<p>I don’t understand the “no one ever saw it coming” crowd, when his parents and professionals had called the police on him a month before. Ok, maybe they suspected only suicide, but what would be a likely way a young man would off himself? It’s too bad his parents, therapists and police didn’t also expend the small additional effort to warn his roommates. </p>
<p>Bay, I agree that a good way to look at this situation is that ER committed suicide, as his family and therapists feared that he would. But the vast majority of suicides are not murder/suicides. IMO, a policy of telling people around a potential suicide, “X might commit suicide and he might kill you too,” would be on balance a bad plan. It would stigmatize mental illness even more than it is already stigmatized, and would deter depressed people from seeking help. It would be an enormous invasion of privacy with small benefits and huge costs.</p>
<p>If I knew that the likely result of my going to a professional to be treated for depression would be an announcement to my acquaintances that I might kill them, I wouldn’t go. </p>
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<p>The difference is family and roommates live with him and are in close enough proximity during his unguarded moments so the front wouldn’t always be maintained. Moreover, if the aspergers diagnosis is confirmed…it could have co-existed with the disorder and had an effect with those the symptoms, too. </p>
<p>As for the psychiatrist, it’s very possible he was very resistant with him as was shown by his interactions with him and refusal to take the prescribed medication. </p>
<p>If he were charming, then he would have been able to charm at least one person. But we have heard of no one that was charmed by him, and no one who said he was charming. He managed to convince the police, in a short interview, that he was normal, but clearing that low bar is not the same as having charm. Any ordinary non-charming person would be able to do that.</p>
<p>People who hadn’t even talked to him, who had just seen him, said he was weird. He was not charming.</p>
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<p>Actually, when it comes to the ASD I’m sort of in agreement with you on the environmental component. Because social behavior does not come naturally with people on the autism spectrum, modeling and even instruction is helpful in terms of behavioral learning. (The “I act like a gentleman, why don’t girls like me?” bewilderment.) But even if there was an ASD dx at one point, this kind of psychotic break is outside of the realm of that disorder and suggests some kind of comorbidity. </p>
<p>It’s not possible he was resistant with the psychiatrist. It’s fact. He refused to go back or take the medication.</p>
<p>ER only saw Dr. Charles Sophy, a well-known psychiatrist to the stars two or three times and the last time was 2012. He also had 2 psychologists, one in SB and one in LA and three 20-somethings hired to be social role models. </p>
<p>I agree with CF. Charming he was not. Ever.</p>
<p>Three sets of room mates moved out on him in two and a half years. He wasn’t seen as socially well adjusted, or even ignorable. However, there are a lot of people living under freeway bridges I would not personally want to socialize with, and it doesn’t make them murderers. I can absolutely see parents not wanting him to live under a freeway bridge, and grateful he could maintain at least an attempt at student life (assuming he made reassuring noises about his various new starts). They might see it as a sort of social therapy for someone who might never get through college but still needed to live. I don’t know. I don’t think they ignored his problems, and I am not going to second guess based on what I know, so long as they were in there trying. I don’t know what I would have done based on whatever advice they were getting. I do think apartments might have a three strikes rule for roomates… if NO ONE can get along with you, maybe you shouldn’t be allowed into a roommate sharing situation after some point. But I don’t think enough of the signs were there until he did what he did to have guess this in advance, or to have had grounds to do anything in advance. Locking people up because you are afraid they MIGHT do something is not exactly acceptable, as a general rule, and I don’t just mean under the law.</p>
<p>I agree with some who said if it wasn’t this particular heirarchical obsession it would have been another. Not just sick people look for ways to make their life better - the self help industry booms on this instinct. It is a healthy thing to do, in most situations. Feeling that if you follow the instructions someone out there OWES you the hoped for response, that is where the mental illness comes in. Every makeover storyline around, not just in Hollywood but amongst groups of friends in private life, starts with the idea that ‘catching someone’s eye’ favorably is the first step. Only someone mentally ill would think it was an enforceable ticket to ride.</p>
<p>By the way, he was on xantax and had vicidin (SP?). The latter might have been saved from when he broke his leg but he was going to take a fistful just before he shot himself at the end, per his manifesto so that even if the bullet didn’t kill him in time the drugs would (don’t know if he’s right about that.) I don’t know if xantax adds anything to this besides his obviously being treated for depression.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that we need to postulate a psychotic break here. Or maybe I don’t know the definition of psychotic break you’re using.</p>
<p>My view is that ER was seriously unhappy, lonely and depressed. Because of his Aspergers, he didn’t understand social situations. ("I act like a gentleman, why don’t girls like me?) He convinced himself that he was entitled to young women’s attentions-- if that is a psychotic delusion, it is one that is shared by a lot of men. So then when he decided to end it all, he decided to get revenge on the people who, in his mind, mistreated him, which was pretty much the entire world.</p>
