Bipolar Made Me Do It: Kill My Co-Worker
Jul 6 2007 | Comments 10
A 19-year-old who was convicted of manslaughter at 18 has been sentenced to one year in prison. He fatally stabbed Karl Kuhn, 21, outside of a grocery store in Utah, allegedly because Kuhn owed him money. But later it came out that Moll had both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and was off his antipsychotic medications at the time of the crime.
Again, I find the diagnosis of both bipolar disorder AND schizophrenia puzzling. It seems weird to me. I’m going to ask my shrink about it the next time we meet.
Man Sentenced for Killing Co-Worker
liz | 12:38 PM | Uncategorized
I find it creepy that he was only sentenced to one year in prison. Is he going to be placed in a mental facility because of his illness?
The late teens (this guy is 19 yo) is when significant schizophrenia symptomatology usually begins to appear and consolidate (notwithstanding the articles about toddler diagnosis you have posted.) Early on in the diagnosis of psychotic illness it can be difficult to firmly differentiate between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Some studies have indicated that there is even a socio-economic bias to diagnosing the poor with schizophrenia and seeing wealthier psychotic patients as being bipolar.
Perhaps the correct term would be schizoaffective? I have a friend with that diagnosis, and he experiences the bipolar-type moodswings as well as psychosis and depersonalisation. (I would say a more extreme kind of psychosis than the small breaks I occasionally have as a person living with bipolar 1)
I have a schizoaffective disorder and have been misdiagnosed over the years as being either schizophrenic or bi-polar. perhaps this is where the confusion come in.
Schizoaffective disorder is supposed to be the diagnosis to use when a patient has psychotic symptoms and bipolar (or manic) features but it isn’t always used that way. If one disorder is diagnosed first and then other symptoms develop later, some clinicians prefer to give a second diagnosis rather than change the original one.
It seems he might have been misdiagnosed. It’s funny how people who exhibit vastly different kinds of behavior can have the same or similar diagnoses. Maybe he has JPMD (Just Plain Mean Disorder). In any case, I too find it creepy that he was sentenced to only one year in prison for killing someone. That’s only a third as long as the sentence Suzanne Butts might get just for stealing toilet paper:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,281012,00.html
Hi Liz. Yes, it’s called schizoaffective disorder, when a person has both bipolar and schizophrenia. The bottom line is that a person with schizoaffective disorder can destabilize with or without mood swings.
Cristina.
If someone who had a sinus headache killed someone else, could that be used as a defense? It’s probably been tried. A while back this blog had some entries of accomplishments by people labeled with psychiatric illnesses, perhaps you could feature some crimes by people deemed non mentally ill, like “diabetic robs bank,” “another asthma suffer convicted of rape.”
how can someone committ such a crime and somehow get away with it. mental illness is such a huge and scary problem. it should be mandated that people that suffer with these illness are required to take their meds by law.
Every time someone who commits a vicious and violent crime is identified as being part of a certain group, it increases bigotry against that group. It doesn’t matter whether the group is economic (i.e. “another assault committed by a homeless person”), ethnic, religious, or based on having a psychiatric diagnosis, or anything else. The effect is always the same – anytime some group affiliation of the perpetrator of violent crime is stressed and made a big deal of, bigotry against that group will increase.
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