#i am also violently ill randomly so this was a Task I Had

[submariini]

ERIKAVIKMANOFFICIAL (TT) ► 2024/02/03

[salamanderinspace]

personal updates. sheeeesh

I feel I'm officially Fallen on Hard Times. Husband is still out of work and still in full lockdown mode. Won't go out. Won't even take the trash. Very convinced COVID is 100% going to kill him.

He's also been very political lately, sometimes shouting "fuck Ukraine!" randomly or blasting the Russian Anthem 3 or 4 times a day. IDK. I don't engage.

Money is non-existent. No rent, restricted food (which is one the toughest things for me, always). I've applied for disability benefits but that process takes 6-8 months and last time I was refused because too much time had passed between when I last worked full time for an employer and when I was diagnosed. They acknowledged that yes my conditions do qualify me and yes I submitted adequate proof that they affect me now but because I could not prove that they affected me before 2015, I was denied.

My lifelong, incurable, genetic conditions.

IDK I've applied again but even if I get it the max benefits isn't half my rent. My royalties from my "successful" art career ran out last year and since I've been doing small odd jobs or selling a piece here or there. Meanwhile my laptop is very old and very broken (battery cannot charge, for instance) and so is my phone (again can only be used when plugged in.)

Husband seems to struggle with small tasks. He spends a whole day wailing about grocery shopping--which we do by instacart! And I bring the groceries in and put them away. But the instacart is still too much for him. Of course I am empathetic and supportive because I have my own accursed limitations.

Medical stuff. It hurts to move around but I do it anyway. Just muscle spasms and joint pain. I don't think things are much worse than when I was on meds. Emotionally I'm ... having more emotions than I used to. I'm a little on the fence about that. It feels morally correct to have emotions. It feels right and natural and like I should have them. It's stressful, though, because I can't express them to anyone, because everyone else is on a very short string. People get epistemologically threatened when I talk about my feelings. They don't really hear what I'm saying. I say "I feel like society isn't structured in a way that's safe for me or that meets my needs. I feel this is urgent," and they hear "you're bad and I want you to die in a violent revolution." It's so stressful.

I did therapy for awhile but we both agreed that most of the feelings I'm having are normal, reasonable, and Not Illness, and that we should conclude our business. He was a good therapist IMO, which is very rare and very hard to find. Sometimes they hit on you or have 10 cats or show up late to your appointments and only talk about themselves or don't talk at all. So I trusted my guy, my dude, but boy, did he seem tired.

The younger people are, they better they are at listening. I chronically tend to date people who are either much younger or much older than me, partly because that's what I'm attracted to and partly because they don't seem to have the brain worms everybody in my age range has. But I feel shame about that because, you know, age gaps are socially inappropriate and taboo and shamed and so that's another part of my life I can't really talk about.

One feeling I'm having a lot is boredom. I'm so bored with everything. I want to travel. I want to kiss a stranger on the mouth.

The last time I felt like I had Fallen on Hard Times was 2018. I was Down Bad for this girl, who... reciprocated, but didn't want to run away with me, and ended up essentially running away with another woman. My anti-seizure meds were discontinued and pulled from the market for mysterious reasons. So I ended up in the hospital, really in mortal danger. The docs forcibly gave me super heavy seizure meds - Lorazapam maybe? - and it made me disoriented and suggestable. They couldn't figure out WHY I was having symptoms and they got the idea that maybe I'd taken something (I didn't) in, like, a suicidal sort of way. And since I was disoriented and suggestable I was like, ok, whatever, and that's how I got locked in a psych ward for a month. Which was read bad and not the subject of this post.

I just got a call, just now. Not sure if anyone was following the saga of when my insurance suddenly dropped me for no reason and I had to move heaven and earth for months to get them to correct the error. Well, they did correct it, and then I got switched to a new company that took over the old company, and assigned a whole new doctor. So I put in an appointment and waited a month or two and I was supposed to see the doc on Monday. Well, I just got a call that, in the last month, that doc has ceased to take that insurance.

I'm feeling ok right now. I had a bagel for breakfast and carbs are very soothing. Sometime later today I'll be laying in bed, though, asking myself: what can I do? How can I change this? Trying to think my way out of this situation.

