Category: suicide

The suicide of Robin Williams…

By Gary G. Kohls, MD

On July 2, 1961, an American icon, Earnest Hemingway, committed suicide at his beloved vacation home in Ketchum, Idaho. He had just flown to Ketchum after being discharged from Mayo Clinic’s psychiatric ward where he had received a series of electroshock “treatments” for a depression that had started after he had experienced the horrors of World War I as an ambulance driver.

One of his duties was to retrieve fragments of mutilated human bodies in the battle zone. He was haunted by the images of dead and bodies and dying humans for the rest of his life so there was no question that he had what was later to be understood as combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder, with depression and insomnia. Hemingway himself had been severely wounded by shrapnel. Like many victims of combat-induced PTSD, he drank a lot of alcoholic beverages and had had a series of failed marriages, with financial problems related to the alimony payments to his ex-wives. He understood that his psychiatric ECT “treatment” had erased his memory, and he knew that his writing career, his reason for living, was over.

Almost exactly 53 years after Hemingway’s suicide, another American icon, Robin Williams, entered a psychiatric facility in Minnesota (July 1, 2014). He had been given an as yet unknown cocktail of prescription drugs that resulted in his losing weight and withdrawing from his loved ones, sleeping, after his discharge later that month, in his darkened bedroom up to 20 hours a day, in an apparent drug-induced stupor.

Williams was said to have developed Parkinson’s Disease (and had been given some new drugs for it), which can commonly be caused by antipsychotic drugs, now often prescribed, off label (i.e., unapproved for such indications by the FDA), for insomnia, especially psycho-stimulant drug-induced insomnia (which Williams suffered from). It should be mentioned that antipsychotic drugs (like Abilify, Seroquel, Geodon, etc.) also commonly cause diabetes, obesity and hyperlipidemia, in addition to the neurological movement disorders that mimic Parkinson’s Disease. It is also important to note that when a patient suddenly quits antipsychotic drugs (even if first used for non-psychotic indications like insomnia) withdrawal symptoms can occur, such as acute psychoses, hallucinations, insomnia and mania any of which can lead a physician to falsely diagnose schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Within weeks after Williams’ discharge from Hazelden’s Rehabilitation facility in Lindstrom, MN, he hanged himself in the bedroom of his San Francisco home where he was certainly suffering multiple side effects from his cocktail of drugs. He left no suicide note, but certainly his psychiatrists, psychologists and other staff members at Hazelden know exactly what Williams could have written on such a note. So far Hazelden is mum on what happened to Williams during July’s rehab stay.

Some of Williams’ closest friends are claiming that the newly prescribed drugs were what killed him, but the media that are swarming all over the tragic event are avoiding those logical and obvious conclusions; for anybody who is aware of the well-known connections between psychiatric prescription drugs and violence, suicidality, dementia, and irrational thoughts and actions (whether while taking the drugs or withdrawing from them) has already asked him or herself the question: “I wonder what psych drugs Robin was on?”

Knowing that Williams had been under the care of psychiatrists for the last six weeks of his life, certain taboo questions need to be asked and answered.

But don’t hold your breath. There will be no answers unless we get them in the secret details of what happened at Hazelden, including what brain-altering drugs he was on. .

Shouldn’t there be penalties for pushers of legal brain-altering drugs?

There are penalties for bartenders who serve underage drinkers who go on to have auto accidents while under the influence. There are penalties for street corner drug pushers who supply their junkies with dangerous illicit drugs, and there are penalties for the drug lords who are at the top of the drug supply chain.

But shouldn’t there also be penalties for legal drug pushers who are supplying medications to their addictive and addicted clients without first obtaining from them fully informed consent after understanding what are the dangers of the drugs? Shouldn’t there be penalties for legal drug pushers who are prescribing dangerous brain-altering psychiatric drugs in combinations that have never even been tested for safety in the animal labs?

The heretofore respected—and very profitable—industries of Big Pharma, Big Psychiatry, Big Medicine and drug rehabilitation are all very interested in keeping any and all unwelcome truths about the lethality of their products from being aired out in the mainstream press. Thus the rapid disappearance of interest in the celebrity suicides or lethal psych drug overdoses by the time the belated coroner report reveals what drugs were in the victim’s blood and gastric contents. (Note that many coroners are not aware that many psych drugs are detectable in brain tissue long after the time that they disappear from the blood; therefore many coroners don’t bother to test for drugs in brain tissue samples).

If blood tests are negative for drugs, it is often erroneously assumed by the uninformed public (and even by medical professionals) that drugs aren’t a factor in the aberrant behavior or death of drug-taking patients. Drug withdrawal commonly causes patients to become irrational, violent or suicidal—realities that can occur at any time, even after the drug has disappeared from the blood.

