The recent news--or should I say, the recent news we are allowed to know about or are fed through our algorithms because they pluck the strings of our appetites--seems to be about suicides.
Jason Arday committed suicide after much of his fraudulent, or autism-induced behavior, was exposed and he was discharged from Cambridge. Very perplexing all around.
Hayden Panettiere, a young actress, was found deceased in her apartment. She had lived a successful (as an actress) and deeply sad (as a young person and mother) life. Very troubling.
Lindsey Clancey is on trial for the killing of her three pre-school children three years ago, by strangulation. She tried to commit suicide after the act and was found unconscious outside of the window from which she had jumped. She is now in a wheelchair as a paraplegic. She confessed to the killing but under what might seem to be defensible circumstances related to postpartum psychosis. Extraordinarily tragic and the hardest for me to fathom.
These are tragic and the bend and stretch my not-always-flexible mind to understand. It is easy in all three, and in similar, to blame the larger community. How much do those around a person who commits suicide bear any responsibility? In one sense, none. It is the act of the one who commits the act. Often the person seems happy and "okay" and functional until they are found deceased. Were there signs? Of course, but are they easy to overlook? Yes, perhaps.
Jason Arday obviously should not have been put in the position at Cambridge. His academic record was not sufficient, and his record of fabulism, seemingly justified by blaming events and statement on racism, John McWhorter, a American Black academic and linguist, wrote pretty scathingly about both Arday's misdeeds and Cambridge's worse ones, in the Free Press, and I send the reader in that direction (except a subscription is needed, probably). If he truly did have autism, his behavior of lying and being imprecise does not support it; those with autism are super-factual and often unable to imagine a different reality from what they experience. On the other hand, as McWhorter points out, his copy and paste plagiarism is like the mimicry of autism.
It is likely that those around him wanted to overlook his autism because if anything, the condition is inconvenient. I have been reading about the movement over the last ten years to normalize autism and focus on the "neurodivergence" of it, like it's a superpower, rather than the true disability of it. Those with profound autism, like my brother, are not functional and require constant care because of "unsocial" behaviors and inability to communicate. I resent this movement a bit because it focuses on the high-functioning, highly verbal folks on the spectrum who can speak clearly and write coherently but do not understand social cues, suffer from sensory overstimulation, have meltdowns, and require special services. Temple Grandin is a remarkable person, but she is not representative of all folks with autism.
Hayden's case seems to be an often-told story of a person in the public eye for most of their life who come to be unable to cope. She had given up custody of her child because of her mental condition, several years ago. Inability to care for a child would push one deeper into depression. Where were her family members and friends? That could be said of many suicide victims I fear.
In the case of Lindsay Clancey, I wish she had given up custody of her children when she felt she could not care for them. Here, too, I think those around her missed the signs and should have known what could have happened. True, no one wants to think their wife or daughter or sister would murder her children methodically. But we have had previous cases, and she was suffering. Ms. Clancey is confined to a wheelchair for life, it seems, which is imprisonment enough, and will probably be found not guilty by reason of insanity despite her admission of guilt. Since death penalty is off the table, she will be a ward of the state for the rest of her life, and the people of Massachusetts get to pay for her condition and acts.
I want to have compassion on Lindsay Clancey, but at this moment I can't. Murdering three small children is too far off my radar for that. I do hope that postpartum disorders are treated more fully and compassionately, and that we realize as a society that motherhood was never meant to be a one-woman, solo performance. I do understand that sometimes our imaginations, our emotions, and even Satan (yes, Satan or demonic forces, sorry for those who do not believe in a spirit world) can put horrific ideas in our heads. In the case of the last, we help those forces along by filling our minds with true crime and horror movies. I see images, momentarily, that make me question my sanity and make me want to hide in a corner in case I were to have a psychotic break, which I never have--but we know too much, we have seen too much, things are ancestors were less aware of because they weren't bombarded with media and information far outside our experiences.
We like to think we know a lot, but we know little. We only know what the news media allows us to know about people like Jason Arday, Hayden Panettiere, and Lindsay Clancey. We should remind ourselves that our rumination on it is mostly fill-in-the-blank than true facts (the world's biggest redundancy, perhaps?).
What we do know is that community, even sometimes intrusive-seeming community, is worth the attempt.
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