Also, I keep thinking about bringing it up with my classes -- acknowledging the anniversary and mentioning my experience -- except I can't think what on earth to say about it. "So this happened, and this other thing happened to me, and... it sucks. I've got no suggestions for you. Life is unpredictably, spontaneously evil sometimes, and bad things happen. Good luck."

tommyrot, I'm very hypochondriac about my own strange foot pains, but they all go away (of course, that could mean that something is terribly, terribly wrong and it's going to fall off!). I hope yours resolves, but if it doesn't I suppose you'd have an interesting thing to talk about at parties.

shrift, were they filming YOU?

How does someone who can do that grow up -- in prison, no less -- to be someone who can talk rationally and somewhat introspectively about his own and others' crimes?

I guess the classic explanation is that some people are just sociopathic and thus feel no empathy at all for other people.

Hmmm... dunno....

Sometimes you just don't see it.

True. But sometimes people don't want to see it because it's hard to deal with on so many levels -- hard to accept the social stigma, hard to deal with the insurance company for treatment, etc., etc. There's definitely a spectrum out there, but I still think that more people could be treated earlier if we could just get over it, and that maybe we'd get better at seeing the clues, even if there are few of them.

eta: By which I don't mean to say that your family should have seen the signs MM, at all. And certainly I wouldn't expect anyone to predict that level of harm done to another person.

Life is unpredictably, spontaneously evil sometimes, and bad things happen.

This is not a bad thing for people to know from someone first hand.

I guess maybe part of what bothers me is the fear that there really isn't any underlying difference -- no mental illness, no deepset evil or sociopathy (is that a word?) -- and that he's just a guy who did something awful and stupid without really realizing what he was doing, and got caught up in it, and just kept going. I don't want to think that, but it's always been a scary possibility.

Okay, enough. Sorry about the depressing, folks. Ten minutes to my next class! Maybe I'll post about the mouse next!

Thanks, Emily. I speak some Arabic - not very well, but it was one of my high school electives.

It's weird - apparently there's been a stigma against mental illness for a long time. I once saw a list of the most stigmatized conditions and how they've changed over the years. For example, cancer was highly stigmatized in the late 1800s - people would keep their cancerous relatives up in the attic or something and never tell anyone what was going on. So the stigma associated with various diseases has come and gone over the years. But mental illness has always been one of the highest, if not highest stigmatized disease.

Emily, my DH and cousin both liked the RosettaStone to learn some basic Arabic. My DH hasn't really had a chance to use it, but my cousin has been able to speak enough when she visits her husband's family (who don't speak English) to make herself understood.

3) Batman

Do you have a preferred incarnation?

Also, you're light on Marvel there. No Spidey love? Dr. Strange? Walt Simonson's Thor? (or Beta Ray Bill?)

shrift, were they filming YOU?

No. Well, they better not have, because I was in my pajamas and had bed hair. They're shooting a commercial on my street today, although I don't know why. I mean, it's not exactly the most picturesque street in Chicago, but whatever.