"Just a nut case with a gun": the tragedy of Matthew Warren

Something has been rumbling underground - you can't say it's in the air, because it doesn't live there, but down under, in the murky land of social stigma.

Every so often it dives to the surface. When that happens, society is ill-equipped to deal with it or even talk about it at all.

I came across this tidbit of news on Facebook (which I almost never look at):

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Popular evangelical Pastor Rick Warren asked members of his Southern California church for prayers as he and his family coped with the apparent suicide of his 27-year-old son.

The church said on Saturday that Matthew Warren took his own life at his Mission Viejo home.

Matthew Warren struggled with mental illness, deep depression and suicidal thoughts throughout his life, Saddleback Valley Community Church said in a statement, after his body was found Friday night.

"Despite the best health care available, this was an illness that was never fully controlled and the emotional pain resulted in his decision to take his life," the church said.

Allison O'Neal, a supervising deputy coroner for Orange County, declined to release the cause and manner of death pending an autopsy of the young man.

Rick Warren, the author of the multimillion-selling book "The Purpose Driven Life," said in an email to church staff that he and his wife had enjoyed a fun Friday evening with their son. But their son then returned home to take his life in "a momentary wave of despair."

Over the years, Matthew Warren had been treated by America's best doctors, had received counselling and medication and been the recipient of numerous prayers from others, his father said.

"I'll never forget how, many years ago, after another approach had failed to give relief, Matthew said 'Dad, I know I'm going to heaven. Why can't I just die and end this pain?'" Warren recalled.

Despite that, he said, his son lived for another decade, during which he often reached out to help others.

"You who watched Matthew grow up knew he was an incredibly kind, gentle, and compassionate man," Warren wrote. "He had a brilliant intellect and a gift for sensing who was most in pain or most uncomfortable in a room. He'd then make a bee-line to that person to engage and encourage them."

This article brings up so much stuff for me, so many "issues" (as those chunks of living gore are so euphemistically called) that I don't know where to start. What jumps into my head first is the irony: this pastor who wrote a wildfire bestseller on how to live a meaningful life had a son so driven by despair that he simply could not go on with his own life and had to end it.

Another thing is the rather elaborate, detailed explanation of Matthew Warren's exhaustive (and no doubt exhausting) medical treatments over the years, how he had tried everything,and how in the end "even prayer" (the panacea for fundamentalists) didn't work.

Why does this cause that squirmy twinge in the pit of my stomach? 
Compounding the shock and horror of this unimagineable tragedy is a sad public pressure to "explain". If he had died of a heart attack or an accident, I don't think there would have been any need for all these elaborate verbal back-flips. He was sick, yes - but he couldn't help it! He tried everything, even prayer! So it could not have been his "fault", it could not have been personal weakness or a spiritual taint. 

I see "mental illness" (a term I loathe - I'll explain that later) as an issue that's slowly coming out of the closet, but unfortunately it only seems to show itself when someone commits a horrendous and very public suicide or shoots up a shopping mall or a primary school.

"Suffering from mental illness" - that's the tag. So it really isn't ALL his fault - well, maybe not - or maybe he went off his medication (a very bad decision on his part). In spite of all this faux compassion, the taint of judgement hangs around like a faint but noxious odor.

Never are we presented with an example of someone "living with", not "suffering from". Our society is big on suffering, but it was only recently we changed our vocabulary from "cancer victim" (almost universal 20 years ago) to "cancer survivor". And it took a lot of effort on the part of activists to wake people up.

Public attitudes towards mental illness are much more distorted and resistant to change. People's perceptions are tainted by a combination of pity and fear. Or terror. Only recently, Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of Congresswoman Gabby Gifford, declared that before anyone was sold a gun in the U. S., they should have a thorough background check (so far, so good). Two groups should be eliminated immediately without question: convicted criminals and "the mentally ill". 

I love that "the" part, a little three-letter wedge driven between those with this illness and the rest of humanity. But what scares the shit out of me is - no, several things do, actually. To automatically lump in the "mentally ill" with criminals makes me want to chew tinfoil because it hurts me less. They're all corralled in the same pen, it seems: wild-eyed, inherently violent, unable to control themselves, and deserving of a sort of wary contempt.

