While it is early in regards to the investigation into yesterday’s mass shooting in Boulder, it is important to remember that not everything is terrorism. Even if it winds up terrorizing people. Terrorism in general and both domestic and what we call foreign terrorism (also doing business as just terrorism) have very specific definitions. And sometimes some acts technically fit the definitions, but would be better categorized as one of the forms of mass murder, such as serial or spree murders. Ted Kaczynski is probably the best example of this. Kaczynski’s terrorism campaign did have a political objective, however, the whole campaign and the motivations behind it were the result of Kaczynski’s delusions that arose from untreated mental illness. As such, Kaczynski’s behavior was far, far more similar to that of David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam Killer, than to someone like Eric Robert Rudolph. Like Berkowitz, Kaczynski’s beliefs and actions resulted from delusions that were part of their untreated mental illness. Rudolph had clear political and religious/ideological, doctrinal, and dogmatic objectives he wanted to achieve and the motivations to undertake his campaign is rooted in the racialized charismatic evangelicalism of the Christian Identity movement he was raised in.
The now identified shooter in Boulder is alleged by his family members to have been suffering from untreated mental illness. This included paranoid delusions that he was being both physically stalked and cyber stalked because of his Muslim faith. So far nothing reported has indicated any self radicalization into any form of religious or political extremism. Just that he was introverted, had a temper, was bullied in high school, seems to be suffering from paranoid delusions, and, as a result, that his family believes he is mentally ill.
From The Daily Beast:
The motive for the nation’s second major mass shooting in a week remains unknown, but a family member said he believes the alleged shooter—a former high-school wrestler who was born in Syria but raised in Colorado—is mentally ill.
Ali Aliwi Alissa, 34, told The Daily Beast in a phone interview that his brother was paranoid, adding that in high school he would talk about “being chased, someone is behind him, someone is looking for him.”
“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” he said.
He said he was sure the shooting was “not at all a political statement, it’s mental illness.”
“The guy used to get bullied a lot in high school. He was like an outgoing kid, but after he went to high school and got bullied a lot, he started becoming anti-social,” the brother said.
In one Facebook post, the suspect appeared to express fears that someone was targeting his phone for Islamophobic reasons.
“Yeah if these racist islamophobic people would stop hacking my phone and let me have a normal life I probably could,” he posted in July 2019.
He made similar allegations months earlier, accusing his former high school of hacking his phone. He asked Facebook followers for information about laws against phone hacking, and said he suspected someone was starting rumors about him, which “set off” the alleged hacking.
On Facebook, his politics appeared mixed throughout several camps. He shared an article rebuking Donald Trump’s stance on immigration, but also posted about his own opposition to gay marriage and abortion.
A day after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, Alissa had shared a Facebook post from another user that read, “The Muslims at the #christchurch mosque were not the victims of a single shooter. They were the victims of the entire Islamophobia industry that vilified them.”
If – and it is early days in the investigation, so it is a big if – Alissa is in fact mentally ill and the shooting was as a result of his paranoid delusions, even if investigators do get an explanation out of him, it may not make any sense to anyone else. If Alissa is in fact mentally ill and he is put on an appropriate therapy regimen and the paranoid delusions go away, he may still not be able to provide a coherent motive for his actions even as the reality of what he did is able to finally sink in.
Mental illness is a weird thing when it comes to motivating violence. When I was a post-doc at UF one of my colleagues was beaten to death by her foster son who she was in the process of adopting. She’d helped to save him from the foster system and from a life of being largely abandoned by parents that couldn’t take care of him because of their own demons and problems. He loved her fiercely. And yet one day they got into an argument and something was said that triggered all the trauma that he’d endured from his birth parents, in the foster system, from schools and social services not set up to actually resolve these types of problems and he beat her to death with a baseball bat. Apparently he’d been writing about his anger for several days and had confided in his girlfriend, so this wasn’t completely spur of the moment. And he did realize what he did, panicked, tried to cover it up for several days by claiming she was out of town, and he is now in Florida’s maximum security prison where he’ll spend the rest of his life. However, I’m pretty sure that to this day, over fifteen years later, if you asked him what set him off that day or why he did it, he still cannot provided a coherent answer other than she made him angry.* The only real answer, as insufficient as it is, is that on that day, for a brief, unfortunate moment all of the years of trauma he’d endured came into contact with something that Barb said to him and now two lives were destroyed.
