Oxy.Octo

One by one I’m picking it apart. From the edges to the center, from top to bottom. Once again....

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 23:06:33 -0500

One by one I’m picking it apart. From the edges to the center, from top to bottom. Once again. Unraveled

smiliu: [Article of Intesest] Anatomy of a Murder-Suicide By...

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 04:44:56 -0500

[Article of Intesest] Anatomy of a Murder-Suicide

By Andrew Solomon

Suicide is not as newsworthy as homicide. A person’s disaffection with his own life is less threatening than his rage to destroy others. So it makes sense that since the carnage in Newtown, Conn., the press has focused on the victims — the heartbreaking, senseless deaths of children, and the terrible pain that their parents and all the rest of us have to bear. Appropriately, we mourn Adam Lanza’s annihilation of others more than his self-annihilation.

But to understand a murder-suicide, one has to start with the suicide, because that is the engine of such acts. Adam Lanza committed an act of hatred, but it seems that the person he hated the most was himself. If we want to stem violence, we need to begin by stemming despair.

Many adolescents experience self-hatred; some express their insecurity destructively toward others. They are needlessly sharp with their parents; they drink and drive, regardless of the peril they may pose to others; they treat peers with gratuitous disdain. The more profound their self-hatred, the more likely it is to be manifest as externally focused aggression. Adam Lanza’s acts reflect a grotesquely magnified version of normal adolescent rage.

In his classic work on suicide, the psychiatrist Karl Menninger said that it required the coincidence of the wish to kill, the wish to be killed and the wish to die. Adam Lanza clearly had all three of these impulses, and while the gravest crime is that his wish to kill was so much broader than that of most suicidal people, his first tragedy was against himself.

Blame is a great comfort, because a situation for which someone or something can be blamed is a situation that could have been avoided — and so could be prevented next time. Since the shootings at Newtown, we’ve heard blame heaped on Adam Lanza’s parents and their divorce; on Adam’s supposed Asperger’s syndrome and possible undiagnosed schizophrenia; on the school system; on gun control policies; on violence in video games, movies and rock music; on the copycat effect spawned by earlier school shootings; on a possible brain disorder that better imaging will someday allow us to map.

Advocates for the mentally ill argue that those who are treated for various mental disorders are no more violent than the general population; meanwhile an outraged public insists that no sane person would be capable of such actions. This is an essentially semantic argument. A Harvard study gave doctors edited case histories of suicides and asked them for diagnoses; it found that while doctors diagnosed mental illness in only 22 percent of the group if they were not told that the patients had committed suicide, the figure was 90 percent when the suicide was included in the patient profile.

The persistent implication is that, as with 9/11 or the attack in Benghazi, Libya, greater competence from trained professionals could have ensured tranquility But retrospective analysis is of limited utility, and the supposition that we can purge our lives of such horror is an optimistic fiction.

So what are we to do? I was in Newtown last week, one of the slew of commentators called in by the broadcast media. Driving into town, I felt as though the air were full of gelatin; you could hardly wade through the pain. As I hung out in the CNN and NBC trailers, eating doughnuts and exchanging sadnesses with other guests as we waited for our five minutes on camera, I was struck by a troubling dichotomy. People who are dealing with a loss of this scale require the dignity of knowing that the world cares. Public attention serves, like Victorian mourning dress, to acknowledge that nothing is normal, and that those who are not lost in grief should defer to those who are. When I stopped in a diner on Newtown’s main drag, I did not sense hostility between the locals and the rest of us but I did sense a palpable gulf between us. We need to but cannot know Adam Lanza; we wish to but cannot know his victims, either.

In a metaphoric blog post called “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” a woman in Boise, Idaho, who clearly loves her son but is afraid of him worries that he will turn murderous. Many American families are in denial about who their children are; others see problems they don’t know how to stanch. Some argue that increasing mental health services for children would further burden an already bloated government budget. But it would cost us far less, in dollars and in anguish, than a system in which such events as Newtown take place.

