Confirmed: Crazy People Are Dangerous

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He was once described as “happy-go-lucky,” but then his father lost an election and his parents divorced and Gus Deeds went nuts:

“Eventually it got to the point where everyone… you couldn’t ignore it. It was obvious he was going through a difficult time,” Tony Walters, who has been friends with Gus since they were children in Bath County, Va., told ABC News on Wednesday. “I don’t know where they ended up taking him but he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and did get treatment for a while and I know he was on medication. . . .
“He seemed very sort of scattered, very different. He had strange paranoias,” Walters said. “And he was imagining different schemes against him; suspicions of people around him…it really seemed like he was going through a very difficult time.”
At one point, Gus said that God told him to drive to the Pacific and he did.
“He would say it was a spiritual thing that he felt a calling that just needed to go and drive west, see the ocean and when he came back that’s when he really, he was a different Gus than he was,” said Adam Michaels, a friend who worked at Nature Camp with Gus for several summers. “His personality had changed a lot, he was pretty manic for a while.”

Was this really bipolar disorder? The symptoms actually sound more like schizophrenia, but ultimately the bottom line is the same: Gus Deeds was crazy, and crazy people are dangerous. See my Wednesday column, “Madness Takes Its Toll.” And speaking of crazy . . .

The problem is really spiritual and moral. Unable to cope with failure, the damaged personality seeks to externalize responsibility by fixing blame on demonized scapegoats. This is how disappointments, which the healthy mind can cope with rationally, become psychic wounds that develop into paranoia: “RACISTS! EVERYWHERE!”

Some people unfortunately resort to violence and self-destruction. Charles Johnson committed reputational suicide.

 

28 comments

  6. I dunno. My guess is more sane people are dangerous, and in bigger ways *cough* Obama *cough* than any crazy person could be. And it is the supposedly sane who vote for him. Then again, Republicans don’t seem to be all that stable these days either.

  8. Ah, Memory Lane, that misty walk into the dreamy world of Days Passed, when CJ was thought relevant, even essential. But in retrospect, the signs were there all along, just like with the Deeds kid, and the Tuscon, Aurora, and Newtown shooters (using their names gives them more fame when they should be forgotten).

    I remember thinking at one point, back in the day: “Okay, man, we get it: you ride your bike on scenic highways and let the wind blow your ponytail back. What makes you think we need a pictorial souvenier of every single ride?”

    Ol’ Charles Johnson melted down
    Just like the youngster Barrett Brown,
    Each made and jumped to their own disaster,
    The difference was, Barrett was faster.

  10. “And in the distance, freighters. Fading further into the distance, all pretense of my professed objectivity. Long since over the horizon, rationality.”

    /banned from LGF rather early on

  12. From what I’ve read, habitual marijuana use presents a very real danger to the schizophrenic or potentially schizophrenic mind. I don’t believe, however, that this problem has ever been thoroughly, systematically researched.

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