While we wait for more information to come out, it is important to remember that sometimes there aren’t answers. That doesn’t excuse what Alissa did yesterday, nor does it make it right. But it is important to remember in our hyper-politicized, 24/7, chasing the headlines, controversy creates cash news media culture that not everything is terrorism. Sometimes it is just a tragedy. But there are a lot of subject matter experts – both real ones and self promoting charlatans – on social media, as well as a news media that needs controversial content to attract eyeballs across multiple platforms, that has a vested interest in driving the events of yesterday into very specific directions. Not everything is terrorism. Not everything has a nice, neat answer or resolution. That doesn’t mean there may not be a political component to yesterday’s events, such as the ability of someone whose family says has untreated mental illness to be able to easily purchase a firearm. Or the NRA’s, as well as other similar groups’, stupid fight to remove every last reasonable firearms regulation at every level of government aided and abetted by every Republican member of the House and the Senate. All of these people, from the talking heads on TV to “terrorism” experts on twitter to the GOP senators that decided to put on a show during a committee hearing today on gun violence all have a vested interest in this being something that is considered newsworthy. Domestic terrorism, radicalized Islamic terrorism, an excuse for those commie Democrats to grab everyone’s guns, etc. There are two real issues here: untreated mental illness and easy access to firearms by everyone in the US, including those who are mentally ill. That’s where the focus should be. Everything else, unless some startling revelation occurs as to motive, is a sideshow intended to raise people’s visibility – terrorism experts, anchors and pundits, politicians, and special interest groups – and then monetize that visibility.
Just one quick, final note: this tragedy was definitely compounded because Alissa had ready access to a rifle he had purchased on 16 March. In this case, based on the reporting in The Daily Beast, a Ruger AR-556, which is Ruger’s AR pattern rifle. If Alissa had, instead, purchased a different rifle, Ruger or otherwise, it might not have made much difference in the number of casualties. Using a bolt action or lever action rifle would have slowed things down a bit as the rifle would have had to be manually cycled after each shot. But many of these manually loading rifles still come with either detachable box magazines or with integral to the rifle tube magazines. Not every non AR or AK pattern rifle is a single shot rifle. Every single non AR pattern rifle that Ruger sells with one exception – all bolt action – have either an integral tube magazine or a box magazine allowing the rifle to be loaded with between 4 and 10 rounds with the factory magazines. The same is true for the majority of lever action rifles. Getting caught up in a discussion of AR rifles is a rabbit hole. The one definitely confirmed problem here – Alissa’s ability to get a rifle – and the one unconfirmed, but suspected one – that Alissa was suffering from paranoid delusions as a result of untreated mental illness – are the two immediate concerns. Especially in regard to each other provided his family’s speculation’s about his mental health are correct. The issue is not that he purchased an AR 556 rather than the Scout or the Precision or a lever action rifle. The issues are that both his family and some friends suspected he was having mental illness related problems – such as paranoid delusions – nothing was done about that and that he was also able to easily obtain a rifle. And that the American political system has decided that mental illness isn’t really a public health crisis and that the solution to each and every one of these mass murders by mass shootings, regardless of motivation, is to do nothing because doing anything is somehow un-American and unconstitutional, none of which is true.
Open thread!
* If you click through to that article, you’ll see that my description isn’t lining up 100% with the reporters. I knew Barb, she was a friend and a colleague. I knew her foster son, though not well. I’m also the person that went over and packed up her things for her parents, as a favor for the departmental administrative staff, so they could take what they wanted home with them after the crime scene people and the local cops released the apartment and the apartment complex could have the apartment prepared to for a new renter. You’ll notice in the reporting that her son could not articulate an actual coherent reason for why he did what he did when he did it other than “she was holding me back” and he was angry. In reality he was doing well in school, was a successful athlete, and had a lot of potential opportunities he never would have had had he not met Barb. But mental and emotional trauma is a hard thing. And it sometimes leads people to do terrible things. And this was one of those times.