The taboo reality: Psych drugs can cause suicidality

There have been millions of words written about how much everybody was shocked by Williams’ suicide. There have been thousands of flowers placed at any number of temporary shrines. There have been hundreds of comments on the Internet from amateur arm-chair psychologists spouting obsolete clichés about suicide, mental illness, drug abuse, alcoholism, cocaine addiction, and how wonderful prescription drugs have been for depression.

And there have been dozens of disinformational essays and website commentaries written by professional psychiatrists who have financial or career connections to Big Pharma, Big Psychiatry, Big Medicine and the rehab industries. Most of those commentaries distract readers from making the connections between suicidality and psych drugs. Some of the comments I have read have preemptively tried to discredit those who are publicly making those connections.

Whenever unexpected suicides or accidental drug overdoses occur among heavily drugged-up military veterans, active duty soldiers, celebrities or other groups of individuals, I search—often in vain—for information in the print media and on TV, radio and the Internet that will identify the drugs that are often involved. There seems to be a taboo on revealing the drug names, dosages, length of usage or who prescribed them. One has to read between the lines or wait until the information might possibly be revealed at www.ssristories.org (which, by the way should be mandatory reading for everybody, especially those who prescribe or consume psychiatric drugs). .

Rarely can I find information about the crazy-making drugs involved, the prescribing physicians or the institutions that were treating the individual before the unexpected death. Patient confidentiality is usually the reason given for the cover-ups—and which is the reason why important teachable moments about these tragedies are lost every day.

There is a lot of fluff to wade through on those mostly futile searches for the truth about the drugs. The useful information that could clinch the suspected real diagnosis (i.e., psychiatric drug-induced suicidality or psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome rather than the usual “mental illness” [of unknown cause]) seems to be cleverly concealed—probably with the intent to misinform the public and perpetuate the ever-present, cunningly-implanted myths of mental illness.

Calling for an inquest into the suicide of Robin Williams

What the Robin Williams’ case needs, especially in view of the American epidemic of prescription psychiatric drug deaths and suicides (tens of thousands every year), is an unbiased judicial inquest to determine the real root causes of his sudden and only partially explained death.

Autopsies can determine the immediate cause of death but inquests can reveal the underlying motivational or contributing factors involved. And the results of an inquest could be the beginning of a rational discourse about drug-induced violence and drug-induced mental ill health. So far, the corporate media’s rush to judgment about celebrity suicides and the violence epidemic has been subverting teachable moments that could save tens of thousands of lives in America. The disinformation so vigorously forced upon us from the four special interest groups mentioned above has guaranteed the dumbing-down of most of the potential consumers of psychiatric drugs, so that most Americans have become true believers in what they are repeatedly told about drugs in the prime time commercials on TV.

The Marin County coroner has established the preliminary cause of death in Williams’ case: suicide by asphyxiation/hanging. No surprises there. The coroner has also told the press that the toxicology findings on the blood and gastric fluids won’t be ready for 6 weeks (even though the tests could actually be completed in hours or days).

The confidence of the American public in Big Pharma’s highly profitable drugs and vaccines must not be shaken. Wall Street’s rigged stock market does not easily allow anything that could destroy investor confidence in their major publicly-traded corporation’s products, even if the product is bogus or destructive.

The beauty of an unbiased public inquest, which should have been done in the case of Adam Lanza and every other school shooter murder-suicide, would be the subpoena power of a grand jury to open up the previously secretive medical records and force testimony from Williams’ treatment team. The public could finally hear information that could make comprehensible the mysterious death of yet another high profile suicide victim and start the process of actually preventing America’s suicide and violence epidemics.

An inquest would likely reveal that Robin Williams did not have a “mental illness of unknown cause” or “bipolar disorder of unknown cause” or “depression of unknown cause” or “suicidality of unknown cause.” An inquest would obtain testimony from medical, psychiatric and psycho-pharmaceutical experts such as Peter Breggin, MD; Joseph Glenmullen, MD; Grace Jackson, MD; David Healey, MD; Russell Blaylock, MD; Fred Baughmann, MD, and other well-informed medical specialists who don’t own stock in Big Pharma and who know well how dangerous their drugs can be.

Robin Williams did not have a mental illness of unknown etiology

Just knowing a little about the life and times of Robin Williams (as would also be the case for that long list of drugged-up Hollywood celebrities that “died too soon”) easily disproves most of the amateur or professional theories about his death that have appeared online. The proposed inquest would reveal what happened inside the locked doors of the rehab facility.

What is the major reason that many psych drug skeptics, medical professionals and psychiatric survivors want an inquest in the Williams’ suicide? We want to know the names of the ingredients in the cocktail of drugs that had been tried on him (and the dosages and length of time they were taken). We want to know what side effects he had from the drugs and what his responses were. We want to know what was the reasoning behind the decision to prescribe unproven drug cocktails on someone whose brain was already adversely affected by the past use of potentially brain damaging drugs.

