sudden illness. There were rumors but no one knew for sure. One mother hushed up her son's suicide of thirty years ago, then recently she committed suicide. She finally admitted what happened to her son and said in her note that she couldn't live with that anguish anymore.

It's better it's talked about now, and help is there, if only family members or close friends would steer that person toward the help they need. And that person, of course, would have to be accepting of the help offered. That's hard, though, when someone is clinically depressed.