When something sticks out like a sore thumb, like a rusty nail, that's all we see. If I were bipolar and had not had an episode of any kind for 20 years, I could not (theoretically) buy a rifle for duck-hunting because I am "mentally ill" and therefore a bad risk for handling firearms, presumably for the rest of my life.

OK, I hate firearms on principle and would never think of buying one for any reasons, but is it fair that a person with a treatable medical condition should have the same kind of "background check" as a convicted criminal? How exactly do they DO this background check? What sort of private medical records would need to be invaded? Does anyone even think of the sense of personal violation this could create?

Oh, but if it saves even ONE child it's worth it, people say, using the kind of cockeyed logic that seems to rule this twisted culture.

Why not apply that rule to all the Charlton Heston-esque yahoos who keep a gun in every room of the house? Why not take THEIR guns away, in case somebody gets totally hammered one night and "loses control" (maybe deciding his ex-wife or her boy friend have inhabited the earth for long enough)? Isn't it worth it to confiscate all these potentially-deadly weapons, even if it only saves ONE child?

We might do background checks on criminals and perceived nut cases, but what about assholes, sons-of-bitches and nasty little men with a grudge? If we took even one step in that direction, they'd be waving signs claiming someone was violating their civil rights.

I once talked to a psychiatrist at a cocktail party who shocked me by saying, "The vast majority of my patients lead stable, productive lives if they are willing to participate in their own treatment."

The vast majority.

This is a silent, buried majority, obviously. I guess they're too busy going about their lives to jump up and down and scream about these things. When the sons of bestselling preachers who seem to have all the answers to life's dilemmas shoot themselves in the head, we notice. When a congresswoman is mowed down and permanently disabled, we mutter, "Mental illness".

Better maybe than cracked or whacked or all the other lovely synonyms we've come up with. But what does it mean to be "mentally ill"?

How can one be "ill" and "well" at the same time?

You can't. You're stuck in "ill". You're sick for life. You "suffer from", you don't "live with". 

In other words, you're a victim.

As for the "mentally" part: I don't need to tell you that in a culture that worships the idea that we have total control over our lives (see Pastor Warren), being "mentally" out of the groove in any way at all is a sign of weakness, of passivity, of giving up. "Mentally" means "of the mind", and if it's "of the mind", it is voluntary, under our control, like bad habits or unwise decisions. 

When the stigma is so buried in the nomenclature that no one even notices it, we have a problem. I see it as something more like diabetes. It can vary in severity, perhaps waxing and waning throughout life, but the one constant is that it needs to be monitored. But if it IS monitored, the person no longer "suffers from diabetes", but has learned to live with it, can live a long life, a productive life, with diabetes existing in the person's peripheral vision, not constantly staring them in the face.

Why isn't the culture even aware that an alternate vision of this disequilibrium (as I like to call it) exists? Because we like drama. We don't like shootings, but when there IS a shooting, we must quickly point a finger of blame at a subject that will make us all say, "Ohhhhhhhhhh." (One of "those".) There is even a degree of comfort in telling each other, "He suffered from mental illness." "Ohhhhhhhhhh." That explains it, doesn't it? Isn't that the way "those people" are? The solution, the thing that will "fix" it: let's get that legislation in place as quickly as possible so that NOBODY with "mental illness" can ever buy a gun.

If it violates their privacy and their civil rights, if it marginalizes them and makes them feel like gum on the bottom of somebody's shoe, hey, isn't it worth it if it saves just ONE child?

POST-POST: Since writing this piece, I've had a ton of other thoughts, but it's a mistake to try to fit them all into one piece.

What hit me just now - while tacking away at my antique keyboard - is WHY the stigma is so damaging. When you're stigmatized, that is, if you have a stigmatizing condition, you may be driven to pretend you don't have it, or to deny it even to yourself. This leaves you much more vulnerable to your illness (if in fact you're feeling ill: I DO believe in the mentally well, and will insist on believing it for the rest of my life!). If you feel stigmatized, you might not want to take "those pills" that you're invariably supposed to take. The pills remind you of the stigma. That leads to another stigma, of course: "Oh, she went off her medication." The most insidious form of stigma, or denial perhaps, is feeling so well that you are sure the illness has gone away forever. Society LOVES this attitude because it implies "triumphing", "vanquishing" and all those bullshit terms that mean absolutely nothing ("victory" being the worst, with its warlike/Christian fundamentalist taint). Living with something that lasts a lifetime makes a great many people profoundly uncomfortable. 

