Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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I'd like to chime in on this...
I lost a friend to an event like this one a few years ago, with a high-caliber revolver at point-blank.
I have talked to people who were in the mindspace to do this kind of thing for various reasons.
I know people who were long-term steroid abusers, one of which is "winding down" now.
I study psychiatry and the foundations of the human mind.
And my single insight into it is ... it could be any one of us.
Yes, in this case, it would seem likely to be because of the steroids, whether directly or indirectly. As such, one could of course assign blame, but in reality we do ask them to take them, and condone them doing so. Several professionals in the field have as much as said that you just don't end up looking like the average WWE wrestler without doing steroids, and people want to see it. In reality, it falls under the heading of "cost of doing business".
And while steroid use is known to be a problem, it is also something that falls under the heading of "calculated risk" and can be managed as such; in most cases, if you can find a doctor who is willing to monitor the use, it is not at all as risky as people have been raised to think, although it is still risky. The main problem is with people who pick it up and use it without medical supervision, which is also just silly, as it's not that hard to find a doctor who would rather manage the risk (damage reduction approach) than refuse (total abstention approach).
Also, from seeing the one who is now winding down from it, I can say that a lot of these guys probably started out when they were too young to think through the long-term consequences, some of them probably starting out before the dangers were widely known. Winding down is just the kind of thing a lot of these people would have a problem with. It requires training harder than you ever did, except now all you're doing is lose muscle, you just have to train that much more to avoid looking like a ruined husk covered in skin that no longer even remotely fits you. And along the way, you will feel some or all of the consequences of dropping hormone levels: mental impairment, loss of energy, loss of libido, erectile dysfunction, depression, and so forth.
Not an excuse, as such, but it's fairly understandable how it comes to be.
And, we don't know that steroids were the cause here.
There are a lot of conditions that can cause a person to snap this way.
I lost a friend because her father had a brain tumor. The doctors were treating it as usual, but one day it started pushing on the wrong parts of his brain, and he "lost it". It is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't experienced a psychotic mindspace, but suffice to say that it wasn't "him" doing these things. He got a high-caliber revolver and shot his family, including his daughter (my friend), and then shot himself.
Do I blame the father? No. He was ill, and there was just no way to predict the outcome.
Shit happens. Stuff breaks. People die. That's just life, we can't safeguard everything.
There are also several other somatic and mental illnesses that can cause events of this sort to happen. The commonality is that the person ends up in a psychotic mindspace, and aren't themselves in the usual sense. There is little in the way of coherent thinking, no real understanding of cause and effect, no real "touch" with reality, and their usual personality doesn't manifest the usual way.
Certain prescription drugs can cause such things during normal, doctor-supervised use.
And most psychotic events don't end up with tragedies like this. I've had the unpleasant opportunity to experience brief psychotic events due to proper use of prescription drugs in the past, and can honestly say I wasn't me at the time. Nothing serious came out of it, but I can easily understand how it could go wrong, given the "right" circumstances for that.
In my case, I have some experience in managing alternate states, and doing rigorous "reality testing", so in my case, I had the discipline not to physically interact with the world around me in any way until the episodes passed, but a regular person doesn't have that. It just feels completely real and you're certain you're yourself and in control of your faculties, until afterwards. That's how I felt, too, even though the ingrained habits that let me control it told me differently; I had to behave in a way that seemed insane at the time, because I trusted (not "knew", but "trusted") that it was the right thing to do.
In short, if there's anything to blame him for, it's for starting the steroids in the first place.
People can have a surprise heart attack while driving a car, and crash. Nobody will blame them for that, even if their lifestyle was one that increased the likelyhood of having a heart attack. There's no reason to judge more harshly when other organs fail in a surprising manner, even when that organ is the brain. That's just how the body works.
We don't demand that people be able to fly, because it's easy to see that they can't.
Just because it isn't quite as easy to see where some other conditions mandate a specific outcome, such as with transient failures in the brain, doesn't mean that it's any more reasonable to expect (or demand) people to cope better with that than with a heart attack, or that it's any more reasonable to assign blame for it.
Again, if the steroids were the definite cause, one could of course blame him for starting in the first place, just like we can blame anorectic kids for having tried to live up to the modern "ideal appearance" and giving in to peer pressure, and can blame smokers for having started smoking, or whatever.
But the event itself is dictated by circumstance, cause and effect.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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Chris Benoit, WWE Wrestler Found Dead - 
it appears he killed his wife and smothered his young son to death then took his own life...he was one hell of a wrestler..makes me wonder what could drive someone to do such a thing? especially someone so loved and successful. 
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