Sociopath Week

Being a psychiatric nurse, I am always aware of the seven days beginning April 15th, because as my peers and I dubbed it in our conversations this week: it is Sociopath week. Since today is the anniversary of Columbine this blog will be limited to that particular episode in this week of evil spirits.

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard about Columbine. I was a staff nurse in the best mental health unit for children and adolescents in our city and I had just left work and was driving to a coffee shop to have a cup of after work coffee with a male co-worker. We had had after work beers with groups of friends, and an occasional private chat, but this was the first time we were having coffee together. I heard just enough of the headlines at 3:30p to know that the event was bad and that it concerned children like those we cared for, but my mind was not on the world at that moment and I turned it off to stop for coffee. I was not completely divorced at the time, never imagined dating someone younger than myself, and had in my mind that I was going to set up this lively musician with my musically inclined sister. By the end of the coffee I realized I was not going to set up this kindred spirit with my sister and I needed not to see him until I was actually divorced.

I share those personal details because if my activity of the day had not been so in the world of a man and a woman who care for kids enjoying each other's company Columbine might not have affected me the way it did. I do not have my own children. The mentally tender children rotating through the hospital unit were my children at the time, and as I left coffee and got more of the news, my heart broke for what was going on. From the moment of impact, my impression was not about individuals or schools, but about families. I knew enough about kids who were left out and odd, that I never once thought the easy target "goth" or "skin head" was the real picture of what was going on. I knew lots of weird kids, and many of them were very tight with their parents, it was just that the parents were enough standard deviations off of normal that the kids had no information to pull forward with socially. I really didn't mind such situations. Securely loved kids who just don't have enough information about the outside world are much easier to help than very well informed kids who don't feel secure with their parents. You can just tell the first set what they need to know. The second set has many life experiences to go through to achieve grounding.

I knew what created powerful reactivity, and that was powerful hypocrisy. I developed a personal theory about Columbine. It was based on one little note in the early reporting that mentioned since the day was April 20th a post it board somewhere did not have the month spelled out as usual, but said 420 - the code word for marijuana insiders everywhere. I learned about marijuana from the teenagers I cared for. This was not my world, but I had many of them telling me about making money off of it at high school, needing it to calm their nerves, etc. etc., and I also knew it was a powerful point of hypocritical contention in many homes.
Parents would lie about marijuana use and then severely punish their children for use. The kids were not stupid enough to think this was right, and marijuana hypocrisy was a point of righteous indignation that kids clung to to avoid having to obey any other parental dictum. So I have wondered all these years whether the two perpetrators of this crime were in that situation, either because of their own parents or some other legal authority at school or elsewhere. I wondered if the real hypocrisy of the world they were being given was part of their unreal objection to cooperation with norms.

Like every other long distance, news dependant analyst, I was wrong which I found out this week by reading Dave Cullen's book Columbine. April 20th had nothing to do with the planning of this personal vendetta against the world. The boys were trying to join in the bigger sociopath day April 19th and just didn't get their plans together in time.

I liked Dave's book. It said what I who have done both state and private adolescent unit work already knew. Some people are just determined to carry out their worst instincts. Sometimes others can stop them. Sometimes they can't. If we lived in a way that would make sure something like Columbine never ever happened, we would not live in a free world. Obviously, every time something surprises us like Columbine did, we learn more about watching out for those who are not motivated to be productive, but never the less, if we expect bad, we will end up getting so much more of it than if we expect good and learn to spot the exceptions.

To relate the rest of the story, my co-worker and I have stayed friends in spite of no longer working together. Neither of us have our own children. Both of us have other partners. He was the kind who distracted kids from their own pathology, made them laugh, didn't let them take themselves too seriously, and never let them know what had stopped them from the overblown reactions they were on the verge of having. I was the kind who watched for what the kids actually cared about and set choices in front of them with the resulting consequences, and achieved with their own logic and desires what they could not learn from the expectations of others.

We were a good team, but we had a locked down environment to work in, and we were not emotionally attached to the children we were helping raise, and we never had to stay and deal with whatever happened; eventually, we changed shifts or the kids went home.

Dave's book was good closure for me. Not that I was a community member of Columbine, but because I am a community member of those who care for mental health in children and I have seen both the Dylans and the Erics, and I know that not all of them kill others. That is a very good thing to know.