GALLERY. Maybe this is yet another form of stigma, or one of those clunky, heavy-handed attempts to "banish" it that only serve to underline it. But when I was compiling images for this post (all of them taken by me in my back yard with my 1923 Brownie box camera), I kept coming across celebrities grinning away. Then I realized: oops, this is the category of "celebrities with mental illness"! This is either supposed to make sufferers feel better (if, in fact, they are suffering), or to make us all less uncomfortable about nut cases, since SOME nut cases seem to become famous! Famous is the ultimate goal in our society, better even than being rich, so if you're famous AND mentally ill, whoo boy, it must be OK to be mentally ill, or at least not horrible!

I liked this shot of Dick Cavett grinning away. He has been open about his bouts of depression and (I think) bipolar, though I think he was only manic once (which is, believe it or not, relatively common). I like it because he's 70-something, still has good cheekbones and that Nebraskan resonant voice, and looks happy.

I couldn't really find a good shot of Carrie Fisher, because she seems to have erased herself with plastic surgery and no longer looks like herself. But she has surely had her innings with bipolar (I refuse to tack "disorder" on it - why do I need to?), and come out the other side more than once. She's a veteran, and besides I like this hair style.

I did a whole post on Stephen Fry ages ago, a poem actually. He is monumental: it's that Easter Island face of his. Like some of his confreres, he has been open about his experiences with depression. The only thing that bothers me about all this is: when a celebrity comes out like this, they are forever "branded". "Oh, didn't he have shock treatments a couple of years ago?" If you don't give a fuck, however, I heartily approve.

Patty Duke had a hard go of it from the start, but has come through it all. I like the warmth in her face and the LACK of self-erasure (rare in Hollywood and making her a target of unkind remarks). I purposely featured only older people here because they have the stuff, obviously. Brittney Spears: come back in 20 years.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

Connecticut school shootings: the moral void

 

Christie Blatchford, a tough and venerable print reporter who exposes truth far more powerfully than I ever could, had some choice things to say about the horrors that happened this morning in Newtown. Some of it touched on social media and the bizarre, faceless way we communicate in this stranger-than-strange time:

The wisest story I’ve ever read about a mass school shooting is a work of fiction – no accident, I suspect, for it takes distance to see past the horror of such things, not to mention get around the makeshift shrines and the spoken and printed equivalents of the teddy bears which adorn them.

Social media and Twitter, it is certain, will make that latter task ever more difficult.

As mainstream newsrooms around the world geared up the sombre music and reporters lowered voices and dumbed down their language (yes, it is hard to imagine) in order to interview eight-year-olds, so did cyberspace fill up with omgs, fake sites, expressions of sorrow, rumours and ghastly bleatings.

To quote a young man named Ryan Lanza, who may be someone with the bad luck to have the same name as the Ryan Lanza who was first wrongly identified as the latest shooter or who may be the actual brother of gunman Adam Lanza, who complained on Facebook Friday, “So aperently I’m getting spammed bc someone with the same name as me killed some ppl..wtf?”

Either way, this is what passes for social commentary in 2012 — illiterate, petulant, self-referential sludge.

I think this is what I was trying to get at - not nearly as effectively - in my tirade against the cult of narcissism that drives texts, tweets and other bleeding chunks of damaged language. It astounds me that up until the past few months, this cacophany of chirping and blathering has been seen as nothing but positive: isn't it marvelous we can connect like this,  that everyone's the same, all of us equal in the great wide sea of cyberspace, so that we can freely propagate lies, scams, gooey badly-spelled sentiment (soon to become standardized, no doubt, in the form of "Twitter English") and other verbal effluvia, all in the name of instant communication!

