I was transfixed when I opened up the Huffington Post on June 13 and found the story that I attach below. I had mostly forgotten about Kip Kinkel; but I had built the first chapter-draft of No One Cares About Crazy People around his psychotic murder-spree of twenty-three years ago, near the dawn of our present mass-murder era. More specifically, I’d built it around the coverage of that spree on a 2000 edition of PBS’s Frontline.
I eventually discarded that draft in favor of a new beginning. I realized that starting my book with a description of such an atrocity would risk reinforcing the myth that serious mental illness is synonymous with violence. Yet I kept the draft in my files. That draft also is attached.
A lot has happened in the world of mental illness over those twenty-three years, by no means all of it good. Yet to re-read the HuffPost story–centered on interviews with Kinkel over several months–is to be reminded how primitive public perceptions of schizophrenia remained near the turn of this century.
One year after Kinkel’s rampage, teen-agers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold slaughtered fifteen people, including themselves, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
I listened to news accounts of Columbine on the radio of a rental car in my home town of Hannibal, Missouri, where I had returned to gather material on a pair of cold-blooded killings by teen-aged boys for my book, Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore. Several commentators attributed the Colorado murders to the fact that Harris and Klebold . . . wore trenchcoats. Two years after Columbine, I published a piece in The Atlantic about the Zantop murders in New Hampshire. Two adolescent boys from a small town in the northern part of the state knocked on the door of a beloved Dartmouth academic couple in nearby Etna, whom they did not know, and stabbed both to death. In none of these stories, including my own, were the terms “schizophrenia,” “psychosis, or “serious mental illness” mentioned. Those who do not remember the past . . . https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kip-kinkel-is-ready-to-speak_n_60abd623e4b0a2568315c62d
