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"A source emailed me his life's work. Then, he ended his life."
By Gregory Korte, in the Columbia Journalism Review:
A source emailed me his life's work. Then, he ended his life.
By Monday afternoon — now five days after the emails — I still hadn’t heard back, which was somewhat unusual. I went to his Twitter feed and his blog and saw no recent posts. I did a Google news search and found a headline in the Rockford Register Star from Saturday: “Sheriff’s department investigates double murder-suicide at home of RVC professor P.S. Ruckman Jr.”
His sons, found shot to death in their bedrooms in Ruckman’s house outside Rockford, Ill., had not been to school since Wednesday — the day of the emails.
My heart sank. I wrapped up my work and headed home. I didn’t even tell my editor I was leaving.
On the way home, I called the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office, in case the emails helped to pin down a timeline or establish his intent. (On the advice of our lawyers, I did not provide the emails or the data set itself.) The detective said the emails were potentially significant — he seemed particularly interested in the value the data had to Ruckman. For him to suddenly give it away — something he had previously been unwilling to do — might demonstrate that he was wrapping up his affairs.
His sons, found shot to death in their bedrooms in Ruckman’s house outside Rockford, Ill., had not been to school since Wednesday — the day of the emails.
My heart sank. I wrapped up my work and headed home. I didn’t even tell my editor I was leaving.
On the way home, I called the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office, in case the emails helped to pin down a timeline or establish his intent. (On the advice of our lawyers, I did not provide the emails or the data set itself.) The detective said the emails were potentially significant — he seemed particularly interested in the value the data had to Ruckman. For him to suddenly give it away — something he had previously been unwilling to do — might demonstrate that he was wrapping up his affairs.
One in three American adults will have the symptoms and/or diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder at some point in their lives.
One in three.
Here are some things we know about psychiatric disorders:
1. The variety of conditions, symptoms, etiologies, and manifestations that fall under this umbrella term fill a very large book indeed, the "DSM-5" or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition. More than 900 pages worth of description, speculation, and accumulated documentation on conditions that range from neurodevelopmental disorders to paraphilic disorders.
2. Disorders may last anywhere from days or weeks to lifelong.
3. Many, even most, psychiatric disorders produce no easily-recognizable physiological alterations, and many, even most, have NO physiological "markers" that are reliably diagnostic by means such as blood tests, brain scans, etc.
4. The extent to which psychiatric disorders may impair an individual's ability to function can range from imperceptible (except to the individual suffering from the illness) to profound, and the nature of the impairments varies across an enormously broad spectrum that includes perceptual, sensory, cognitive, and behavioral elements.
And that, frankly, is pretty much all we KNOW about psychiatric disorders in the aggregate.
What is truly shocking, given the incidence of psychiatric disorders in the U.S. adult population and the levels of suffering they cause, including the mortality risks to those with the disorders and those around them, is how little we know about most specific disorders.
Most of the research being done in connection with psychiatric diorders is focused on finding pharmaceutical substances and other treatments that will alleviate, control, or eliminate particular symptoms. In comparison, the amount of research being done on the causes of various disorders, their specific physiological/neurological processes, methods to reliably diagnose them, understanding how various disorders interact with each other, etc. is grossly underfunded.
In the mean time, people with disorders suffer the stigma related to "mental illness" and have oceans of inaccurate and degrading propaganda to cope with, in addition to their own suffering. Which is mostly done alone.
Why Professor Ruckman chose to commit a heinous crime before he ended his own life, we may never know. The question of how to treat the crimes committed by people with psychiatric disorders is a thorny one, to say the least (see "Mental Illness, Evil, and Blame").
However, it's clear that Professor Ruckman had better access to a gun than to treatment and support for psychiatric disorders. Or at least he felt there was less downside, perhaps less stigma? to using the gun to end three lives, than there would be to examining the source of his own pain and getting treatment for it.
May I humbly suggest that until such time as we can actually destigmatize 'mental illness' in this culture, spend the resources needed to adequately understand psychiatric disorders, diagnose them reliably, and provide treatment and support for those who suffer from them, we make GUNS JUST A LITTLE LESS AVAILABLE?
The tragedy of this story is quantitatively smaller than the seventeen youngsters killed at Parkland, but qualitatively it is no less agonizing.
And it's going to keep happening. Until we do something about the guns. Or the mental health infrastructure, or (preferably) both.
sadly,
Bright
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