well done AspieGirl!  :smile:  Make them realize that we are out here and watching!

Stella

It is much easier to spot a person who is at risk when he is in your physical space. My support groups have had such people come and go for twelve years.  Several times, I have had to tell people that they need help beyond the group's capacity and refer them to professionals.

        It is a lot harder on-line to tell. But I think we will all be better off if we take any statement about potential self-destruction or harm to others seriously. It is not something to flame in response and it is not funny. We need to warn people who make such statements as well as those who provoke with insensitive responses. And we can refer them to real help.

         Another thing that could help is to ask people who register to provide an email address and phone number of somebody to contact if there is an emergency.

        Last thought:  Many have suggested that the wrongplanet people should have called the police. There is no gaurantee that the police would have responded. I know one family in which an aspie has been in violent situations eight times in nine years and the police or mental health people NEVER responded until the person forced them to.

      In the end, nobody at wrongplanet.net is responsible for the actions  of William Freund. He is solely responsible. If drugs influenced him, he took them.  We all need to remind people that most of us will never do something like this.

Problem is, pharmaceutical companies have massive resources when it comes to fighting legal battles.  Most newspapers would hesitate to make allegations about side effects, unless they knew they could back up their assertions with science.  And since most journalists have at best only a hazy understanding of the science, for legal reasons they'll sometimes skirt around such issues.

I'm sure you're right.

I was prescribed some antidepressants and I started wetting the bed at night (a bit embarrassing for a 30-something).  I just thought maybe it was because I was in quite a stressful situation, and hesitated and almost didn't mention it to my GP, because it was so embarrassing.  I kind of blurted it out by accident though, and sure enough, 'frequency of micturition' or something like that was listed as one of the possible side-effects of this particular drug (can't remember which one it was now).

But as it obviously doesn't have that effect on *all* people who take it, but affects *some* people who take it, and given that maybe a good proportion of people suffering from clinical depression will be Aspies/somewhere on the spectrum, because clinical depression is a common co-morbidity, it does make me wonder whether those who experienced this particular side effect are Aspies/on the spectrum, so maybe it affects Aspies/ASDs differently to how it acts on NTs.

I think it's very possible that lots of different drugs used for psychiatric/neurological purposes will have a different effect on us than they would on NTs, and most drugs are probably tested on NTs, people with clean bills of health, so they can see what the side effects are.

I will do!

Yeah -- I'm sure you're right -- unfortunately.  I know it's a sort-of David and Goliath battle to try to argue with pharmaceutical companies (or any major company for that matter) -- but, if some people out there are going to experience really adverse, dangerous side-effects to this medication, I think it should be looked into.

I have no idea if Geodon played any role in William's case -- I just think the question should at least be asked, you know?  Not ignored.

The one small ray of hope I thought of when I contacted the L.A. Times reporters is that, if you remember, last year there was a lot of talk in the press about SSRIs and teen suicide.  I thought that, perhaps, that was fresh enough in everybody's mind to make people concerned about this medication, too.  We'll see.

Report: OC gunman was social outcast, even on the Internet

ASSOCIATED PRESS

4:33 p.m. November 6, 2005

LOS ANGELES – The Orange County man who killed two neighbors and then turned a shotgun on himself desperately sought friends on the Internet but was ridiculed for his sometimes angry and bizarre messages.
William Freund, 19, had no more success finding companionship online than he had in high school, where his poor social skills made him the butt of cruelty.

  
In the wake of last week's rampage, Tiffany Key, Freund's former high school classmate, wondered via the Internet: "Think about your interactions with him. Were they positive? Or were you one of those kids that made his life hell?

"If you did, then please change your life. This is your wake-up call."

Two days before Halloween, Freund, who lived in the wealthy community of Aliso Viejo, donned a cape and a paintball mask and drove to a neighbor's home, where killed a father and his 22-year-old daughter. He also fired into another home, wounding a person inside who was cut by flying glass. Freund's shotgun jammed when he fired at another neighbor. Freund then went home and shot himself.

Freund had Asperger's syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by poor communication and social skills. As an undergraduate at Aliso Niguel High School, he reportedly was harassed, spit on and had his head pushed into the toilet.

People laughed at him and harassed him in the school halls, Key told the Los Angeles Times for a Sunday story.

"He wouldn't get aggressive. He would never retaliate," she said. "He would just take it, day after day."

"Here's a guy who had it really hard and nobody made it any easier for him," said Tio Lavranos, 19, another former classmate.

After Freund graduated last year, he got a part-time job at a computer repair shop in Corona del Mar.

"He didn't have much of a personal life with friends," said Forrest Fuster, his former employer. "He did a lot of work and no play. All he did personally was play on the computer."

Freund only opened up on the Internet, which he accessed from his computer-filled bedroom at his parents house. The Times said he played online games, discussed movies and TV shows such as "The Outer Limits," posted reviews of online businesses, bought and sold video games and paintball supplies on eBay.

He left pleas for friendship on some Web sites.

"I've never really had a friend," Freund wrote in one profile. "I've never had someone I can share more intimate conversation with, or just have a good time with."

In more troubling messages, he discussed guns and, in the weeks before his death, talked about his thoughts of suicide.

"I think the only thing to do is go admit myself to a hospital I feel like I need to kill myself," he wrote in an Oct. 19 post on wrongplanet.net, a Web site for those with Asperger's syndrome.

