It’s sadly ironic that I learned about this from an RSS feed.

I was also shocked by Cory’s mention of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.  I’ve faced the same struggles and found CBT helpful.  I released a CBT App on Friday but it’s too late for Aaron…

Tears

If anyone knows a good link that really encapsulates warning signs for the layman, it would be in everyone’s best interest to read it, because I guarantee you probably know at least one person with medium to severe depression which you are not aware of said condition. After watching 2 great people choose this path, I will not make the mistake of ignoring warning signs again, and your story is a reminder I need to do my homework and learn more so I can at least attempt to be a better friend.

Sorry Cory, nothing anyone says will make it feel any better, but maybe doing something like you just did is the smartest move. 

I have my hopes set on Neurology given what we now know. Mental illness is caused by gene expressions and life experience, particularly childhood and the teen years. Horrific events can cause it in otherwise stable people like losing your home in a fire or being in the military in the Middle East. Like PTSD; which is not always treated successfully. The only good therapists I had were psychologists, 2 of them. Alas, health care plans limit visits no matter how sick you are.

Bullies from schools become bullies in the work place including the government. My last psychiatrist told me there is no such thing as bullying in the work place or she would know about it. So, no help coping with bullies because there were none and it is my own fault for being fired. I was fired for bad behaviour she said. No, for good behaviour.  It is a damned crisis across the world! Australia and Quebec in Canada have laws against bullying in the work place illegal. Foxcon, in China, had to put nets around the building to keep them from committing suicide. To me, having passed that point, when despair kicks in love of life dies. I am alive for my son, period. 

I suspect this brilliant man hit the despair point. It does not much matter who bullies you when you are mentally ill. It is painful and sets up anxiety that it will keep happening. The anxiety starts to affect your behaviour and your control over the depression. It is like a vortex that sucks you down kicking and screaming. And you know it will get worse if they ever find out you are ill. They will stick their fingers in the wounds, so to speak.

I mourn this young man. Geniuses are often bullied and told to stop showing off. A singer can sing and get cheers. A painter can put a single stripe of white on a white canvas and be called a national treasure. The Greatest Living Novelist takes awards. Best field goal record gets all sorts of praise. But god help you if your gift is creative thinking. Being hounded by the government is to be hounded by these kinds of bullies, who deny that it is acceptable for there to be people gifted at thinking and problem solving, 

I am one of the ones who has found no help in prescription medication or therapy. I have learned that psychiatrists should be kicked to the curb for not keeping up with research, for assuming that a patient is a moron with no understanding and for getting bent out of shape when disagreed with. 40+ years of looking for help for nothing. When I am suicidal it is because of my brain chemicals and connections not because I reason my way to it. It just is and the mind set is that I would rather die than live with this pain any longer. It is to stop the chaos and fear of more years of this. My reasoning mind says that is bunk but my reasoning mind has no ability to overwhelm the horrors. 

No one who has never been trapped inside can possibly understand the desire to die because their own brain does not tell them to die and stop the pain. Trying to define such a state to those who have not been there is like trying to describe the affects of large doses of acid, No way to do so. It is a different mind set. There is no way to determine what Aaron was running from other than mental anguish. That should be enough to generate compassion for this brilliant and broken young man. We do not need to know or understand. We need to feel and remember to be supportive of others even if we do not understand. Don’t blow them off as selfish. What happens in the brain of seriously depressed individuals precludes the able to stay with your values when your mind is being torn apart. 

Another issue regarding ECT is that while it may not be common that anyone is legally forced to undergo ECT, they are often coerced into agreeing to it in order to avoid being confined against their will or to escape from confinement.

It is also interesting to see that many people seem to be saying that depressed individuals are not capable of making rational decisions regarding suicide but are still somehow capable of deciding whether or not to undergo a major medical procedure like ECT. I submit that statistically ECT is just as likely to cause permanent memory loss as it is to relieve depression.

If ECT was really safe and effective, programs offering the treatment wouldn’t be so few and far between. Practitioners and advocates of ECT present statistics to show that ECT has helped a small percentage of depressed patients, but they have no scientific data to explain why it works, which patients it is likely to help, and what effect it has on the brain. It has its roots in trial and error experiments conducted during some very dark times in medical research. It has been in use for 75 years and still cannot be explained.

Cordially,

Bruce Sanders

I asked myself that same question(s): didn’t he know we cared? Could I have said anything? Could I have saved him? Could I have said “it will get better”? Could I have simply gotten him to come over and lose himself in some mindless TV so he would be safe for just a few hours more?

Sadly, I’ve been told (and I still haven’t accepted it) that I couldn’t have done anything. That the thing that was wrong was too far wrong in such a way that nothing really could be done. And that is as painful if not more so than the loss that happened. My friend’s pain and Aaron’s is over, but we keep going with the questions and the pain that is left behind.

I hope this isn’t too maudlin or sentimental.

I had LONG wanted to write to Aaron – but most regretabbly kept putting it off, and off and off…  I had actually wanted to write to him about a powerful systems aid to problem solving and decison making that, if he had ever known about it, may have helped prevent him from taking that irrevocable step he felt impelled to take.  It would surely have helped him pretty significantly in his heroic fight against the unfair monopolization of the wonderful tool to enhance human freedoms that the Internet is (/could be). 

I didn’t write to Aaron because I wasn’t sure if he would actually get to see my message and and if he would then actually check out that tool for himself:  it does take a month or two to convince oneself that this simple means of ‘inquiry into one’s own situation (and into one’s own heart and mind)” can help one tackle the kind of terrible ‘external’ problems and pressures he was evidently facing.

From the ‘outside’ of wherever he was, I’m pretty sure he could never have been incarcerated for the ‘crimes’ he was alleged to have committed.  How I do wish I had written…

As “rushrhees” writes:  how can we who are left behind ensure that his vision is carried forward?

When is ENOUGH, ENOUGH??

The overzealous prosecutors of the US Justice department  aren’t an anomaly. They are part of the takeover of the US Government by RIAA/MPAA Copyright Maximists. This out of control Klepto-Oligarchy is now in complete control of all aspects of the US Government. 

Today we read about Verizon implementing the 6 strikes against the use of the Internet. We see this kind of over reach everywhere. Congress is held hostage, by the Republicans, but the Democrats are enablers. They all are working for the 1 percenters and against us citizens. Whistleblowers are kept in Guantanamo like conditions. We have still have a Guantanamo and all these other dark CIA renditions! Torture and assassinations of citizens is legal if the President orders it.

Its time to say STOP!

Its time to take back our future.

We should call for a strike of anyone who thinks the Government is no longer of and for the people and demand immediate change.

I don’t know what the best way is to focus something like this, but this is my reaction and I think we have to do it now before its even more too late.

Tragic? Yes. 
Waste of a life? Not from where I sit. 
Everyone will die, but does everyone really live?

My deepest condolences to his friends and family.

Even if the JSTOR case (the replicating of some bits) is not the direct cause of this terrible event, one thing seems clear to me (I’m a particularly vengeful person): if the prosecutor can be shown to have been aware of this young man’s emotional fragility (depression etc), then they are appropriate targets for the full force of the Internet Hate  Machine.

The prosecutor used the State’s machine to terrorise a fragile kid (26 is very young – although I would not have said so when I was 26), and it’s high time that people like that get shown what it feels like to have an oppressive machine crushing the life out of you.