A Wisconsin woman accused of stabbing her classmate to please horror character Slender Man more than a decade ago asked a judge again Friday to release her from a psychiatric hospital.
Morgan Geyser, who is now 22 years old, filed a petition with Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren seeking her release from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. The petition marks the third time in the last two years she has asked Bohren to let her out of the facility.
She withdrew her first petition two months after filing it in 2022. Bohren denied her second request this past April, saying she remains a risk to the public.
I mean sure, but at 12 years old you cannot possibly be a lost cause I would think, there is still so much development going on.
That is like saying a 12 year old should be able to be healed from being quadriplegic because they are still growing. Some medical conditions are for live (at our current medical knowledge) and it doesn’t matter if they are “physical” or “mental”.
There’s a huge difference between neurological growth and limb growth. Now if you could point to the physical damage on her brain and display evidence it can’t heal I might agree with you. But as it stands all we know is an atrocious act and our own cultural biases that make it easy and convenient to say that a 12 year old committing such an act is irreparably broken.
And even if the causative disorder is irreparable, many psychological disorders allow for workarounds and treatments that can prevent the catastrophic scenarios.
It’s not physical damage to her brain. She has schizophrenia and developed symptoms of it at an abnormally young age. She didn’t have a clear grasp on what was and wasn’t real and that ultimately led her to stab her friend nineteen times. It’s clearly a condition that has presented itself as very dangerous for her, and it needs to be under control before she can be released.
That’s a false equivalence
Just because their brains are still developing doesn’t mean they aren’t developing wrong.
If the foundation is fucked the whole thing is gonna be fucked no matter how much time you give it.
Some people are unfortunately born with fucked foundations be they physical or mental.
It’s up to the medical practitioners to decide.
Why?
A twelve year old who stabs another twelve year old 19 times is outside of normal.
I’d be fine with executing anyone who does that, at any age, unless it’s in self defense.
Well you could be. Some people are just born that way.
Sure you can. Every psychopath, sociopath, narcissist was that when they were 12. They went on to do bad things later. What makes this person unusual is the lack of impulse control.
Nowhere near every sociopath goes on to do bad things. Most of them are normal people living among us.
It’s notable that there was a story roughly 15 years ago about a psychology researcher who put people into MRIs to scan their brains. He found out that psychopaths have different development than the general public. He put himself in for funsies and found that he has the same structural issues. When he asked his family about it, they confirmed that they had always known he was a psychopath.
To your point, you can absolutely be a functional member of society with one of these disorders, but the likelihood that you can’t be is also heavily increased.
Doing bad things and getting away with it.
Saying every psycopath was like that when he was 12 is not the same as saying every 12 year old with psychopathic behaviours went on to do bad things.
This girl went on to have a normal life after getting treated, for example: https://youtu.be/UNMUFlpIero