Keith P.
Did we ever get a motive from the other shooter? I’ve got a friend who said he looks “Antifa”, while I thought “MAGA”.
Adam L Silverman
@Keith P.: Huh?
raven
UGH
cain
Thanks for showing the empathetic side of that tragedy. The kid was clearly in a bad place – and killed someone he loved. That’s going to stick with him for the rest of his life – and sadly he has all the time to think about it in jail.
Yutsano
We need to make the distinction that mentally ill does not mean he is not legally culpable. I firmly believe one can have delusions but still have the mental faculties to distinguish right from wrong.
Yutsano
@Adam L Silverman: I think he’s talking about the Atlanta shooter. Didn’t we establish he was just “having a bad day” and he’s just a good Christian white boy?
jonas
Mental illness is of course a human condition everywhere around the globe, but only in America do we allow the criminally insane to waltz into a gun store and purchase military-style weapons with nary a shrug. Therefore *I’m* the one who should have to go everywhere in tactical armor (the kids too, I suppose?) and open-carrying to “protect myself.” This is fucking insane.
debbie
Yet, all I’m seeing from the right are arguments about what AR really stands for. Their gift for distraction is lessening.
Major Major Major Major
What are some ideas for keeping handguns away from the acutely ill that don’t keep them away from the chronically ill? Like what would be a mechanism that would keep a gun out of this guy’s hands but still let me, a bipolar fella with everything under control, buy one? (I have no interest in doing so, nor do I think most people ought to have guns, but that’s not our political reality)
Keith P.
@Adam L Silverman: The guy who was having a “bad day”. A mug shot showed up on TV while I was watching with some friends, and the first thing I heard was “He looks totally Antifa”. My response is “I could just as easily say he looks ‘MAGA'”. Now, we’ve got a guy with a foreign-sounding name, so it’s like a squirrel….but at least the current guy in the WH isn’t going to weaponize either’s background.
Another Scott
Good post.
I agree that mental illness is a big problem and it’s different from “terrorism”. But I’m not sure that the distinction between Kaczynski and Rudolph is as stark as your first paragraph. It’s not normal for anyone to blow up clinics and hide in the hills for years. How much of that is mental illness is debatable, but there is some there, I think.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Adam L Silverman
Gotta run an errand. Back in 30 or so. I’ll answer all questions that I can answer then.
jonas
@debbie: That’s right. Experts on pandemics, disease, the economy, climate, evolution — all pinheads who don’t know anything and should get bent because I subscribe to this newsletter and know better. The only expertise we should bow down to is gunhumping and if you don’t know your 30.06’s from your .357’s, you have absolutely NO BUSINESS discussing gun policy.
cain
@Adam L Silverman:
What is your thoughts on chetinnad cooking?
Ohio Mom
I get the idea that there is a difference between the havoc wrecked by the politically motivated vs. the untreated mentally ill but from my perspective, I’m terrorized either way.
Now I usually put it out of my mind because else I couldn’t function. It’s just one more item on the list of why I absolutely hate Republicans.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, the usual xenophobe bigoted reactionary shitstains are certainly cyber stalking him now.
Procopius
@Yutsano:
I think what hasn’t been established is whether he was aiming at Asian women specifically, or at massage parlors in general, as “dens of iniquity.” It seems plausible to me that he had nothing against Asian women, but the massage parlors employ mostly Asian women, so that’s who was there when he was killing everybody there. After all, he did kill a Caucasian man and woman, as well. But, yeah, good Christian white boy struggling to overcome his masturbation problem. The media, of course, want to make it a hate crime against Asian Women (identity).
schrodingers_cat
@cain: I love it.
AnotherBruce
Almost every time when Adam does one of these posts, I think that he should have a wider audience than he does. Maybe MSNBC. Maybe CNN. Go suck up that gravy. That goes for Cheryl Rofer too.
gwangung
@Procopius: Oh, I don’t buy for a second that he didn’t have problems with Asian women. You don’t fetishize without having some unsavory problems, and connecting Asian aunties and grannies doing massage with sex is some sort of fetishizing.
debbie
@Keith P.:
The set of his mouth, to me, was that of an incel Proud Boy.
