Alot has been talked of mental illness in the wake of all these tragedies. Obviously the culprits are mentally ill themselves and the way to contain such individuals is on every one's mind.

However, think about this: These acts create more mental illness in the form of PTSD. PTSD is post traumatic stress disorder.

My whole hell experience with SSRI withdrawal and then coming back home taught me empathy with two groups of people I never even thought about: people with PTSD and drug addicts. PTSD is such a weird term - we give it to soldiers who experience war but never really seem to realize that anyone who experiences traumatic stress in which they legitimately felt their life was threatened can have PTSD. These shootings have left wakes of people with PTSD - no doubt the 58 hurt in that Aurora shooting have a bad case of it. They may actually have a worse case of it than most soldiers - soldiers are trained and prepared for warfare, these poor people only thought they would see a movie or, in the case of the Sandy Hill massacre, go to school.

Your mind goes in a strange dark place due to both drugs and traumatic stress. Thoughts of suicide will invade your mind when they never had before. Your mental well being and the well being of the world around you is suddenly in question when it never had been before. It is a fundamentally disturbing experience.

People aren't bad but people with PTSD often end up neglected - homeless, forgotten. They end up like that not because society is sick at its core (though it often seems that way) but because the average person doesn't know what to do. The average person does not know what it is like to experience the threat of death up close and personal or to experience situations in which things felt quite literally out of control. The experience of such people is so out of the realm of the ordinary (for most people) that even the most well-intentioned don't know how to respond and often respond in silence.

So the trauma just keeps lingering. There is a website called Mad In America that explores mental health issues and they go in to that pretty well in a recent article with an example relating to a patient:

“My daddy, he molested me from when I was 6 until I left home. ‘Said he gonna kill me if I tell anyone and ain’t nobody gonna believe me anyway.” She pauses again. “I never told nobody, not my mamma, not my girlfriends, not nobody.” Monique felt a sense of relief, her secret unburdened, her experiences hitherto deemed ‘ununderstandable’ and all the more frightening for it, were now understandable to her. Yet in the 18 years that Monique had been a psychiatric patient, these facets of her mental life were not explored at all. I’m sure she had been asked about trauma in the perfunctory way that characterizes modern psychiatric assessment, but never in a way where she may have made any meaningful connections with her past experiences and the current distress she lived with. For contemporary psychiatry recognizes in diagnostics only one outcome for traumatic experiences, and that is posttraumatic stress disorder.

The article goes on with interesting stuff - all of which I think will show in the lives of the people effected by the shootings:

When a patient attending for psychiatric evaluation today discloses a history of trauma, be this childhood physical or sexual abuse, rape, domestic violence, kidnapping, attempted murder, or combat exposure, the line of questioning takes a predictable turn. The patient will be bombarded with questions about whether they have nightmares or flashbacks, whether there always feel on edge, or whether there are any situations or people they avoid. It is as if these are the only types of symptoms that could possibly occur following traumatic events. This not only flies in the face of the clinical experience, it also flies in the face of epidemiological studies which show individuals are just as likely to experience depression or anxiety following a traumatic event than they are PTSD. My own clinical experience is that even more common than the traditional symptoms of PTSD are physical symptoms – chronic unexplained pains, unexplained neurological symptoms, gastrointestinal disturbance and so on. The effects of trauma are not so much embedded in a fractured mind, but a fractured body.

I didn't realize this until I read this. Experiencing withdrawal in a strange land with abusive family members gave me a sort of PTSD that I can only imagine many of the people caught in these tragedies will feel. I passed a kidney stone after I came back - my body usually processed food and vitamins very well. My on edge anxiety got out of control - I started seeing death and disaster in everything around me. Friends say that I'm gotten better but I know I must have been horrific to be around when it was at its worst (many posts here have been taken down because of that).

Your body reacts to your mind. You get sick when your mind is sick. I can only imagine the survivors of Aurora experiencing pain when they go by the Red Box booth at 711 and see a copy of Dark Knight Rises on display. The actual disturbances caused by their trauma might not be obvious to put them in the hospital, their family may not even detect them but they could leave the victim haunted with pains they never would have had otherwise.

Oh, by the way - Thank you all for reading. This website and its sophisticated readers have helped me go from the depths of depression and darkness in to writing in a way much more sophisticated than before. You all helped me literally work the kinks out.