Robbie Parker, the father of one of the victims, spoke out within 24 hours of the shooting and said to Adam Lanza’s family, “I can’t imagine how hard this experience must be for you, and I want you to know that our family and our love and our support goes out to you as well.” His spirit of building community instead of reciprocating hatred presents humbling evidence of a bright heart. It also serves a pragmatic purpose.

My experiences in Littleton suggest that those who saw the tragedy as embracing everyone, including the families of the killers, were able to move toward healing, while those who fought grief with anger tended to be more haunted by the events in the years that followed. Anger is a natural response, but trying to wreak vengeance by apportioning blame to others, including the killer’s family, is ultimately counterproductive. Those who make comprehension the precondition of acceptance destine themselves to unremitting misery.

Nothing we could have learned from Columbine would have allowed us to prevent Newtown. We have to acknowledge that the human brain is capable of producing horror, and that knowing everything about the perpetrator, his family, his social experience and the world he inhabits does not answer the question “why” in any way that will resolve the problem. At best, these events help generate good policy.

The United States is the only country in the world where the primary means of suicide is guns. In 2010, 19,392 Americans killed themselves with guns. That’s twice the number of people murdered by guns that year. Historically, the states with the weakest gun-control laws have had substantially higher suicide rates than those with the strongest laws. Someone who has to look for a gun often has time to think better of using it, while someone who can grab one in a moment of passion does not.

We need to offer children better mental health screenings and to understand that mental health service works best not on a vaccine model, in which a single dramatic intervention eliminates a problem forever, but on a dental model, in which constant care is required to prevent decay. Only by understanding why Adam Lanza wished to die can we understand why he killed. We would be well advised to look past the evil against others that most horrifies us and focus on the pathos that engendered it.

I catch myself not breathing. Well, it’s more like holding my breath. Although release,...

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 04:43:12 -0500

I catch myself not breathing.
Well, it’s more like holding my breath. Although release, I’m aching.
Can’t help but catch my breath.

Flat. Motionless. Monotone. Today and tomorrow. Of slosh and continuous drizzle. The sleep, the...

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 04:39:10 -0500

Flat. Motionless. Monotone. Today and tomorrow. Of slosh and continuous drizzle. The sleep, the cold, the window. Outside. Slosh. More rain.
Such is life’s pallor, the unglamorous touch of routine. A finish. Yet incomplete. I am here. Today and tomorrow.

3:27 am. Back at tumblr. Haven’t posted anything for almost a year. No more blog ADD. I know...

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 04:29:05 -0500

3:27 am. Back at tumblr. Haven’t posted anything for almost a year. No more blog ADD. I know I’ve mentioned I’d make a new one, yet my heart isn’t into it. No motivation. Flat. The best inspiration.

hifructosemag: Korean-American artist Timothy Lee was born in...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 22:31:26 -0400

hifructosemag:

Korean-American artist Timothy Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, but was raised in New York City. His recent exhibition entitled Secretive Skin is an installation of metaphors. His media is intentionally stark white paper that takes on a sculptural quality, which he uses to express the ethnophaulism “gook eyes,” a derogatory ethnic slur that has been around since the 1920s. Reactions to Asian racial politics and stereotypes are a primary focus of his work. “By isolating the eyes from the face,” Lee explains, “I appropriate the stereotype of the “demure and silent” Asian, for confrontational purposes.”

Motivated? Partially..

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 18:44:46 -0400

I’ve started reading a book called Brain Rules by Medina due to a lack of activities in my life. Every day seems to be a repetition of the last: wake up, do dishes, go out.

I must admit though, I’ve satisfied most of my cravings. From sushi to cake, I’m having pretty darn good luck getting to eat what I wanted to eat.

Anyways, back to the book. The first chapter talked about exercise and how a “sedentary” lifestyle of a couch potato is detrimental to your life span. It got me all worked up about picking up yoga DVDs and moving. Not to mention I may also have read about missing out on a greater salary per hour if you don’t exercise.