Emma
@Procopius: He drove specifically to these Asian-run spas that were 30 miles apart. Maybe a hate crime isn’t that plausible to you, but it’s a certainty to Asian women, such as my friends and I. Or hell, just women in general, commenters at LGM pointed out that shootings targeting women are a hate crime in GA too.
Brachiator
@gwangung:
That’s odd. Every sex positivity guru and their momma insists that kink is good.
This guy (I don’t even know his name) brought misery and terror to people. But most people, even those with sexual issues, don’t act out or hurt others.
JaneE
Almost 40 years ago I worked with a woman whose adult son was mentally ill. She spent all her spare trying to get him admitted to a mental hospital for care, but he supposedly wasn’t that seriously ill. Then one day he killed her, hacked her literally to pieces with an ax. Then he got committed. No reason was ever given and he didn’t seem to remember doing it even. An unthinkable tragedy, but it happens regularly.
RepubAnon
@Yutsano: It depends upon the delusions. A friend of mine is paranoid schizophrenic. He has long, often loud conversations with people who talk to him from thousands of miles away via what he says is telepathy. He thinks there are bugs and turtles crawling around his room. He also gets command hallucinations, where the voices tell him to do things – and he cannot do anything but obey.
The things he sees are just as real to him as the things I see – he thinks he’s fine, and the rest of us just don’t have his telepathic powers. We’ve tried to get him involuntarily committed, but until he does something sufficiently violent, he can refuse treatment and can’t be forced to take his medications.
He gets violent enough to get arrested, and hospitalized for a few days – and then he’s released. Fortunately, he’s too broke to be able to buy a firearm. Until you see someone you knew slide down this terrible path, it’s difficult to believe.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: I’m not arguing he shouldn’t be held culpable or liable.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: I did not. Some dipshit Cherokee County Sheriff’s captain did.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: I honestly don’t have any good answers for you. Some states have Red Flag laws that prevent people who are diagnosed with certain types of mental illness from buying or possessing guns if they’ve been diagnosed since purchase. Others have cooling off periods. Others have provisions to allow law enforcement and/or family to petition a court to take someone’s guns away, sort of a restraining order for guns that can then be revisited if circumstances change.
The issue is not and is never the people that are willing to actually abide by the laws on the books. It is the ones who aren’t. And it is also the ones that abide by the laws until they don’t. Even if Colorado had a ten day cooling off period between purchase and pickup the way California does, I’m not sure it would have prevented this. All it would have done, unless his family did something to get him help, would have moved it back ten days.
Adam L Silverman
@Keith P.: You mean the Atlanta shooter? We’ve already got documentation from the Korean language and other Asian news media that he made it very clear he was targeting Asian Americans/Asians.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: I wrote my doctoral dissertation about Rudolph, but please, enlighten me on who he really is and what he was really doing.
Adam L Silverman
@cain: I’m a big fan. As long as I’m not doing the cooking and the person who is knows what they’re doing.
Adam L Silverman
@Villago Delenda Est: So are some of the “terrorism” experts who have decided that he’s an incel. Even as they indicate they’re not going to comment because there’s not enough information. Hence the impetus for this post.
Adam L Silverman
@Procopius: It was established. I did an entire post the day after the attack citing the sources that documented his anti Asian-American/Asian animus.
Adam L Silverman
@AnotherBruce: Thank you for the kind words. It’ll never happen. Occasionally I do get asked for a quote:
https://www.newsweek.com/will-trump-troop-withdrawals-tie-bidens-hands-afghanistan-iraq-1548059
Adam L Silverman
@Procopius: @gwangung: @Emma: @Brachiator: I dealt with this on the front page the day after the attacks in Atlanta:
https://balloon-juice.com/2021/03/17/breaking-eyewitness-reports-indicate-the-atlanta-mass-shooter-domestic-terrorist-was-specificaly-targeting-asians-contradict-this-mornings-law-enforcement-statements/
Yutsano
@cain: You’re Tamil? Or just a fan of the food.
Adam L Silverman
@JaneE: Psychotic break. He’d have no idea what he did or why he did it.
