I'm not going to call judgment on any of this. I've seen totally rational and very 'cool' (as in, hard to perturb) people go from their normal happy self to strapped down on a stretcher in the space of 48 very long hours. People can be under absolutely immense pressure and not show it until something hits them at the wrong angle, or some tiny blood vessel in the brain decides it's had enough.
Crystals are like that too: along one axis you can up the pressure to incredible values and nothing will even show to indicate something is up, then you tap them lightly along another axis and boom, nothing but dust left.
Things that can trigger this kind of episode besides the obvious medical causes are simultaneous crisis in relationships, financial situation (probably not here) and professional life. Other ways in which it can happen are bad drug trips and many other ways besides.
Yet another option is that there is real substance to Ians claims about police brutality but he could have done a lot better if he wanted to make that claim and make it stick. All in all an extremely sad affair where I'm fairly sure we'll never know the real root cause, all we can do is keep our eyes open for repeats of such patterns in the people near to us and to hopefully react in time when we see them.
Agreed on all counts. A particularly bad day or days can absolutely wreck a person, and until someone or somebody close to them has gone through the process there is really no explaining how real a thing it is.
In Ian's case, some combination of alcohol, depression, and police violence (seriously, go read the coroner's report) seems to be the cause.
What's entirely absurd is the number of people here who, hat in hand, are all too happy to say "well golly gee another terrible victim of mental health problems" and ignore the likely sexual abuse ("cavity search" in polite terms) that Ian suffered at the hands of the police.
If the same story happened here with !police, you can bet your ass that people here would be incensed and crying about how something must be done, but yet given what happened here everybody seems oddly okay with blaming the victim and spreading the vague explanation of mental health.
That's not right, that's not justice, and that's not what we should be doing.
Then again, it's a lot easier than realizing how fucked the system has become while we've been screwing around in startupcanistan.