A few years after the initial bird-brained euphoria, the rotten underside of this whole ill-planned enterprise is beginning to stink big-time. The fact that it has fewer rules governing it than the Wild West is only just now beginning to make itself felt in bullying and cyberscams and other forms of human hatefulness. Old people are being bled dry and have nothing left to live on, teenagers are killing themselves due to relentless organized persecution (after which we get all sentimental and fix things by designing a tshirt). Even the shocking suicide of that poor blameless nurse after the Duchess prank may have been driven by a barrage of cyberabuse.

Blatchford speaks of a novel called We Need to Talk About Kevin, in which a budding Adam Lanza-type begins to emit those eerie waves of incipient violence that everyone is so good at ignoring.  This bit of dialogue is both hair-raising and wrenchingly accurate:

The dad once asked Kevin, “Do any of the students at your school ever seem unstable? Does anyone ever talk about guns, or play violent games or like violent movies? Do you think something like this could happen at your school? Are there at least counselors there?”

“All the kids at my school are unstable, Dad,” the son replied. “They play nothing but violent computer games and watch nothing but violent movies. You only go to a counselor to get out of class, and everything you tell her is a crock."

Blatchford touches on the new industry of trauma therapy that always leaves me feeling as if something had been stuffed down my gullet:

I was in Littleton, Colo., 13 years ago. What was almost as horrifying as the carnage — 14 students and a teacher dead, the killers having shot themselves — was the theatre that followed. Students were able to grieve only in public, preferably for the cameras; professionals descended in swarms to help the town mourn; people urged each other to hug their children, as though without the reminder, no one would have thought of it.

Tonight I listened to countless reporters say things like "experts claim that -" and "let's talk to an expert on this subject", after which a psychologist would come on camera and spout truisms that any grandmother would know. Not one person had the guts to say, "My God, I don't know! I don't know what to do about  any of this. I feel like there's nowhere left on earth that's safe." Not one of them admitted that there is NO WAY to "safely" let your children know about all this hideous carnage in a way that will spare their feelings and leave them emotionally unscarred.

Don't lie to them, we were told, but don't say too much.  Don't disclose, but don't withhold either, and make sure you give them a big hug (because otherwise, we might forget).
 
But even that convoluted mobius of non-advice wan't the worst.  Every single "expert" I heard tonight told us that we should reassure our children that it "won't happen to them".  Oh? Do we know that for sure? Did Newtown know that for sure when it woke up this morning? If a place that looks like a Norman Rockwell painting could bury twenty small children just a few days before Christmas, we should not be so sure it "won't happen" in our town, that it won't start to happen in escalating waves as more and more people go crazy from alienation and meaninglessness and fall into the moral void that breeds pure evil.

Connecticut school shootings: not again, not again

 

 

First there was that groan, the sound that has become almost involuntary of late:  oh, no. Not again. That sense of headshaking disbelief and dismay, and horror. Another mass shooting, this time in an elementary school, and right before Christmas! And then the words echoing in my ears, something my 7-year-old granddaughter had said to me earlier in the week: “My school was in lockdown yesterday.”

 

WHAT?

It turns out that “lockdown” in elementary schools has become as routine as fire drill. This is a word I never heard in my childhood, or in my children’s. In fact, I never even heard it 20 years ago. So what in hell is going on here?

I could go on and on – I have a tendency to go on and on when I am confused, frightened and angry, whipping up my adrenaline against the awful sinking depression and despair that is surely to follow. I could go on and on about gun culture, about how Americans seem to think that the solution to guns is “more guns”. It has been a contentious point between Canadians and Americans for as long as I can remember, and has now become inflamed as never before.
 

 

Here is my point. If you have a deadly weapon in your hands, you don’t have to think. All you have to do is make your way to a promising venue, a mall, a movie theatre or an elementary school, and squeeze the trigger. Pop, pop, pop, the sound registering as “firecrackers” to people who are used to hearing the phony “BLAAMMM” of TV shows and movies so that they don’t even know enough to respond.

As a matter of fact, almost everyone involved in these horrors says something like, “I thought I was in a movie”. Oh, how distanced we have all become from what is real.

My feelings are like a dark kaleidoscope, all broken up and shifting and moving. Pieces jump out at me, jagged as glass, and I don’t want to look at them.