I've been pretty involved in politics and activism for the last 10 years. I've also been reading a lot of history, though. It seems like, historically, things do not get better. Not for people like me. The arc of history is not bending upward for people like me. Lately I look at social media and I see a lot of bad takes that make me feel epistmelogically threatened. I mean, that's social media... people just type words and half the time even they don't really believe them. But then you go out into the world and no one is wearing a mask anymore, and I wonder - does it matter, what people feel or believe, or does it matter how they act?

I hate feeling alienated on social media though. Even on tumblr there's no way to curate out all the bad takes without limiting yourself to corporation-friendly sanitized Content (TM).

I miss my therapist. Even if I could see him again I can't afford it. I miss the way he would say, "yes, that's true," really quickly, as if he was so uncomfortable. I don't want to make people uncomfortable. I want people to make choices and do actions based on truth.

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: Please help. I am the INFJ who used to ask you about caring for chonically ill family member who emotionally abused me months ago. This might be beyond the scope of this blog, but I really have nowhere else to turn to.

So, my family member has recently passed away from that illness. It's over and everything should be fine. I grieved and I moved on, or so I thought, because I couldn't help but feel like the death still follows me everywhere. First, it's the guilt. You told me in the last post that I should know how to properly distance myself emotionally and find emotional support, which I did. However, now I feel guilty, as the question keeps popping into my mind whether I at least gave him enough love to ease him out, because my head won't stop telling me that I was selfish and left him to die alone, lonely on the hospital bed, not being present in his last moments (another family member was there with him and I was stuck in the traffic). The memories of the times when I'm impatient or frustrated with him also came back to remind me that I was a horrible person, even though logically I know I shouldn't feel that way. 

Second, I am now unable to envision my future without death in it. I keep seeing death happening to other people that I care for like my mother and my best friend. Everytime I hug them, suddenly my mind replaced them with an image of me carrying the sick family member to his bed (which I had to support him from the front, similar to hugging). Everytime I hold their hands, I can't shake the feeling of the cold, dead hands that I touched as a last goodbye to that family member. Every activity now reminds me of the time when I watch that person slowly wasting away in their sickbed. I sometimes sneak into my mother's room at night to check her breathing to make sure she's still alive. One day my friend didn't answer my text for an entire morning after the night that he said he felt ill (we text each other often and he usually send me goodmorning texts first), and my mind immediately told me that he's dead. I can't live like this. 

Some days things are not too bad, but some days, out of nowhere, I just got overwhelmed with all these irrational thoughts and images. I don't have resources to go to a therapist and I could never seem to speak to anyone about it. I tried once and I was dismissed and told "enough" and after that I'm just unable to speak about it at all. The words just wouldn't come out. It's easier here because you are a stranger but I would probably regret this later so I have to send this to you before I delete the message. I can't live like this but I don't know what to do. I tried to move on. I even continued on my project I left behind to take care of my family member and it's going great, but I just can't stop thinking.

__________________________

Emotional problems like rumination should be addressed by improving your emotional intelligence, please read up on it in the site index. It seems that you still have a long way to go to understand the concept of self-care. 

The contents of your mind are NOT your enemy. The reason they plague you is because you treat them as foreign to you, like an invader, something to be violently suppressed or eliminated. Feelings and emotions are an integral part of who you are, and they don’t run on a schedule of your choice. The recovery process requires time for feelings to dissipate naturally. However, you don’t allow them to dissipate. Your constant resistance feeds them power and influence. Until you understand that your feelings express something true, and you learn to interpret and accept that truth, you turn emotional life into a bogeyman to run from. Essentially, you keep fighting against yourself.

What you describe is a normal manifestation of grief. Grief doesn’t just magically go away because you took half an hour to sit down and think about it. Grief runs very deep because it is very painful, especially in the case of prolonged illness. A painful wound needs time to heal, so you are often processing grief in the unconscious mind. It is a normal, everyday task of the brain to process information unconsciously such that “byproduct” thoughts and feelings pop up randomly, just like clouds moving through the sky. Most people don’t notice them because the content is benign. When the brain is processing intense emotions, the content is more noticeable, like storm clouds. Instead of watching and appreciating the clouds do their thing, you worry and overreact to every little movement. And then the anxiety drives you to do destructive things like put yourself down, obsess over details, ruminate in circles about the past, etc etc. Do you understand that the root of your problem lies in your inability to own and accept your thoughts and feelings as they are? You won’t be capable of self-care until you learn to accept every aspect of yourself with compassion.

