<font color=orange>This is pretty horrible!!!
SWORDSMAN KILLS THREE!!!</font>

Just got done reading that on CNN. How much you want to bet they try and say the Highlander movies made him do it?

sad *voices telling him to do bad things* really sad things can happen 2 a human being :(

This is sad and terrible.

The article doesn't specify what kind of treatment he was recieving for schizophrenia. It is a grim disease. My fiance runs an outpatient home for schizophrenics. They take lots of drugs, but sadly there is no cure. They aren't violent, few Schizos are.

It would be a real shame and an additional tragedy if this guy wasn't recieving the right care for his disease and this happened.

It sounds like he should have been institutionalized back when he started hearing the voices. His family and shrink should have been very concerned he collected swords if he was revealing violent thoughts and urges. That is a sure sign of a need for serious care. Perhaps more on this side of the story will come to light.

[ 06-30-2003, 01:41 PM: Message edited by: Chewbacca ]

Oh, my. [img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img]

<font color="cyan">Not good, not good at all.</font>

:( It's very sad.

Schizophrenia is a very sad and often misunderstood disease. An old school friend of my brothers was treated for it since he was a teen. Thorazine, among other things were used. He is very strange. Self absorbed and impulsive. He was found by police wandering the streets in the wee hours of the morning. He was agitated, weilding a pistol, and muttering to himself. He got into a shootout with the officers. Though he was shot multiple times, they were minor wounds. He was lucky beyond belief! No one else was hurt. He hadn't been taking the medication regularly and was vividly hallucinating that "they" were out to get him. Anyone could have been "them" as "they" were always disguised. I blame his parents for not monitoring his medication. The idiot prosecutor wanted the insanity plea thrown out despite the medical record. He was institutionalized temporarily and is back out. God hopes that someone watches his medication from now on.

sounds like something familiar that had happen over here.

With a sword ? Oh my... :(

The problem with medication also of course is the terrible side effects nearly all schiphrenia medications have, even the newer ones, which discourage compliance enormously, especially when there is a lack of monitoring. The move to deinstitutionalise and move to community care was a travesty, mostly because the community care, at least here in Australia, is hugely lacking and most are left unattended in hostels or homeless. It doesn't help either that there is so much misinformation about schizophrenia and people are allowed to make 'humourous' movies like Me Myself and Irene prolonging the view that schizophrenia is having multiple personalities, and the fact that whenever a person who commits a crime who happens to have schizophrenia this is reported, whether it is the cause or not. In some cases the schizophrenia is to blame, though more often they harm themselves rather than others, but usually the schizophrenia is totally unrelated and yet by reporting it it is seen as the cause and increases the stigma and fear.

In the end, there can be only one. He wasnt it!

and if we had sword control laws, this wouldn't have happened. :rolleyes:

I know this is a sad and sick thing to think but while reading that article I didn’t think "Oh my god, people were killed." I thought "Heay, I wander what they are going to do with the sword now the guy obviously doesn't need it..." [img]graemlins/uhoh1.gif[/img]

<font color=deepskyblue>A very sad and tragic incident for everyone involved. My heart goes out to the loved ones of all the victims, including the family of the young man.

<font color=coral>Rokenn</font> - I doubt this incident will be "blamed" on the Highlander movies or TV show. Paranoid delusions and irrational behavior are common symptoms of schizophrenia. This young man may have enjoyed the Highlander series, but if it hadn't been that, it would have been something else. This is definitely a case of a mental disease being the cause.

<font color=orange>Sir Kenyth</font> - Just a countercomment to your remark about the family not monitoring his medication. My former coworker has a brother who is schizophrenic. He has had a couple of "episodes" himself where he entered public businesses and acted in a somewhat threatening manner when he wasn't taking his medication. The problem with the disease is that - when they take their medication - the person suffering from schizophrenia is as "normal" as anybody else. That's why he was able to be a volunteer fireman and EMT. Unfortunately, the medicine works so well, that they start to believe they are "cured" and don't need it anymore..so they quit taking it...which leads to delusions and further resistance to resuming thier medication. My friends family DID monitor their brother very closely. One of them checked on him every single day...but there is NO WAY to MAKE them take the medicine. When the brother went off his medication, he believed his family was "out to get him" and that they were all plotting against him. For cases such as this, the ONLY way to monitor thier medications is to have them put in an institution or other facility where they are given daily injections of their medication. This isn't as easy as it sounds, because (even in an institution) the treatment of daily injections has to be approved by the State before it can be implemented (in NC anyway).

