I'm reading this story about the kid in Dekalb, Ill., who snuck guns into a school and just opened fire, out of nowhere.  Here's the line that got my brain a movin:

"If there is such a thing as a profile of a mass murderer, Steven Kazmierczak didn't fit it: outstanding student, engaging, polite and industrious, with what looked like a bright future in the criminal justice field."

As the story goes, he stopped taking his meds, started to act "erratic" the last couple of weeks, and this all culminated in the tradgedy.

Another quote:  "He was engaging, motivated, responsible. I saw nothing to suggest that there was anything troubling about his behavior."

These all sound like nice traits to have.  But, it seems to me, that if he had to have a pill to make these traits work, then maybe the whole thing was a lie, the entire "public" persona of the guy.  The only thing that was keeping the people around him safe from actual physical harm, was that ritual of taking the pill everyday. 

I say ritual, cause I'm not sure I believe in anti-depressants.  Just like they say that Hypnosis is just a social construct, and people just act "hypnotized" because they know they're supposed to, I just wonder if taking meds doesn't perform the same fucntion in lots of people's minds - they take the pill, they're "ok".

But even if you do believe in anti-depressants, I hope you can agree that the physical act of ingesting that pill, including its chemical components, was the main thing keeping this attack from happening.  Whether they're a good thing or not, that's a paper-thin safety barrier, if you ask me.  I have no idea what a solution might be, but I gotta think, how many *more* terrible things are 12 pills away from happening?

All of this gets me wondering, from a hypno perspective, how powerful are our daily rituals?  I just finished Bandler and Grinder's "Reframing", and there was a story about a friend of theirs who went to a new management position at some corporation.  His philosophy was to make things more "people-oriented", so he got rid of the impersonal time-clock.

Immediately, productivity dropped.  Apparently, the clock was an anchor for these people.  Everyday, they started their morning rituals, and when they got to the part where they "clocked-in", that was their signal to "be at work".  When he got rid of the clock, no one knew what to do!

In my own daily rituals, I find I get the pattern-interrupt when I deviate from them.  The more ingrained they are, that is, the less attention that I have to pay to them to perform them, well, the more ingrained they are.  The harder they are to replace, or change.

You know, who knows what happened with this guy, and I'm not trying to pretend that I do.  But imagining that I'm him, it seems like an awful big burden to have to take that pill to be "normal", to have to act normal, to be all those wonderful things quoted above, all the time.  Not only the doing of those things, but the knowledge of them, as well.  The knowing that if not for that thankful pill, what would I be?

Not only that, but if the time came that I was "done", that I'd had enough with life, well, I'd have a convenient escape hatch.  Once I stopped taking the pill, you couldn't blame me for anything I did.  And I wouldn't have to feel bad about it.  Its my genetics.

Again, all conjecture.  But I re-read that first line, about his not fitting the profile of a mass-murderer.  And then I think about that idea that he was faking "happiness" all that time, *because* he was on those drugs. 

And it sounds like a lot of self-delusion.  On his part, for pretending to be something he wasn't.  And on our part, for wanting so badly to believe that all we need to do is medicate someone, and all will be well, we won't even have to check up on them after that. 

And for getting angry each time it doesn't work...