As INFJ, it’s likely that you have an unhealthy core belief which blocks you from being emotionally intelligent: You believe that negativity is an indication of something being morally “wrong” in you that needs to be “corrected” or “punished”. This unhealthy core belief produces chronic guilt problems. It is a form of self-hate, as you’re always trying to violently cut out the “bad” parts of yourself. Your desire to maintain a false, one-sided image of yourself as a morally “good” person distorts your grieving process, turning it into self-harm. Guilt is a common INFJ issue, I suggest that you read past posts about it. 

[madd-days]

Things I realise I do as a person who struggles with maladaptive daydreaming

Note: I have not properly diagnosed myself because my parents are fully against of me getting diagnosed, so I had only realised I had MADD because of the reasons below. It may have been ADHD, or it might just be a symptom of other mental illnesses.

I shut down completely from social interaction while I quietly perform tasks, because it's so much better listening to myself talk to imaginary people and being a person that's unrealistic to me.

This goes on for days, and I develop the story for my para each day and I'm influenced by things that happened on that day, so for example a radio host with a charming guest where I act as the guest or becoming a youtuber that talks a lot of social issues while playing a casual game. A lot of the times, just basically- I am everyone and I created everything. A god complex.

I spend way too much time on youtube if I'm not daydreaming. My favorite times to daydream are at night when I don't have wifi, and my fantasies are what makes me sleep at night.

Sometimes the fantasies are romantic and sexual, and sometimes they are captivating and exciting. I go to sleep by the first (preferably not too sexual) and go on my day with the latter. If I daydream of the first one in any class, I fall asleep in mere SECONDS. And I actually like my classes! I remember wanting to stay awake to take notes or I'll miss the chance but I couldnt really switch my mind off anyway.

I cannot stand still when I'm having exciting daydreams. I walk around the house a lot. I used to walk around my primary school too but I stopped doing that because people thought I was either crazy or skipping class while I walk in weird places. The urge to wander still happens, I haven't really tried to wander a lot since encountering people I know brings me misery.

I feel like daydreaming is an escape. It doesn't have to remind me of the boring life I live and the struggles I have. It makes me messy and disorganized despite having to actually enjoy cleaning my room. I tend to forget about tasks and I struggle to focus on it on a very bad day.

My bad days push me to hide in my room, repress all emotions and go in my comfort world.

One of the main characters in my daydreams stuck around for little more than a decade, just had gone through change and a LOT of phases. He reflects my phases IRL. But his image is still the same, tall like 180cm skinny black haired boy with blue eyes and a blue hoodie with gap teeth and freckles. I'll probably draw him in his different phases if I remember to draw.

Lately these days I've been daydreaming of escaping my personal relationships. I do have a boyfriend, he doesn't know I have maladaptive daydreaming but he has seen some of the symptoms. It's like I would rather hang out with my imaginary friends than my IRL friends.

It does bug me, when I have urges to daydream but everyone is talking to me. I have two reactions, I act like an alien trying to communicate like sorry !!I can't be as social now but!! I want you to know I am still trying while I have this sad smile I show to my friends who care about me or I deadpan at every statement everyone makes and I just respond like "Yeah. Right. Okay" because I'm too annoyed(?) more like unbothered?to talk with anyone. I don't even realise I do this, I do it to my family members when I'm sweeping the floor/cutting vegetables/cooking rice and I just barely give any energetic response to whatever they were saying because I'd rather listen to my paras.

I do or I used to flinch whenever my mind goes to bad place. Not when I'm daydreaming, but when I'm in reality where things are messy and awful. I think about past decisions and old relationships, and I tend to jerk. I have tendencies to yelp out weird words, or a simple "I fucking hate you!" randomly, or shake my head vigorously or sniff loudly. As of late I try not to be as violent to myself, at least verbal abuse is fine. It used to be bad to the point where I drop and break things and also hurt myself one way or another.