<p>Being depressed and seeking revenge don’t count as psychosis in my book. I’m saying he was mentally ill: depression is a mental illness, and Aspergers is a mental disorder which I guess counts as mental illness. But I don’t see psychosis here. Rather I see murderous revenge in a seriously depressed person who didn’t see a reason to continue living.</p>
<p>I don’t think that every kind of wrong understanding of the world is psychosis. He was wrong about the social world, but I don’t see that as psychosis per se.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what the technical definition of psychosis is. I think inability to separate reality from fantasy in what one can reasonably expect in real life is something, whatever that might be called, and that that is where his sense of entitlement came from. I think others might feel resentful that others get the girl when they think they are doing everything right, but literally thinking someone owes it to you if you take certain steps and that their personal preference or disinclination is irrelevant – to the point of revenge – I dunno, that sounds pretty sick to me. I think he LITERALLY didn’t get that the world wasn’t the movie he saw or the fantasy the people on PUAHate obviously were not living or they wouldn’t have been there, to begin with. Their world view explained his problem if you took it literally, and he took things literally because of desperation and the way he was made. That’s my completely untrained opinion, at this point.</p>
<p>Neither ERs parents nor the police had any obligation to keep his roommates out of the loop. I’m just saying if you think it through, a young man is likely to commit suicide with a gun. There is nothing untoward about the police or ERs parents inquiring of his roommates about guns on the premises. As his previous roommate disclosed to the press, he heard a gun clicking and saw shadows from ERs room indicating a gun way back then. </p>
<p>If he had Aspergers, he would take what the PUAHate people said literally because people with Aspergers take things literally.</p>
<p>If we say that ER was psychotic because he believed the PUAHate people, then we also have to say the PUAHate people are psychotic, and cobrat’s entitled ibankers are psychotic. I don’t think it makes sense to throw around the psychotic diagnosis so widely.</p>
<p>We can say he was mentally ill without saying he was psychotic.</p>
<p>When I first saw this, I thought it was a parody of ER’s world view on women, but the Daily Mail in the UK is reporting that he purportedly put it on facebook. I tend to doubt it. As parody, it works.</p>
<p><a href=“http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/05/25/article-2638474-1E32820300000578-393_634x313.jpg”>http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/05/25/article-2638474-1E32820300000578-393_634x313.jpg</a></p>
<p>I used psychotic way earlier because I had read a psychologist’s comparison of sociopathology and psychopathology and he was saying this was the latter. I have no real idea. It is sick, though.</p>
<p>But I bet most of those on PUAHate (how big is this community, in any event?) can’t really BELIEVE in walking down the street wearing AXE and Gucci sunglasses and having girls fall at your feet. Maybe that part is Aspergers and the rest is comorbidity, but this guy didn’t just have Aspergers based on my data points of people with Aspergers, anyhow. I don’t study it, I just know some people who have it. You have to be careful about being taking literally if you are joking, (“that was a joke”) but the people I know wouldn’t go around attacking people. I’m sure his parents hoped the same of him, but I think there was something more wrong there, and their focus on Aspergers may have blinded them to that.</p>
<p>Bay - I agree with you on the gun issue, basically. If a parent suspects a young man is suicidal and is actively trying to prevent it then it’s is probably a good idea to find out if he has access to firearms, knives, machetes, or a dangerous bottle of pills. This is tough to manage long distance. And, If a creepy roommate is playing with a gun in the apartment it’s probably a good idea to immediately march into the leasing office and refuse to return to that room. Ever. </p>
<p>I don’t have a good understanding of the police’s understanding of their job when they visited ER. What were they looking for, and what would they do if they found it?</p>
<p>It doesn’t make sense to me for the police to do mental health checkins on people, because the police are not trained for it. If someone is not actively dangerous to him/herself or others, what options would the police have anyway?</p>
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<p>That’s a good point. I wonder why the police DO do this - instead of a social worker or something.</p>
<p>None, really. They had him call his mom and assure her that he was okay. A welfare check is not suicide prevention. But, the therapist involved in this would be expected to know that even if the parent doesn’t.</p>
<p>As I use the terms, “psychotic” or “psychotic break” essentially refers to someone who, because of their mental illness, has lost their moorings in reality. The delusions and obsessions have taken over the rational assessment of the world around them. Based on the information I’ve gotten, ER before and during this rampage clearly fits that. </p>
<p>I haven’t read any of the PUAHate stuff. But there is a big difference between someone who thinks it’s cool to be total jerk ***hole and celebrates that kind of behavior and someone who advocates killing people because they get in the way of your sexual gratification. One’s being an obnoxious idiot; the other is inciting a hate crime. </p>
<p>The police do it because it’s their job to respond to emergency calls. Meanwhile, he reportedly had a psychologist in Santa Barbara and nothing else happened as far as we know for 20 days. It could have, but as stated by the family spokesman, “He fooled everyone”. </p>
<p>^ElliMom is correct. At his worst, my son could not tell what was real and what wasn’t. He couldn’t even walk steadily, because he wasn’t sure if the ground was real. When I asked him to name objects, he said, “I see warmth, I see blue, I see destruction, I see love…” He literally could not name any concrete object.</p>