Response to 'A Loded Gun'

In the New Yorker, there is an article titled
A Loaded Gun
by Patrick Radden Keefe


I want to respond to this article.  First, a thank you to the author of the article.  This is precisely the type of topic which is open for discussion on this blog about academia and mental health.

The article is a story about a woman professor who shot six of her colleagues not long after her tenure case was denied at the University of Alabama.  Her name is Amy Bishop.  The smoking gun, according to the article, is that Bishop shot her brother in what their mother claimed was an accident.  The article makes a character sketch and attempts to detail the events leading up to Bishop's academic career.

There are several threads to the article.  I will talk about several, but the one that concerns me the most is the incidence of undiagnosed mental illness among high-achieving individuals.  Page 12 of the article implies that high-functioning people cannot have a mental health problems.  This is as if nobody with a mental health issue can be high-functioning, earn a Ph.D., and be a professor.  I spent the last blog post addressing this.  Suffice it to say, that people with mental disorders can be very successful and still struggle with a mental disorder.  To me it seems a gross miscarriage of justice that Bishop did not receive a diagnosis or have a successful insanity plea.  I believe Bishop to be a paranoid schizophrenic just as she claimed in the article.  To me it seems to be a crime that the justice system did not recognize this.  Due to this, she is currently serving life without parole at the Tutwiler Prison for Women.  It is not clear whether she is receiving treatment.

Another thread in the article is the academic career path and the stresses of it.  The career path is typically graduate school to post-doctoral position to faculty interview to faculty position to tenure.  The article mentioned a first impression formed by a colleague of Bishop as crazy, presumably formed during the interview process.  The article also mentioned that this perspective was shared after the fact, and could have been a reinterpretation of past events in light of present information (the shooting at U. of Alabama).  I, for one, believe that it is almost never the right of someone to make judgements about another's mental health, particularly if that someone is not a health professional.

Throughout the article I was disturbed by the tendency of people to judge Bishop's mental health despite not being mental health professionals.  I am continually disturbed by this in society.  Perhaps we should better venerate the mental health profession so that we are less likely to inadvertently undermine their attempts to help people.

Continuing the thread about the academic career path, the article also mentioned women in academia as having a difficult time.  It can be true that some women have a hard time balancing the competing demands of family and career.  This is an expectation that is thrust upon them by both themselves and society.  The idea that you have to be a helicopter parent combined with the 60+ hour a week career demands of an assistant professor can be crippling.  On the other hand, plenty of people handle these pressures just fine, perhaps by not being helicopter parents.

As for tenure pressures, although I do not have first-hand experience of them, it should be remarked that job turnover in industry is much higher than academia.  Most young professionals do not even keep the same job for the first 6 years (the number of years to tenure) of their career.  The idea that the threat of not getting tenure and loosing ones job can possibly explain a massacre is absurd.

The article also mentioned one 'symptom' which appears in the DSM-4 but is suggested to be removed from the DSM-5, that is narcissism.  The article said that some people claimed that Bishop was narcissistic.  My problem with the whole discussion of narcissism is that nobody can adequately define the term.  Even mania is better defined than narcissism, which seems to depend on high subjective judgements of what is normal.  Even if Bishop was concerned about academic credit and acclaim, this should not be taken out of the context of tenure pressures.

Now, I want to return to the question of guilt.  There is no doubt that Bishop was responsible for the massacre on Feb. 12, 2010 at the University of Alabama.  There were too many witnesses to conclude anything else.  What is most striking is that Bishop does not remember the incident.  She said that she has no memory of the event.  This makes one wonder both about the memory of someone having a schizophrenic episode and about the memory of someone experiencing extreme trauma, even trauma that they inflicted.  I do not believe that Bishop is lying about this, because she would have nothing to gain.  It is really interesting to think that her disease may have progressed to the point that she was unaware of her own actions.