I feel like I'm narcissistic. I look at myself in the mirror and I see a capable rising star, a good singer, talented artist, a unique model and a charming spokesperson. All I ever did was just finish school quietly and live with my parents. Doing anything remotely social takes too much energy. And in front of that many people??? My anxious ass could never

Maybe this is just me but I love analysing emotions and character traits, which is why I love astrology and psychology and it is the very root of my learning interest to understand why people act the way they are. I take too much time in analysis that all my characters have in depth stories. Maybe not the most consistent storyline but it was enough to get me emotionally attached to them.

[somedaysitry]

Personal dispatch: 2/14/20

It’s been a bad PTSD month or two here in grad-school-land, so I’m just going to vent for a bit.

I know a lot of grad students who suffer from symptoms of anxiety and depression as a result of the academic environment alone. This post is not about them. Those of use who have had Bad Brains™ for a long time often recognize the symptoms of poor mental health in our peers early on and are able to reach out to offer support. It’s a privilege to be able to help people we care about and actually apply some of this practical mental health experience for the forces of good. 

That said, it often feels like my peers and my advisor have no clue what it’s like to live with persistent anxiety and C-PTSD. The best analogy I can think of is this: imagine you had really violent malware on your computer years ago, so you downloaded some powerful anti-virus software to counteract the harm the malware did to the computer’s internal functioning. It helped in the short-run, but you couldn’t de-install the anti-virus software and now it runs constantly in the background at all time. It runs down your computer’s battery, disrupts the functioning of other programs, and sometimes randomly makes a program crash out of nowhere. 

That’s what it can be like to have a Bad Brain™. On top of coursework and writing up my thesis and juggling multiple projects, my brain is also: figuring out the safest place to sit in the room where no one can sneak up behind me and where I can see the door, calculating the last interactions I had with everyone present and dissecting whether their behaviour might indicate ill-will and then doing the math to figure out how this person might have power over me and how they could misuse it, trying to be charming so no one will realize I am an anxious mess, being anxious about not getting everything done fast enough, stalling because if I can’t get it all done then of course the logical response is to become overwhelmed and freeze, then spending way too much time figuring out if I can say “no” to yet another task, and finally debating whether I have “earned” food/sleep/exercise/leisure time/the right to socialize with other humans/insert other anxious behaviours here. 

It’s exhausting. Particularly in bad times, it feels like tasks take me twice the effort as compared to my peers. It’s frustrating and humiliating and often makes me wonder if I deserve to be here at all. It’s my responsibility to seek help and build up tools to mitigate it all, but sometimes I really just want to challenge my advisor and ask them if they think they’d be doing half as well in my shoes. On multiple occasions, I have attended lectures or meetings while in the midst of a full-blown panic attack and managed to hold myself together long enough to take notes, present on research, and not disrupt anyone else’s experience, before finally allowing myself to actually experience said panic attack one the class/meeting was over. Mostly, I’m just really frustrated. I hate feeling this way and I hate that I just have to accept that certain people will think I’m slow or lazy or incompetent or fragile unless I break down and lay out my complete personal history for them, at which point they’ll feel awkward/guilty and I’ll end up coaching them through their experience of my second-hand trauma. It’s easier to be called slow.

Anyway, if anyone needs someone to talk to about navigating academia and mental health, don’t hesitate to message me. I’m an expert in cooly forcing campus counseling offices to actually provide adequate mental health care, so you know I got you.

[findsomeoneelse]

       This might be a very angsty thing to say but I kind of legit hate my dad. He complains all the time that my brother (who i think probably has depression or something rn) and I don’t help him around the house but 1) when we do he’s a huge asshole, literally calls me retarded all the time bc he’ll verbally tell me like 10 things in a row to do and my ADD ass can’t remember it like that and he often  threatens me as well (and there have been incidents with physical violence between him and me). 2) gives us the most useless and asinine tasks i.e. vacuuming a BRICK PATIO or WASHING ROCKS. 3) will ask us when it’s convenient for HIM, my brother and I are 20 and 21 and have either a job or school and for a while I was doing both. 4) he is NEVER satisfied no matter how much we do. 