Adam L Silverman
Apparently I’m hanging out in here having a conversation with myself…
Yutsano
@Adam L Silverman: Should we be concerned?
Emma
@Adam L Silverman: Yes, I know you did, sorry. I’ve been extremely angry this past week at people downplaying the intertwined racism and sexism. I’m very fucking pissed off. The Boulder shooting also fucking pisses me off and scares me in a different way
Edit: on a happier note, I will be making sup kambing in the near future. The variation with more coriander powder than turmeric. It will be awesome, and I will die happy of a heart attack.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: Always.
Adam L Silverman
@Emma: No need to apologize. I never know who has actually read what, so I wanted to make sure everyone bringing this up knows we dealt with it on the front page.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
I saw it. It was great stuff, as always.
My only point is that not every person with kinks and fixations is a hateful monster dying to hurt others.
Emma
@Brachiator: no, but every person with a kink for Asian (or any other racial group) women needs to be dick-kicked until non-functionality.
gwangung
@Emma: I share that.
@Brachiator: I’ve had enough experience with sufferers of yellow fever to handle them firmly, but not to coddle them…..
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: No arguments from me.
Adam L Silverman
@Emma: What if I just find women that I think are attractive attractive and it doesn’t matter if they’re Asian, Black, Hispanic, Arab, Persian, white, mixed ethnicity, etc?
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: thanks.
Emma
@Adam L Silverman: well then, you’re a well-adjusted human being that doesn’t have creepy and dehumanizing assumptions about women of other races, and who meets each woman as an individual. I feel like this shouldn’t be rocket science, but then I always see white men go “are you saying I’m RACIST for liking Asian women?!?!?!” And if I am, dude who’s dated a string of Asian women under the assumption that we’re submissive little petals???
See what I mean about being extremely pissed off?
Emma
@gwangung: Can you dick-kick them as a favor to me next time? :D
Adam L Silverman
@Emma: I was largely teasing, but also trying to make sure I’m not going to get punched or kicked in the groin.
I understand why you’re upset.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: You’re welcome. Though I’m not sure I did much to help with that answer.
Sister Golden Bear
Back when I reported on the courts one of the saddest cases I covered was a young man who had paranoid delusions that electronic bugs were being placed in his brain.
His father had been trying to get him committed for years (the kid had been living in the streets) without any success.
And then one day he wandered in a Radio Shack, freaked out, and beat a sales clerk to death with a step ladder.
He was finally declared mentally incompetent and sent to a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Thank Maude he was too out of it to ever get a gun.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: I stand by what I wrote. YMMV.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: I sort of figured there wasn’t a good one.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: It’s after 11 PM here, feel free to sit by or lounge by.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: It is what makes this a wicked problem. And like almost all of the best examples of a wicked problem, what makes it wicked isn’t that we can’t think our way to a solution, we can. What makes it wicked is that it is almost impossible, for a variety of reasons, to actually both get broad support for the solution and implement it.
Sister Golden Bear
@gwangung: Agreed.
The vast majority of trans women killed in the U.S. are street sex workers, who are killed by their clients. Typically the client freaked out over actually acting on their fetish and killed the sex worker. Usually with massive overkill. I remember one victim who was stabbed 112 times.
@Brachiator:
Speaking as someone who’s actively involved in the kink community, kink is good only when it involves the consent of all parties. Non-consensual kink = abusive behavior, or worse.
lofgren
@Adam L Silverman: Ten days is a lot! I’ll take it. Maybe this incident would have been pushed back ten days, but in ten days there are plenty of angry, sad, or vulnerable people who will get help and avoid a tragedy. Ten days won’t stop every killing but it will stop some.
Gretchen
One problem is that if you have an adult family member having mental problems, you can’t do anything about it unless they agree. I couldn’t even make a psych appointment for my adult son because he was an adult. It had to wait until he was in a very bad way and agreed to go for help that I could get him any help. It’s probably different if you think your family member is a danger to themselves or others, but that’s hard for family to admit.