And we want to know, for the sake of past and future victims of these neurotoxic drugs, if the prescribing practitioners fully informed Williams about the dangers of his treatments, particularly the black box warning that is at the top of every product information packet of every SSRI drug: that the risk of suicide is doubled in those who take them. And we want to know if Williams knew that the drug cocktails that were prescribed for him had never actually been tested for either short or long-term safety on lab animals or humans?

(It is important to remind ourselves here that no psychiatric multi-drug combinations have ever been approved by the FDA for use on human subjects, with the outrageous exception being the approval for marketing that the FDA gave for the use of the anti-psychotic drug Abilify in combination with SSRI antidepressants [a combination apparently found to be modestly safe and modestly effective in short-term trials] in cases where the SSRI drug alone had failed to relieve the sadness in some subjects.)

Stress-induced and drug-induced mental ill health doesn’t mean one has a mental illness (of unknown etiology)

Robin Williams gained fame and fortune as a comic actor, starting with what was to become his trade mark manic acting style (stimulant drug-induced mania?) on “Mork and Mindy.” As have many other famous persons that attained sudden wealth, Williams spent his millions of dollars lavishly and—in retrospect—often foolishly. After his third marriage, he found that he could no longer afford the Hollywood lifestyle.

But long before his two divorces and his subsequent serious financial difficulties caused him to crack and fall off the sobriety wagon for the final time, Robin Williams had lived in the fast lane, working long exhausting days and partying long exhausting nights with the help of stimulant drugs like the dependency-inducing drug cocaine (that overcomes sleepiness and fatigue) and tranquilizers like the equally dependency-inducing alcohol (that can counteract the drug-induced mania and drug-induced insomnia that often results from psycho-stimulants like cocaine, nicotine, caffeine, Ritalin, Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, amphetamines, etc).

Williams had acknowledged that he was addicted to both cocaine and alcohol when his famous comedian friend John Belushi died of an accidental drug overdose shortly after they had snorted some cocaine together (March 4, 1962). (Belushi died March 5, 1982. ) Williams quit both drugs cold turkey, and he remained sober and cocaine-free for the next 20 years. There is no public information about the possible use of addictive prescription drugs, but it is well-known that many Hollywood personalities have close relationships with both prescription-writing physicians and illicit drug pushers.

However, Williams did relapse in 2006 and started abusing drugs and alcohol again, eventually being admitted to a Hazelden drug rehab facility in Oregon. After “taking the cure” he continued his exhausting career making movies, doing comedy tours and engaging in personal appearances in order to “pay the bills and support my family.”

After two expensive divorces, huge indebtedness and an impending bankruptcy, Williams was forced, in September of 2013, to sell both his $35,000,000 home and his ranch in Napa Valley. He moved into a more modest, more affordable home in the San Francisco area, where he lived until his suicide.

But despite solving his near-bankruptcy situation (which would make any sane person temporarily depressed), Williams continued having a hard time paying the bills and making the alimony payments; and he was forced to go back to making movies, which he despised doing because of the rigorous schedule, working long days and being away from his family for extended periods of time. He hated the fact that he was being financially forced to sign a contract to do a “Mrs. Doubtfire” sequel later in 2014.

For regular income, he took a job doing a TV comedy series called “The Crazy Ones,” but the pressures of working so hard got him drinking again, even using alcohol on the set, which he had never done before. He was making $165,000 per episode and was counting on continuing the series beyond the first season in order to have a steady income.

So when CBS cancelled the show in May 2014, humiliation, sadness, nervousness and insomnia naturally set in, and he decided to go for professional help at a Hazelden facility in my home state of Minnesota, spending most of July 2014 as an inpatient there. In retrospect, that decision had fatal consequences. The public deserves to know what really happened inside that facility.

Robin Williams ended his life shortly after being prescribed a cocktail of unproven drugs that had never been certified by the FDA as either safe or effective.

There are no reports about any electroshock treatments ever having been given to Williams, but an inquest to bring to light important details such as that would certainly go a long way to demystify his untimely death. It is the least that could be done to honor the man, give some additional meaning to his life and perhaps make something good come out of the bad that has so unnecessarily confused us survivors.

Robin Williams’ fans certainly deserve to know what really happened to him. There are many painful lessons to be learned, and we should be mature enough by now to learn them.

The psychiatric drug-taking public deserves to know what were the offending drugs that might have contributed to his anguish, sadness, nervousness, insomnia, sleep deprivation, hopelessness and irrational, very likely drug-induced, suicide.

And the family and friends of Robin Williams certainly deserve to understand the essential facts of the case which, without an inquest, will otherwise just result in a continuation of America’s “mysterious” suicide and violence epidemics, and the continuation of Big Pharma’s unjust gravy train that has been deceiving—and destroying—so many for so long.

