Bringing this over from the last thread, a post by 4senthia.
Not to argue but there is no one "normal".
2 people can never occupy the same space. Mentally physically or otherwise.
I can't literally ever see thru the eyes of another nor can they thru mine.
That's one reason colors look different to all of us.
I'm not saying this teen isn't/wasn't depressed. IMO many of us are.
It's very common among teens.
They lack the coping skills, but they are readily available from counselors and the like. In a wished-for "ideal" artists' community such as the Tannery, where this young man actually worked at times w/little children, I'm sure the occupants are socially aware enough to provide such services.
If some refuse to believe in broken people and in the existence, even in the most non-religious form, of unexplainable evil, that's their right and I get it.
As a child of molestation and extreme mental abuse I had been at the bottom of the "pit" so many times when I was his age.
And we have no evidence whatsoever that he was abused or neglected.
IMO it was all a sick game to him. He is charged with lying in wait for Maddy.
What a road to choose to go down, and I do believe he had his eyes wide open.
Sorry not meaning to offend anyone.
jmho
I'm sorry that you had to experience so much trauma as an adult.
What I was saying, in my post, that this boy isn't "normal", and just decided to do this just to do it. There is something wrong with the way he processes things, and the way he sees the world. I do believe there is a "normal", although there isn't one perfect "normal" that exists in one person. There are societal "norms", and semesters worth of curricula to teach "abnormal psych" classes. There is a psychologically "normal" type, and a psychologically "abnormal" type, although it can be difficult to determine in some people. But the theory of "abnormal psych" and "normal psych" is there.
So. He didn't do something that all the rest of us wished we could do, we're just morally superior. None of us want to torture a child. In other crimes, the perp has a normal psych but an underdeveloped sense of justice and fairness, and maturity and impulse control. Someone who watches an expensive diamond necklace fall of a woman's wrist, and waits til she's out of sight and pockets the diamond bracelet is only doing what all of us would also like to do, but we are morally superior and more mature. We'd call to her and get it back to her. So the bracelet thief is like all of us, just chooses to do what she knows is the wrong thing to do.
Someone who tortures a child is doing something none of us have any desire whatsoever to do. They aren't like us. We are not separated from them by maturity, or impulse control, or sense of justice. We simply have no desire whatsoever to tie up a child and torture her.
Something is different, and not functioning, in his brain.
IMHO.