I did go to the community library to check out some videos: Tae Bo, yoga for strength, yoga for flexibility…

About the application of such exercises however… That’s up and coming. Hopefully.

My mat is rolled up and ready to go and I’ve bought a new pack of batteries for the Xbox. All I need is a day to do it and a shortage of my lazy hormones.

smiliu: A soon-to-be-released documentary feature, Kings Park...

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 11:56:11 -0400

smiliu:

A soon-to-be-released documentary feature, Kings Park offers an inside look at public mental health care in America by focusing on the story of this now abandoned institution. The journey back begins with Lucy’s sudden decision, on the cusp of her fiftieth birthday, to return to Kings Park for the first time in over thirty years. Determined to face her past and come to terms with her commitment to the state hospital, Lucy’s goals are purely personal when the film begins. She soon learns, however, that in order to fully understand her own story, she needs to somehow learn about the institutional world in which she was once locked away. To this end, Lucy seeks out other former patients, their families, and hospital staff, who share intimate accounts of life at Kings Park. Shot on the overgrown and sprawling grounds of the shuttered hospital, these firsthand accounts of a vanishing world bear witness to the many changes in treatment, policy and attitudes over the past century.

The film culminates with a vision of today. Stories are shared of the often brutally executed “emptying out” of the hospital, and we follow Lucy in her effort to see how mental health care has changed since the hospital’s close. Scenes shot at small mental health care centers, committed to the recovery of their members despite limited resources, let us see the kind of progress that is being made. In contrast, footage shot at the local jail reveals a very different reality – where the penal system has replaced the state hospital as the default “provider” for people with serious mental illness.

What is the hardest thing you gave up in your life?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:23:12 -0500

I apologize for the late reply. I have been recently forgetting that I own a blog.. Ha. But to be frank, I don’t think I have ever given up anything worth mentioning at this point. I’ve always pushed the limits of what I can achieve when it comes to things I want (mainly my relationships with people.) You see, I’m the type of person that would go for it if I believe something is worth the effort. When I’ve done all I can, it becomes easier for me to accept that I have to let go of the things because I can accept that I’m not always going to get what I want, you know? It’s kind of like, I don’t really like having regrets so I’m accepting of what things are.

Wow, your gorgeous. Do you have a knight in shining armor?

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 12:48:02 -0400

Not really. I wish one would swoop by right about now with a triple dipper platter from chili’s (you know, boneless wings, quesadillas, and some artichoke spinach dip mmm) a buttered steak would work too! I’d say you’re pretty smashing yourself, anon.

Sparkly flats, history book, and a chain.

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:47:08 -0400

Sparkly flats, history book, and a chain.

October

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:09:34 -0400

October

Photo

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:36:58 -0400

Quicksilver Dashing

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:36:17 -0400

Quicksilver Dashing

Proud Mary

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 13:44:02 -0400

Proud Mary

Friday night lights

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:22:44 -0400

I’m hoping the game tonight will stop Justin’s crankiness. He has a tendency to be a huge jerk when he isn’t able to take somebody out on the field and wreck shop. I’m glad he has football to freaking alleviate his primitive urges.

book to read?

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:44:55 -0400

That’s pretty tough because I generally don’t like to reread stories and, in my terms, a favorite book to read is something that you repetitively pick up. I prefer reading a good story, harboring the feelings and thoughts it evokes in me, then write it out or move on. I have to say though that The Alchemist by P. Coelho would be one of the few that I actually read again twice or more.

ohsopictures: via ohsopictures My kids better be this cool

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:14:03 -0400

ohsopictures:

via ohsopictures

My kids better be this cool

I’m just genuinely happy.

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:06:39 -0400

I’m just genuinely happy.

ohsopictures: via ohsopictures asdfhjkgajl;s

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:04:20 -0400

ohsopictures:

via ohsopictures

asdfhjkgajl;s