My coworkers brother is a perfect example. After his last "episode", the family finally arranged to have him put in a facility for schizophrenics. They also managed to have the daily injections approved. The brother improved rapidly and was soon very much "normal" again. He did so well, in fact, that the facility called the family in to discuss discharging him and allowing him to return home. He would still recieve the daily injections from a home health nurse. Well, he came home and did very well for awhile, but he recently started refusing to take his medication. Within just a couple of weeks, he started having the same paranoid delusions that his family was "out to get him" again. The last I heard from my friend, they were trying to get him back into the facility he had been staying at.</font>

Man, that is really a sad story there. It's bad when he has that kind of an illness, though it is worse when his family and friends saw him having conversations with himself and did nothing about it. It bothers me too that reporters try and suck the story into bigger proportions than what it already is. I'm really shocked they didn't blame it on video games or D&D, but just because he liked Highlander movies doesn't mean he got the idea to hurt people with a sword from it.

I wondered how long it would be for one of the shooty people to make a crass comment such as this.

Of course if he had a shooty thing it would have said "gunman kills six"

Well, you're right, I do find that a little sick and sad and I'm at a loss as to your reason for posting about it. Maybe you can buy a big bottle of empathy and a new heart on Ebay or something...

[ 07-01-2003, 10:44 AM: Message edited by: Melusine ]

Oh very,very sad.

That stinks........i wonder what triggered him to do something like this....maybe a combo of schizophrenia and something bad happening to him

Unforunately Schitzophrenia is a degenerative brain disease with no cure. No amount of medication can change the way brain gradually becomes deformed because of the disease. Seeing the comparitive brains scans between a healthy brain and the schiztophrenic brain was an eye-opener for me.

Unfortunately, only the rich can afford the kind of consistent long term in-house care those stricken with the disease deserve. Otherwise, they are given their meds and left to their own devices or institutionalized with little or no chance for "normalcy".

<font face="COMIC Sans MS" size="3" color="#7c9bc4">

Of course, you respond to the "shooty people" and not have a thing to say about the article. Maybe Mel can lend you some of that empathy she was suggesting for Dagorian?

Mental illness is a sad thing all round and but for the grace of god or the luck of Budha or whatever you believe in, all it takes is a small imbalance in chemicals to mess things up :( </font>

[ 07-01-2003, 12:46 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]

Well that's not necessarily true. The scans and autopsies of brains of people with schizophrenia are seriously confounded by the medication that is taken, both prescribed and self-medicated which affects the brain enormously (also when institutionalisation was more common, ECT). For example the enlarged ventricles that used to be thought of as a cause (or consequence) of having schizophrenia we now know can't be explained as that because they could be due to medication. Same with cerebral atrophy that is often seen. Studies of pre-medication brains often don't show the same effects, and complicating it still, brains of people who have been on medication sometimes don't show abnormalities either. It is not always a 'degenerative' disease either - about 30% of people have one schizophrenic episode and never have another.

Well that's not necessarily true. The scans and autopsies of brains of people with schizophrenia are seriously confounded by the medication that is taken, both prescribed and self-medicated which affects the brain enormously (also when institutionalisation was more common, ECT). For example the enlarged ventricles that used to be thought of as a cause (or consequence) of having schizophrenia we now know can't be explained as that because they could be due to medication. Same with cerebral atrophy that is often seen. Studies of pre-medication brains often don't show the same effects, and complicating it still, brains of people who have been on medication sometimes don't show abnormalities either. It is not always a 'degenerative' disease either - about 30% of people have one schizophrenic episode and never have another. </font>[/QUOTE]Thanks, thats interesting to know! I'm not the mental health professional in the family, my Fiance is, so my knowledge base is lacking things like a masters degree in Psycology!

I don't feel the need to reply in every thread. Other than 'that's sad' there is little that can be said. I deal with enough mental illness on a daily basis at work as it is.

a pity. schizophrenia is a very sneaky disease of the mind, i guess. at one point people thought i was a schizophrenic, because i had a habit of saying what first came to mind, and it often came out completely wrong(either grammar or content), so i immidiately corrected the sentence to what it was supposed to be, often disrupting the counter-sentence of the person i was talking to. this amused my friends and the people around me to no end(the malicious bastards).

To take a different tack, I wonder how long it'll be before the first lawsuit against the producers of Highlander hits the courts? And let's not forget the makers of the swords used.