In one message, Freund said he planned to "Start a Terror Campaign To hurt those that have hurt me," and added: "My future ended some time ago."

In a firearms forum on the Web site somethingawful.com, Freund talked about staging a "Halloween shootout" to get even with pranksters who vandalized his pumpkin last Halloween.

That was met with ridicule.

"I can imagine this mongoloid, sitting on his creaky porch, one strap on his overalls, leaping up and running to the defense of his precious 24-ounce pumpkin," read one response.

Freund's comments got him banned from the Web site three daysbefore his rampage.

That's why sites like these, and the people that have been so nice to me are so precious.  I only wish there were more.

I'm glad they finally highlighted the fact that he posted on far more sites than just WP, and that on all of the other sites (other than the AS-related one) he got treated like dirt and ridiculed. (Before they made it look like "Hey he only went ot this one AS site and they didn't stop this horror" whereas in fact he was more explicit on other sites, including a gun forum)

May I point out that I started a thread at http://www.thehighroad.org with the title, "Prevalence of Asperger's Syndrome Among Gun Nuts"?

   That was on January 3rd, 2005, and I think the URL for that thread is http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.ph...perger%27s

I'm Orthonym at The High Road, BTW.

For the record:

I don't think I would ever kill myself, no matter how bad I feel; just not one of those suicide-prone folks, I reckon.  Besides, that would result in my being dead, and that doesn't seem like much fun.  

  As to killing other folks, that's something I'm right squeamish about, too. I mean, if you do that, you have to talk to policemen (ugh!) go to court, go to jail, get hanged (if your country still has proper justice) feel bad about it afterwards, and all. No thanks. Not for me.

:?

I am Lothar of the Hill People.

You can find me at http://www.hillpeople.com.

I hate to say it, but it really comes down to the way society treats us. It seems like while 99.99% of us either suffer and deal with it, curl up in a dark room, or just suffer life's beating, there's always that rare person who's taken that much and has been though enough to where they'll do something like this. IMO our community is online, almost completely nonexistant IRL, there's no safezone from the NT world, and as long as society is the way it is we can always expect to read about more Will Freunds (and as we know, society seems to feel this is a small price to pay in preserving the right to be apathetic and intolerant).

Nov 6, 2005
Dana Parsons
Killer Couldn't Survive the Taunts

From what's been reported so far, it seems clear that William Freund took some secrets to his grave. Knowing exactly why the 19-year-old killed two neighbors and then himself with shotgun blasts eight days ago requires more information than we may be able to get.

But among various dark threads running through Freund's last several years, one is especially familiar and painfully time-worn. As reported more thoroughly on the front of this section today, Freund was the subject of mocking and derisive cruelty from his peers as far back as middle school.

They would punch his backpack. They laughed when he sneezed in class. They made him the butt of jokes. They poked fun at his clothes.

One of his sympathetic acquaintances told our reporter that Freund had been an outcast as long as she could remember.

You don't need to be a therapist to imagine the cumulative effect that could have on a young person. All you need to be is someone who's worked your way through the social grinder that junior high and high school can be and remember what being a social pariah can mean and what it's like to take the taunts home with you night after night.

Obviously, most students who are bullied or mocked don't react violently. Most survive it, at least outwardly. Freund, according to his acquaintance, "would just take it, day after day."

That may be the saddest epitaph of all.

All this is sad-but-true commentary to Cyndie Borcoman of Newport Beach, who led a movement a few years ago to get the Newport-Mesa Unified School District to enact an anti-bullying policy. It stemmed from her son telling her that a high school friend had been choked to near-death by another student, only to have school officials blame the injury on a seizure.

"Adults say that bullying is a rite of passage," Borcoman said last week, "and that you have to be resilient in school. Unfortunately, a lot of kids get marked in junior high and once they're marked, they never get unmarked."

Newport-Mesa and other districts, locally and around the country, developed more formal and tougher anti-bullying policies. But their success depends on how authorities define bullying and how consistent they are in enforcing it.

Freund's own words make it clear he never got past it. His postings on websites are rife with references to never fitting in.

"Kids are not shown how to treat each other," Borcoman says, "or when [others] are in pain, how to help them. Instead, they learn on TV how to put them down."

Borcoman has been both a teacher and counselor at alternative schools that take in troubled students. It's not unusual that new arrivals were shunned at their previous schools.

"Kids take it as much as they can," she says of bullied victims. "Some can't take it very much; they keep it in as much as they can."

Most of the time, the victim suffers in silence. Much rarer, of course, are cases in which teens reach the breaking point and explode in pent-up violence.

Borcoman recommends starting anti-bully programs as early as 4th and 5th grades — for boys and girls. The instruction should focus on discouraging youngsters from being bullies as well as letting potential victims know they can find safe port with school officials, she says.

Talk of policies and procedures sounds awfully hollow when juxtaposed with the horrible end that Freund chose for himself and his two victims.

But you can't help but wonder when the demons first entered him. Was the fatal outburst that came at 19 the inevitable product of taunts that first surfaced years earlier?

Neither Borcoman nor I can say that for sure.

But hallway thumpings? Classroom jibes?

Rites of passage to make you tougher?

Somehow, I doubt William Freund saw it quite like that.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dana Parsons' column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana .parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at http://www.latimes.com/parsons.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/orange...&cset=true