This case is getting so much press, I guess because it just went to trial.
MySpace: “You’re the Kind of Boy a Girl Would Kill Herself Over”
liz | 11:17 AM | Uncategorized
Liz Spikol was born in Philadelphia sometime in the 20th century. She started writing about her experience as a person with mental illness in 1999, while employed at Philadelphia Weekly as the paper’s managing editor. Aside from serving as that paper’s web editor, music editor, staff writer, senior editor, executive editor and a host of other random roles that she couldn’t make up her mind about, she has also worked as a Spanish teacher, as a Certified Peer Specialist during Philly’s system-wide transformation and as a communications specialist for a prison reform organization. Currently, she works at the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania and writes book reviews for PW. This blog — named one of the Top 10 Bipolar Blogs of 2007 and 2008 by PsychCentral — is about medications, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, SAD (and many other acronyms), mad pride, Big Pharma, celebrities, hospitals, stigma and the recovery movement. And other stuff.
I’m not sure which charges Lori Drew is accused of, but I’m afraid that even if she’s convicted of them (which she probably will), the penalty will not be enough. She spent a month “setting up” the girl, and then “dropped the hammer” on her, driving her to suicide. What a shameful, cowardly bully she is!
That is heartbreaking. What a freak of a mom who would do that to her neighbor’s kid, even without saying the world would be a better place without her, that is some wickedly strange behavior.
This is yet another sad chapter in the on-line death sagas. Recently a young man filmed his own suicide, egged on by readers.
In that case, one could maybe understand the comments, made by other youths who fail to understand the devastating finality of death.
That a grown woman would instigate this particular final choice is simply obscene. I followed your link to the comments.
What struck me, was the bad spelling, bad grammar and lacking concern by the writers. This is a deep wound in the psyche of America.
Life is too fragile for our youth. It is guarded by government, when it is a foetus, a brain-dead patient, a terminally ill person.
But, for our armed forces, vulnerable teens, impoverished people, death is acceptable. Even promoted.
I don’t know if this is contrary to your site rules, but it’s a link to my own blog which commented on a story in this morning’s Star-Ledger:
http://bestiaire.typepad.com/moreau/2008/11/life-and-death-in-a-public-space.html
Another Internet suicide accompanied by a cheering section. God forgive us.
Dear Liz,
This has nothing to do with your post. I’m not sure why, but I have never watched you on YouTube. Stan, who commented on my blog, had a link to that site, due to a video about the man forced to undergo it.
In an amazingly effective act of self-destruction, I agreed to ECT. It was 1999/2000, I’m not sure. After over twenty “treatments”, I was still S.I. and depressed, only I couldn’t remember why.
I lost all recollection of 2000-2003, with other long-term memory. I do not recall 9/11, which some people view as a gift. They have no idea.
Formally I had a photographic memory. After years of watching the same documentaries until I remembered them, working the Sunday crossword until I could almost fill it, I am better.
But I cannot recall how I feel, far too often. If I write in my blog my thoughts, when my therapist asks me, I am lost.
You spoke so eloquently about ECT. I don’t recall diapers or mouth guards, but the aftermath is a shared experience.
I came in, smart, maybe brilliant and depressed. I left depressed. I left diminished, forgetful, confused, dazed and lost.
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