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In reply to the discussion: This blaming those of us mentally ill for your fucking gun problems is getting tiresome. [View all]TorchTheWitch
(11,065 posts)I was at the mall when that was going on. It was terrifying, but thankfully I had arrived just as it was almost all over yet at the time most people didn't know and I happened to be in a part of the mall a good distance away.
I also knew about her. Her mother was friends with the mother of my friend's boyfriend. I met Sylvia's mother several times and all she talked about was what could be done about Sylvia who she KNEW was homicidally mentally ill, but the laws permitted nothing to be done about it though Lord knows that poor woman tried her hardest because Sylvia was an adult. She was also a paranoid schizophrenic that voluntarily stopped taking her meds. Everyone who came across her when she was off her meds knew she was a danger to others yet not a single thing could be done about it. And one day in October of 1985 her illness made her spin completely out of all control, and she killed several people at the Springfield Mall.
It was this very incident that finally prompted PA to revise their mental health laws so that dangerously ill people like her could be forcibly removed from society and given help whether her illness told her she wanted that help or not. Unfortunately, it's common for schizophrenics and paranoid schizophrenics to believe that they can stop taking their meds and be fine with out them. I've got a schizophrenic living right next door who's stopped taking his meds for that same reason... he's the only one that believes he's normal without them when there is no question at all that he isn't normal without them.
Women HAVE committed mass murder, just not nearly as much as men. And maybe it's at least partly because it is usually men that suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. I actually can't think of a single mass murderer that did NOT suffer from a severe mental illness.
About Sylvia Seegrist: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/mass/sylvia_seegrist/index.html