Adam L Silverman
@lofgren: I’m not arguing it won’t. But if his family is telling the truth that they think he is mentally ill and that he was suffering from paranoid delusions and that he had firearms/access to firearms and didn’t actually do anything before yesterday, I’m not sure another few days wait would have made a difference. If they knew all this and did nothing, they aren’t responsible for what he did yesterday in killing those 10 people, but they are responsible for not doing something to get him help and to try to prevent what happened yesterday from happening.
Gretchen
@lofgren: waiting periods are helpful, especially for suicidal people. Somebody did a study of people stopped from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, and, once saved, most of them didn’t try again. My husband had a friend who stepped in front of a train a day before his first psych appointment, and I can’t help but wonder if the train had been late or someone stopped to talk to him if he’d have been saved.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
It is extremely difficult for families to deal with loved ones with mental illness. Difficult to get them help. Difficult to get the right kind of help. And especially as people get older, they can resist and refuse help.
I’m not sure that other countries do it very much better. It probably helps, though, that it is often not easy for a disturbed person to get access to firearms.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: Unfortunately all true.
Emma
@Adam L Silverman: haha, don’t worry, my groin-destruction skills are all in the theoretical realm at any rate… the one time I took a self-defense class, I felt bad hitting the mannequin :(
KsSteve
Question for Adam regarding the weapon used in this massacre. My understanding is the problem with assault style weapons is not only capacity and rate of fire but especially increased lethality of the 5.56 /.223 round. It seems odd there is no reporting of wounded victims, only fatalities.
Omnes Omnibus
@Emma: The mannequin knows what it did.
Emma
@Omnes Omnibus: Classic case of its neck making unwanted advances toward my elbow >:(
Sister Golden Bear
@KsSteve: I saw an op-ed from a trauma surgeon after Parkland that unlike wounds from pistols or “ordinary” rifles, which often can be treated (although not always), assault rifles usually obliterate (his word) any organs they hit.
Consequently, surgeons can’t repair them because there’s nothing left to repair. Which accounts for the higher fatality rate and the lower injured rate.
But I’ll defer to Adam’s expertise.
Poe Larity
I have probably spent 2 months of evenings in wards during visitors hours at a major metro that expends huge sums for mental health.
Am honestly surprised how few mass shootings there are. Apparently we get “lucky” and most that reach this state only take their own life or one other. I dont have any answers, and I think mental health folks try their hardest.
But I think it’s only going to get worse post-covid.
Kattails
@Sister Golden Bear: I remember reading a couple of extensive articles about this at the time. That is the issue, people tend to think of a “bullet hole” with an entry and exit wound and you can hopefully repair the stuff in between. But these assault rifles are designed to leave everything in between utterly destroyed. It’s really sick.
I also remember hearing some people saying “show the bodies” just because of this. The general populace really not understanding the difference, the absolute lethality of these weapons. The call, such as it was, was partly in response to the monsters who called it all a hoax. The ones who labelled the dead kids and their parents as crisis actors.
Matt McIrvin
The thing Kaczynski and Rudolph had in common is that they both had followers who found their political messages attractive. I remember arguing with a lot of Unabomber fans online back in the 90s and early 2000s–some rejected his methods but found the manifesto compelling, others were overtly pro-bombing people. I recall some journalists who were upset that he was being labeled mentally ill because the powers that be were using this to discredit his important ideas about society and technology.
All that puts Kaczynski in the political-terrorist bucket to me. He succeeded in his goal of getting attention for his ideas.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Sister Golden Bear:
Another problem being that even if someone does not own or purchase a gun, they may have access to someone else’s legally purchased weapons.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Kattails: Even small caliber weapons can do some horrible damage. On some occasions the bullets do not have a clear path from entry to exit wound but “bounce” around causing organ damage. Sometimes it sucks having quite so many EMTs and nurses in my family. All the things you wish you didn’t know.
Original Lee
Sadly, it is very difficult to get mental health assistance for any adult who is not immediately and obviously a danger to self or others, which is often too late. My mother used to volunteer for a suicide help line. She had to quit after a few years because it became overwhelming to her how many people are in a very bad place mentally and were compensating well enough that they couldn’t get help when they needed it; the suicide help line was literally the last guardrail between themselves and the cliff. IIRC the phone call that broke her was the one where the only thing keeping the guy from committing suicide was not wanting his wife to be a suspect in his death.