Across the pond

It could not be a more depressing today in Lyme Bay. It is nearly dark at 2 PM. The sand on Chesil Beach now appears dark grey. The wind is sending down the rain at 45 degrees in the faces of the gas men who were digging up the road in front of my house. It is enough to dash the spirits of the sunniest temparament, let alone a manic depressive always ready to plunge into seasonably affecttive depression.

The news is even more depressing than the weather. Gordon Brown has just addressed the nation to re-assure us in the wake of the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan in the last few years.  All he had to tell us was that was still determined to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq and that this was protecting us from the threat of international terrorism.

President Obama is facing even more depressing news. Yesterday’s shooting by the gunman who went on the rampage at the army base in Texas ended the lives of thirteen US soldiers, and  Obama is dealing with a killer who is a major in his own army,  a psychartrist charged with healing the traumas of the troops who have been fighting these wars.

Yet my own internal bi-polar reglator is propelling me out of yesterday’s black mood. Presestly I am neither depressed nor euphoric. And wondering what  drove Nidal Hasan, an expert in mental health, to behave as he did.

According to the latest detailed news story in the Washington Post, Hasan is the 39-year-old son of Palestian immigrants from the West Bank.  He was born in Arlington, Virginnia, and has spent his working life at the nearby highly regarded Walter Reed Medical Center and more recently at the Fort Hood Texas army base. They have found no evidence of terrorist connections but they have found that he was against the Iraq war, that he felt he was being taunted by some colleagues because he is a devout Muslim, and he wanted to get out of the army. He is single, but according to his wife had been looking for a wife, unsuccessfully, who shared his devout Muslim faith.

So on this evidence it looks as if Hasan has less in common with terrerists than he has with other Americans who have gone on a killing spree,  loners who have been pushed over the edge by intolerable personal stresses.  But of course as more details emerge this picture may change.

While writing this story I have become not increasingly numb.

It is deeply shocking when a healer, be he a psychiartrist or a GP, becomes a mass murderer. One can only hope that something will be learned from the subsequent investigations.