I am even wary of talking about “the boys” in this way, as if their motivations were necessarily shared. Dylan and Eric planned the massacre together, and they acted together, but I believe—as most of the investigators who examined the evidence do—that they were two different people, who participated for very different reasons.
So while there is likely not a single answer, there is one piece of the puzzle that reveals more for me of the overall picture than any other: that Dylan was experiencing depression or another brain health crisis that contributed to his desire to die by suicide, and his desire to die played an intrinsic role in his participation in the massacre.
I realize this is a controversial statement. I certainly do not mean to imply that Dylan’s brain health issues made him capable of the atrocities he would eventually enact. To do so would be to insult the hundreds of millions of people around the world living with depression and other mood disorders. Stigma and ignorance mean that many people who are struggling do not pursue the help they desperately need. The shame attached to getting help for a crisis in brain health is not only tragic but deadly, and I have no desire whatsoever to contribute to it.
Nor do I believe a crisis in brain health is necessarily an explanation for what Dylan did. The automatic conflation of violence and “craziness” is not only painful for people who are suffering, it is incorrect. According to Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, who has spent his career studying the intersection between mental illness and violence, serious mental illness by itself is a risk factor for violence in just 4 percent of incidents. It is only when mental illness appears in combination with other risk factors—primarily drug and alcohol abuse—that the numbers increase. (Dylan was drinking at the end of his life, something Tom and I did not know.)
Most people living with mood disorders are not dangerous to others at all. As Swanson also points out, though, there is some overlap between mental disorders and violence, and I cannot believe it’s productive for anyone when we take the conversation off the table.
There is, in particular, an overlap between brain health issues and mass shootings. In 1999, prompted by the shootings at Columbine High School, the US Secret Service and the Department of Education launched the Safe School Initiative, an examination of thirty-seven school attacks, in the hopes of preventing others in the future. The researchers found that “most attackers showed some history of suicidal attempts or thoughts, or a history of feeling extreme depression or desperation.” Access to brain health screening and treatment, then, is critical in preventing violence—as well as suicide, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, and a host of other dangers threatening teens. Better access to these resources may not be “the” answer, but it’s pretty close to one.
You will notice that I use the terms “brain illness” and “brain health” throughout this book, as opposed to the more commonly used “mental illness” and “mental health.” That decision was the result of a conversation I had with Dr. Jeremy Richman, a neuroscientist whose daughter, Avielle Rose Richman, was one of the children murdered by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Dr. Richman and his wife, Jennifer Hensel, a scientist and medical writer, founded the Avielle Foundation in their daughter’s honor, hoping to remove the stigma for people seeking help, to develop the concept of a “brain health checkup,” and to identify behavioral and biochemical diagnostics to detect those at risk of violent behaviors.
In our conversation, Dr. Richman explained: “?‘Mental’ is invisible. It comes with all the fear, trepidation, and stigma of things we don’t understand. But we know there are real, physical manifestations within the brain that can be imaged, measured, quantified, and understood. We need to move our understanding to the visible world of brain health and brain disease, which is tangible.”
The emphasis I place in this chapter on Dylan’s suicide may sound insensitive, as if I believe his death was more important than the deaths he caused—which is not the way I feel at all. I simply mean that coming to understand Dylan’s death as a suicide opened the door to a new way of thinking for me about everything he had done. I truly believe Dylan lost access to the tools allowing him to make rational decisions, and I hope in this chapter to discuss some of the reasons with thoughtfulness and sensitivity. I am endlessly grateful to the world-class experts who made themselves available in order to help me understand.
Were there signs I missed that Dylan was going to commit a crime, especially one of such devastating magnitude? No. Even now, I do not believe there were. Both boys did “leak” their plan by making disclosures of varying accuracy and specificity to their friends. But they did not leak to us.
That doesn’t mean I was powerless, however, because there were signs that year that Dylan was depressed. I now believe that if Tom and I had been equipped then to recognize those signs, and been able to intervene as far as his depression was concerned, we would at least have had a fighting chance to prevent what came next.
Understanding Dylan’s death as a suicide came almost as an afterthought for me. But for Dylan, the desire to die by suicide was where it all began.
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One afternoon, a few months after the tragedy, I was leafing through a journal over a cup of tea in the break room. Our office received a number of higher-education journals, and looking through them helped me feel connected to a larger world not devastated by my son. I had stopped reading mainstream newspapers and magazines, lest I run into a quote about our family from a “trusted friend” I’d never met, or a scathing editorial about our overindulgence of Dylan, or our family’s lack of moral values. Whatever news about the investigation or the lawsuits or the victims I needed to know came through our lawyer, or from friends and family members.
I came across an article on youth suicide prevention. In the first paragraph, the author said something like, “There is a temptation to look to outside influences like violent video games and lax gun control laws for an explanation of the tragedy at Columbine. But among all the other deaths and injuries, two boys died by suicide that day.”
Those words stopped me in my tracks. Because I had been so single-mindedly focused on the murders he had committed, I had strangely not considered the significance of Dylan’s death by suicide.
Intellectually, of course, I knew Dylan had died by his own hand: the autopsy report had said so. I had taken another short step toward conceptualizing Dylan’s death as a suicide in the wake of a short-lived but popular conspiracy theory in the aftermath of the shootings: that Eric had killed Dylan. (It’s alive and well online.) Whenever anyone raised the issue with me, I told them it didn’t matter. Whether Dylan had pulled the trigger or had been killed by Eric (or by a cop, per another conspiracy theory floating around in those days), Dylan was responsible for his own death.
And yet, until I saw that journal article, I was sure his suicide had been an impulsive act, a response to this “prank gone awry”—not part of any long-standing plan.
After reading the article, I wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t quite an “aha” moment—the situation was far too complex, and I was far too horrified and confused. Still, something in me shifted. That random journal article created an aperture in me, an opening to an understanding I had not allowed myself to have: whatever else he had intended, Dylan had gone to the school to die.
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