        And concerning the physical violence shit I have so much pent up feelings about it. As far as I know he’s never come after my brother like that. He may have hit my mom before but I’m not sure. I just know that once they got into a bad argument or something bc he was being really loud bc of a football game and then suddenly my mom was crying (she doesn’t cry a lot) grabbed us kids and went to our grandma’s. He’s also kicked every dog we’ve ever had, literally drop kicked one through a small tree bc it chewed the blinds and then left him outside to run away while he took off to who knows where to sulk. But my point is he has NEVER treated my brother the way he has treated me and it shows. My brother gets away with avoiding so much work and a fuck-ton of lying. My dad almost never invades his space or commandeers his stuff. I’ve almost failed several big school projects in the past bc he’d randomly decide to punish me or that his stupid yard work was more important and that it was my fault for not accounting for his random chores. 

         I literally keep a bug-out bag in my car and a knife by my bed bc of him. I spent my entire junior and senior years of high school with a stomach ache every single day and horrible insomnia from anxiety bc if he wasn’t threatening me with violence he was talking about kicking me out of the house for no real reason. His response to my worsening mental health was to make jokes or just ignore me when I managed to finally muster up the determination to say something. If my mom hadn’t taken action and helped me get help I’d most likely be dead now. I’m still trying to rebuild my self esteem that he destroyed. Then years after I was on medication (that he was opposed to and mocked, my mom was the only one on top of that) and doing better he had the fucking audacity to ask me about how I was doing. Me being like 16 yrs old I lacked the vocab to say that I feel that he forfeited the right to ask me those things so I just shrugged it off.

          He insults and mocks every friend I have in some way shape or form. He also once told me that some older friends I was extremely close to at the time would eventually get tired of hanging out with an annoying little kid so I should get used to them not being around bc they would leave me. I mean he was right about that, and they were pretty toxic for me but that was really fucked up and I’ll never forget it.

          I finally have a good romantic relationship now, with a boy surprisingly, and he’s so sweet to me. Every time he tells me anything remotely kind I almost fucking cry bc I immediately assume he’s lying or somehow delusional. We had our first sort of disagreement, it wasn’t even that big a deal he had just made a few jokes that had upset me, but I was so terrified to bring it up and was so ready for a fight that when he simply apologized for his behavior and promised to correct it I immediately broke down in tears of relief. I’m so terrified for him to meet my dad bc I don’t want him to belittle and invalidate us, or try and take away all our privacy in a weird attempt at policing my sexuality (he has tried something like this in the past with my brother). I’m also so scared my boyfriend will just assume my dad is a normal nice guy and that I’m crazy, bc my dad is good at appearances. We’re well-off but honestly the only reason my brother and I ever see any of that money is bc of our mom, she handles the finances (and p much everything else around here). 

        That’s another thing I hate is that bc I turned out okay everyone assumes he must be a good parent. I had to work so fucking hard to become who I am now DESPITE him NOT because of him. I had to work so hard to become a kinder person, and learn to motivate, comfort, advocate, take care of myself. I’m an intelligent person (at least i’ve been told I am) bc I work to teach myself, both in school and life. I had to learn all my emotional intelligence and social skills myself. I’m working to make my life good and full of the love I never felt from him and to a slightly lesser extent my mom. I’m still working at it. Which is why I’m just as afraid that he’ll be accepting of my relationship and be “proud” or whatever. Thinking he raised a confident and smart daughter. That he has any right to be a voyeur to my happiness or take any credit for it.  

      I work hard so work through so many issues he caused in me on my own. I work so hard to keep myself from sabotaging my current relationship bc I feel unworthy or like it will just vanish. I still can’t fully grasp that this boy could genuinely like me and feel like I’m worthy of his time and effort bc of how stupid and ugly my dad has made me feel my entire life. I have so many things I want to tell my SO but in the moment feel like I physically cannot get the words out for fear of looking stupid when he finally leaves me. I still have so many walls up with him and I really don’t want to but I can’t get them down bc I’m so fucking scared despite all the evidence he’s given me that he cares about me and just wants to know me. It’s honestly incredible how just having someone like him has changed me for the better. He makes me feel smart and capable, like I can have the life I want. He doesn’t see any of the shit my dad seems to see in me and hate. Like fuck the fact that I only seemed to need one stable and loving relationship in my life to succeed really says something I think. 