I like to watch a very lightweight entertainment/news program called Inside Edition, the kind of show that usually has a funny animal video at the end (though, come to think of it, almost every TV station in the world showed the Ikea Monkey the other day). A cop or some other security guy – who pays attention to these things? – was demonstrating to the host what to do “when the guy opens fire” (not if!). This was in a mall, and the security person said, “The last thing you should do is run.” This reminded me of nothing so much as the instructions for dealing with an enraged bear or a cougar or some other predatory animal.

 

No, if you run you’re a moving target – prey. You’re supposed to crouch down, take cover - preferably behind one of those big metal garbage cans with the bars on it. Bulletproof, unless (he said) a bullet accidentally ricochets off the wall and gets you in the back of the head.

I almost can’t write about the kids right now, but I will, a little bit at least, because writing is the only way I can even begin to get my mind around it. One thing I notice about mass shootings that affect children:  right away the grief counsellors pounce on them and insist they talk it all out, tell them everything that happened to them, every horrific detail, preferably over and over again. Lately some of these counsellors have come under fire (sorry) for squeezing memories out of kids who might be “processing” them a different way, who might not be ready to say anything, or (amazingly!) might prefer to talk to their Mum or Dad or their grandparents.

There is a grief industry now. I don’t remember anything like that when I grew up because there was no need.  I also don’t remember one single shooting in a school, not even of one child. Nor do I remember any of this happening with my own children.

 

The game has changed, obviously, dramatically, irrevocably. How are we to raise a generation of kids who are anxiety-free? All right, no one is anxiety-free, but how are we supposed to take them to the mall – or the movies – or even drop them off at school without a horrible fear of chaos and screams and blood on the floor?

I could say it’s the boom in technology, and I think it’s a factor. I realize that this is a highly unpopular, even taboo and stigmatized thing to think or say, but I will say it.  No one has a conversation any more: they text, phone, “tweet” or go on Facebook, an ironic name for something with no face.  Sociologically, we just haven’t had time to catch up with this explosion, this game-changer that everyone assumes is an unalloyed good.

 Who questions technology, for God’s sake? You’ll sound like an old fuddy-duddy, a party pooper, a Luddite. You’ll sound like me.
 

 

We can’t see each other’s facial expressions any more (and Skype doesn’t count because, in my opinion, it’s theatre). It’s all “lol” and “wtf” and poorly spelled messages that don’t really mean much of anything.

I recently asked my husband in exasperation, “What do these people talk about on their Smart Phones all day?”

He looked at me. “Nothing,” he said.

Tacking away with your thumbs like some self-obsessed crustacean does not make you more human, does not help you communicate anything of importance. It only feeds your vanity and narcissism and  helps you shut off your feelings so that nothing is quite real. So when the awful time comes, you’ll think you’re in a movie, playing the role of the hunter, or – even more tragically – the hunted.

 
(This is a sidebar. In catching up with the latest news developments, I came across an article that said it has become increasingly popular for women to text while - prepare yourself - giving birth. Next they'll be reporting on the quality and intensity of their orgasms, or perhaps the success or failure of their bowel movements. Or how about blowing your nose? As with photographing the Grand Canyon but never actually looking at it, texting ensures you will never really experience anything in your life.)

 

We can’t take it all back, turn back the clock, and I’m not saying we should, but someone HAS to respond to this escalating nightmare with something that actually makes a difference. Alienation and unaddressed rage have become a huge problem in contemporary culture, leading to widespread bullying and other forms of sadism. How easy is it to bully and threaten and mock and shame vulnerable children when you’re not even in the same room with them?

But unfortunately, to kill them, you have to be there.

Doesn’t anyone make any connections any more, or are they afraid they will express an opinion that’s unpopular?  Do these problems have no roots in personal alienation and the dizzying rate of social change, or is each shooter “just some nut with a gun”?

 

I think we need to go back to the very beginning and learn how to be human again. How to put down the devices and stop the madly clawing thumbs and look at each other, really look. And talk.

And figure out what’s wrong with everything now, and what’s right with it, and how to deal with things as they go faster and faster without our conscious awareness because we have all become so terrifyingly numb.