TCC

So I’ve always been pretty curious about what actually goes on in the minds of people who commit violent crimes, especially teenagers, like Alyssa Bustamente or the girls from the Slenderman stabbing. What I keep thinking about is how someone reaches that point where a horrible thought becomes something they actually act on. It’s weird because from the outside it looks like a split-second decision, but you know that there had to be so much happening inside them for so long. Most people just label them as monsters and never try to understand what pushed them to do that.

 And something that makes it even more interesting to me is how many of these people kill themselves right after the crime. That part says a lot to me. It makes me think they were dealing with levels of hopelessness, panic, or internal burden that no one ever noticed or took as seriously as they should. It’s like they didn’t even see a future after what they did, or maybe they felt trapped way before the crime even happened.

Society always pretends to care about mental health, but the second someone shows signs that don’t fit the “acceptable” versions of struggling, which are like just anxiety and depression, people pull away or call them dramatic or dangerous or crazy. When teenagers deal with that level of dismissal it can turn into something very dark very fast, and everyone acts surprised afterward, even though the warning signs were all over the place. I’m saying that ignoring people until they have such a horrible breakdown doesn’t make the world safer. I understand some of the feelings they always talk about, like the neglect, detachment, and such. That’s mostly why true crime interests me so much. 

I like trying to understand the parts of the mind that people avoid talking about and how different things could have been if someone had paid attention before everything went down.