       I hate feeling like I can’t talk to my own parents, well mostly my mom, but they really make it impossible. My dad bc you never know what will piss him off or if he even gives a shit and my mom bc she will probably tell him whatever you tell her. I have other adults, my aunt (my mom’s older sister) and uncle (tho he’s a newer addition to the family, they married last year.) but I’m so scared to talk to them in case they slip up and let stuff slip to my parents. My aunt also just doesn’t Get a lot of things like mental illness so she can invalidate ppl and be mean. She does encourage me a lot tho, more than my parents EVER have. 

      My SO doesn’t have much of an idea of my relationship w my family other than it seems strained and we barely talk despite all living together. He sometimes half-jokingly tells me I should spend more time with them or make an effort too, and I don’t tell him that I’m not the one who fucked that up for us. I try not to talk about any of this with him yet, and I honestly don’t know when a good time is or how to go about it. He’s gotten little hints here and there before I change the subject. He has a relatively big family that he regularly spends time with, so I don’t know if he’d understand all this. His dad is a little similar to mine in the sense that he always seems to have weird projects around the house that he drags them into but it doesn’t seem like he’s violent. I honestly don’t know what to say about the physical abuse. I’m so scared of how he’ll react. I’m scared he’ll brush it off, I’m scared he’ll get super concerned or angry for me. I just don’t want it to change how he sees me. People seem to get the impression that I’m confident and that I don’t take shit, and it makes me feel so embarrassed that I let myself be pushed around by my dad.

      If anyone actually reads this post and has suggestions for talking to an SO about this stuff (especially in the case of an abuser being good at manipulation/gas lighting) let me know any suggestions you have. I thought by this point in this rant I’d have some sort of clarity but I don’t really. My dad has been slightly better the last year or so, since we moved to a new house that’s bigger and we’re on opposite sides of it. After one of his worst outbursts (at the beginning of my senior year) I gave him a book about male abuse in an attempt at confrontation but I doubt he read it. He’s been better but I can’t let go of all these feelings. Older people tell me that eventually I’ll forgive him and move on but I honestly don’t want to. I don’t want him to just get away with treating us like garbage. Maybe that makes me petty and childish but I am barely 20 so. It be like that. Might make a separate post about my brother might not. I love him but dudes got issues rn.

[thekillerblogofkillers]

Sylvia Seegrist (1960-?)

Sylvia Seegrist is an American spree killer. On October 30, 1985, she opened fire at a shopping mall in Springfield, Pennsylvania, killing 3 and wounding 7 before being disarmed. The people killed included 2 men and a 2-year-old boy. She was 25 and had been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia for over a decade. Her case provoked discussion about the state’s authority to commit at-risk people into mental care facilities versus individual rights as she had been committed and discharged from mental care several times prior to the shootings.

Seegrist has some similar origins to many other mentally disturbed spree killers, including a tendency for violent thoughts, discussions and behaviour which would build to a major incident. Ruth Seegrist testified that her daughter’s paternal grandfather fondled and exposed himself to Sylvia when she was just 8 years old. “She was a ‘normal’ child, but was sexually abused by her grandfather and became a troubled teenager,” her mother told the jury, saying she had not known of the abuse until Sylvia was 13. When they discussed it, Sylvia said, “But momma, you don’t know how intimate our relationship was.” Seegrist was first hospitalised at the age of 16 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was hospitalised a dozen times and each time she was discharged psychiatrists said that she was no longer a risk to herself or to others.

When she turned 18, Seegrist tried to enlist in the Army. At the time she was inducted, she was assumed by her fellow platoon members to be a lesbian, and they harassed her for this, seven setting her up on a prank date and making her the butt of many jokes. Seegrist spent a lot of time at the mall she later chose for her killing spree, harassing customers and making statements about how “good” other killing sprees were, including the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre. Seegrist joined the Army in December 1984 but was discharged after just 2 months because of her behavioural problems. Seegrist had drawn attention to herself by dressing in full green army fatigues at the spa and sauna at a local fitness club. An instructor there said “she hated everyone and would often talk about shooting and killing people.” Her behaviour was so worrying that clerks at the local K-Mart told her they had no rifles in stock when she went there to buy one. She eventually managed to buy a Ruger 10/22 from another shop.

