Quote:
Originally Posted by masraum
My guess is that it can happen over a long period of time or it can happen over night. I think we (humans, the experts) barely understand the mind to the point that most stuff is just an educated guess.
|
That's my understanding as well.
It's probably easier to deal with when it's a slow, steady decline with a bunch of warning signs.
This seems to have been relatively rapid situation where people were just sizing up what was going on when the worst happened.
I'd like to propose another scenario. Maybe it wasn't schizophrenia. What if it was bi-polar disorder? I have two family members that are bi-polar. While they have left warning signs for decades, they could also appear normal to people they only knew casually. And the switch from "I'm on top of the world" to severe depression could be instantaneous and triggered by seemingly small things.
True story. I have a friend whose wife was bi-polar and she hid it from him for the duration of his 5-year marriage. It wasn't until she had a particularly extended "down" cycle that he found out and she subsequently divorced him in a fit of self-loathing self-destruction. It wasn't until after his marriage was over that he realized that his wife's sudden trips to "help her mother" were really her hiding her depression.
The highs can be equally as destructive as the lows. My father was bi-polar and ran a small business. He would often make risky decisions when he was in an "up" cycle because he tended to believe that everything would go his way. When these decisions did not pan out, they would often trigger a "down" cycle.
Maybe Holmes was bi-poloar and was quiet because he didn't want to tip other people off to his condition. He believed he had his condition under control and was seeing a school psychologist to keep everything on the up and up. Maybe one day he realized that he wasn't going to cut it in his graduate program and this triggered a severe down cycle. I've seen it first-hand. This kind of depression can trigger not only a desire to end one's own life, but a desire to "get back at the world" in the process. Holmes, being an intelligent person with a severe mental disorder, devised a plan to make this happen.