Watching Death by Lightning has made me wonder about mentally ill assassins, so of course, I needed to check in on John Hinckley Jr., Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassin.
The last I heard he was out of the asylum and living with his mother, heavily medicated, I assumed. And he did, and he had to track his computer usage, stay away from porn, and obviously try not to think about Jodie Foster.
But that was then, in 2016. Now he’s FINE, evidently.
Well, that was a little testy. Mental illnesses can go away. I haven’t had a bout of depression in 20 years. Why do I think I’m fine and he can’t be?
Perhaps it’s because he’s not just FINE, he’s thriving. He paints pictures of his orange cat that seem very influenced by George Rodrigue and his Blue Dog.
He also writes and performs original music. The music is not as pleasant as the cat. You can find his YouTube channel easily, but I’m not going to link to it. (”I don’t need that kind of drama,” Spunky says.)
- It’s dour. To be fair, I don’t suppose he could play song parodies.
- He plays a guitar labelled with his name in stick-on letters. No nuance. Kind of off-putting, but then he might not want people to like his music and then find out his name.
- However, because you know his name, every song he sings sounds like it’s written by an assassin. Songs about love turn into songs about celebrity stalking. Songs about wanting to scream sound like what someone would think before they shot a president.
Still, according to authorities, he’s no longer insane. There are no restrictions. Unconditional release since 2022. If I were Jodie Foster I would have opinions on this.
If you want a deep dive, there’s a New Yorker article about Leslie Deveau, his asylum girlfriend, that goes into his recovery from mental illness.
7 responses to “TWIL: What John Hinckley has been up to”
…uh. Yes. The New Yorker article does not make this sound like a situation where he can in fact be determined to be Doing Just Fine Now since he has previously been determined to be Doing Just Fine but be tricking his doctors, so… But also there is not a really good way of dealing with this?
(and if he had not been deemed mentally unfit, it seems reasonably likely that he would have been released from prison by now, I am guessing [well; if he had shot at someone who was not a president; aiming at presidents probably lengthens sentences?], whether or not he was still somewhat obsessive? Which also seems patently unfair to Jodie Foster so there is that…)
KC – Yes! “I’ve been lying to my psychiatrist.” I had an uncle who did that. What is the point of lying to any doctor?
I mean, in his case, “let me out of here”! Whether he was a danger to himself or not, I think he wanted out; whether he would harm others or not and/or do something additional that was Absolutely Bonkers in his delusions of grandeur, it sounds like he wanted out. He definitely needed to not be let out, however, while still thinking it was gloriously romantic to prove your love to someone by [checks notes] attempting to assassinate a president.
But yes: doctors need an accurate picture for accurate diagnosis, generally!
But also some doctors do have warped views of things; I didn’t lie to the student health center medical staff, but when I had come down with a bear of a life-limiting chronic illness (fatigue! dizziness! constant nausea! blackouts! insomnia!) I did refuse to fill out the Depression Questionnaires, because my honest results for most of the questions were because of physical symptoms (…I mean. How *is* your appetite when you feel like you’re about to vomit most of the time?) and the number-based screening causes an automatic bucketing, and I needed *health answers*; I did still had to get “passed” as non-mental-health by the psych team, and they were *very* enthusiastic about trying to find me a mental health diagnosis of some kind… until they saw my skin go green as I almost blacked out in one of their offices, at which point they concluded they did not want me and very rapidly passed me back across to medical, who passed me to the Mayo Clinic, who did lots of testing and, while they didn’t have anything useful in terms of treatment recommendations, at least had very hard evidence that I was not imagining things or making it up.
So I could see, if you *knew* that Condition X was not caused by Thing Y, lying about Thing Y, just… patients are way more often wrong about whether things are connected than doctors are (by a long distance) so lying is very, very unsafe…
KC – THAT sounds very bad. was that the POTS?
Yep! It’s an unusually severe case of POTS with progressive onset instead of abrupt postviral onset, so it was a bit weird of an experience to have my body changing week by week and having to adapt to each new symptom or capacity hit, while also having to explain to doctors that I was sick, while the sick kept moving the goalposts [how often do you black out per week? … this month or last month?], while also trying to accomplish whatever of normal life was achievable [which also kept changing without notice]. You probably experienced that to some degree in getting an MS diagnosis originally? Or did that come about sideways? (they checked for MS lesions in the brain at one point, so I assume either they were just at a loss or it has at least some similarities?)
We did have some very, very good doctors, and I got diagnosed a lot sooner than most people do. But I can’t say I recommend it as an illness, although it is vastly superior to some of the ones they checked for! And I appreciated the eventual “Here are test results that demonstrate your body is being weird” because after enough people being uncertain about whether it’s psychological or not, you do start to wonder, but yes, bodily functions A, B, and C are doing some objectively really weird things that you presumably could not consciously affect! So that was also reassuring in a weird way. Anyway! Many adventures.
KC – I had a ridiculously easy diagnosis. Went to see a gastroenterologist, he listened to my symptoms, said, “Do you have MS?” At the time I had no other exacerbations to point to, so he did tests to rule out the normal things, told me I needed my own insurance, needed to get my own general physician, needed to get an MRI at some point. I promptly forgot all those things, but by luck and subconscious did the first two. When I got sick again a year later and they gave me the results of the MRI it all came back to me.
That is *wild* and congratulations, esp. on the insurance!