On her first trip to the Springfield Mall on October 30, 1985, Seegrist bought Halloween items from a party shop. She then worked out at the fitness club before returning to the mall. Leaving her vehicle, she retrieved her weapon and fired at a man 27 metres away from where she was standing. The man wasn’t hit, and having seen the car Seegrist arrived in, flattened one of her  tires to prevent her escaping in that car. Seegrist approached the nearest entrance and had fired at, but missed, a woman using the ATM machine. Before entering the mall, Seegrist shot and killed 2-year-old Recife Cosmen who was with his parents outside a local restaurant. Once inside, Seegrist first randomly into stores, ignoring some. Many customers ran when they heard the gunfire but Earl Trout, who either had not heard it or couldn’t hear it was standing in front of a store when he became one of the 3 people killed that day. Augusto Ferrara was the last of the 3 to be killed in the rampage. John Laufer, a local grad student, disarmed her as she walked up to him and raised her gun to shoot him. Laufer forced her into a nearby store while he waited for the arrival of mall security. The guard that responded first asked her why she had done what she just did – she replied, “My family makes me nervous.”

After her arrest, and prior to a competency hearing, Seegrist was transferred to Norristown State Hospital to be evaluated. On March 6, 1986, Seegrist was deemed competent to stand trial for the killings. She was found guilty, but insane, and was sentenced to 3 consecutive life terms, one of each victim that died, and seven consecutive 10-year terms, one for each victim she wounded. The judge said that Seegrist “should spend the rest of her life in some form of incarceration”, and she was sent to the psychiatric speciality hospital Mayview State Hospital to be evaluated before being moved to the State Correctional Institution in Muncy, Pennsylvania.

Seegrist’s rampage spurred the state government to form a legislative task force to address better ways of caring for the mentally ill in the community. Seegrist’s mother, Ruth, urged legislators to make changes to the state mental health laws. It is unknown what, if anything, was changed. In response to the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, The Philly Post ran an article named ‘Decades After Sylvia Seegrist, Mentally Ill People Are Still Murdering Innocents’, in which Ruth Seegrist said: “You know, it’s ironic that people who are irrational are expected under the law to get help on their own. There needs to be something in the law that compels a troubled person to be diagnosed by a psychiatrist. In the 1950s, we were institutionalising people who weren’t mentally ill. You could institutionalise someone who was just unruly. We’ve gone from one extreme to the other.”

At the time of Seegrist’s spree, gun buyers were required to sign a form declaring that they had no record of being in a mental institution. Sylvia Seegrist lied and purchased a .22 semi-automatic rifle for $107. In 1998, the state of Pennsylvania enacted the Pennsylvania Instant Check System (PICS) which enabled licensed gun dealers to conduct a background check using their mobile phone. A reporter from the New York Times wrote to Seegrist asking her to share her thoughts about what happened at the time of the shooting and about her life prior to that day. Part of her response read: “As I am safer in prison less threatening or perverted lesser crimes than my family.”

Seegrist served her first 2 and a half years of imprisonment at Norristown State Hospital before being transferred to Muncy State Prison for women. Ruth Seegrist and her ex-husband visited her regularly and she seemed to enjoy the visits. But in 1992, Sylvia Seegrist had difficulties with her antipsychotic medication. Although she doesn’t know what medication Sylvia is taking now, Ruth says that in 1997 Sylvia decided to stop any contact with her family. Visits and phone calls stopped and the last letter Ruth sent to her daughter was on Nov. 30. Sylvia never replied. “It’s her illness,” Ruth said in 2002. “She’s schizophrenic and psychotic and becomes extremely paranoid. She dwells on things in the past. Since I was her closest family member, I got blamed: She did what she did because of me!” Seegrist’s prison counsellor meets her every 2 weeks and notes that Sylvia takes her meds, spends time at the library, exercises a lot and tries to keep herself mentally sharp.

One of Sylvia’s motivations for the shooting was a fear that her mother was trying to have her sent back to a mental care facility. She said that she would “rather die or go to prison than go to a mental hospital.” Ruth Seegrist said she had seen ‘A Beautiful Mind’, a 2001 biographical drama about John Nash, a Princeton math professor and Nobel laureate who was also schizophrenic, like Sylvia. “I thought it was very well done,” Ruth said. “When a person is so delusional – at first he thought it was all real, but it really was in his mind.” Of her daughter, Ruth said: “I really believe she belongs in the forensic unit of a hospital, not in prison. They should be incarcerated in the forensic unit of a hospital until they get functional and stabilised.”