***

For more information on the above very serious issues, check out these websites:

www.ssristories.com, www.mindfreedom.org, www.breggin.com, www.cchrint.org, www.drugawareness.org, www.psychrights.org, www.endofshock.com, www.madinamerica.com .

Dr Kohls is a family physician who, until his retirement in 2008, practiced holistic (non-drug) mental health care. Dr Kohls warns against the abrupt discontinuation of any psychiatric drug because of the common, often serious withdrawal symptoms that can occur in patients who have been taking any dependency-inducing psychoactive drug, whether legal or illicit. He recommends close consultation with an aware, informed physician who is familiar with drug withdrawal syndromes, the dangers of psychiatric drug use and the nutritional needs of the drug-toxified and nutritionally-depleted brain.

Dr Kohls is a past member of MindFreedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is the editor of the occasional Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter.

Rage

By Katrina Stuart Santiago

When I entered the State University as a freshman in 1995, I was part of an English block that was diverse by virtue of class. It didn’t take long to find that while some of us were from well-off families (I had a Romualdez in my class for example, and there were children of lawyers), and there were some of us who were versions of middle class; many of my blockmates came from poorer families, many from the provinces. Many of them, I later found, were dependent on scholarships, mostly from elsewhere other than the State U.

I only knew one blockmate who was dependent on the socialized pricing scheme that was the Socialized Tuition Fee Assistance Program (STFAP) then. She later dropped out.

I had another classmate who was pretending to be poor, and using the STFAP to pay a smidgen of the P5,000-per sem we all needed to pay. She spoke about it with pride in our third year, when I chanced upon her during enrollment. There were rumors then of UP finding out about someone who had succeeded at duping the University for four years, submitting papers that apparently proved he deserved to be a full scholar, only for the University to find after an inspection that he was actually a rich kid, with a provincial address yes, but of a hacienda. He went through college as a full scholar, haciendero as he was.

From junior year onwards, I had a boyfriend who was by all counts poor. But only once, if I remember correctly, did he get an STFAP bracket lower than mine. Even then I had wondered about why it was so difficult to prove his impoverished state; neither could I understand why he was required to apply again and again, every school year, as if his lot in life was going to change from one year to the next. I thought it absurd too, that even then, he would be asked to prove the state of his family’s income by submitting papers that they just didn’t have, i.e., income tax returns and land titles, and notarized checklists and papers proving their “assets” that included everything and their kitchen sink.

As it was, money needed to be put out to prove one’s poverty. What of those who enter that STFAP office with nothing in their pockets?

Sixteen years later, and the STFAP is no better. Revised in 2006 alongside the 300% tuition fee increase that brought the basic full tuition fee to P1,500 / unit (from P300) or P22,500 pesos per semester (from P4,500), the current alphabetical bracketing system bears little difference to the old STFAP. A look at the process outlined online, including the long list of requirements and papers to be fulfilled – that now asks if an applicant has a toilet at home, and if it is equipped with a flush? – reminds not so much of easier times, but really of how much worse things have become.

And while the UP Administration and the Commission on Higher Education seem to think that all it takes is revision upon revision of the STFAP, while it is easy to think that all it takes is to streamline this process and make sure that deserving students are given an easier time, what was always fundamentally wrong about the STFAP is not being addressed here.

Because what is fundamentally wrong about the STFAP is what it presumes about every student who enters the State University. That is, it puts every student under Bracket A, and presumes that every enrollee has P22,500 each semester, that’s at least P45,000 a year, to pay up.

Imagine how daunting that amount is. And then imagine how urgent and critical it becomes that students apply for the STFAP and get to a bracket lower than the letter A. Imagine how much pressure a poor student suffers through, seeing an amount that they cannot even imagine in their hands, an amount they know their parents cannot earn. Imagine what it is like to find that the burden of proving poverty is yours, when you know it is precisely the fact that you have nothing that is proof of your poverty?

What is wrong with the STFAP has always been that it will presume you can afford full tuition fees unless you prove otherwise. Pre-2006, this wasn’t so bad – P5,300 or so is not an amount that’s daunting, and is undoubtedly easier to raise than P10k, or P15k, or just P24,000. The last is nowhere near easy to raise.

In fact, the STFAP bracketing scheme proves it, too: this amount is for students with annual family incomes of P1M pesos or more.

One million pesos or more.

Which is to say that every enrollee to the University of the Philippines, every student of the State University, is presumed a millionaire until they prove otherwise.

It then becomes clear how, while the STFAP process is a long one and it will cost a student to actually apply for brackets lower than that one for millionaires, the STFAP is in fact an institution riddled with problems that no amount of revisions will change.

Say, its premise that the burden of proof lies in the student, who thinks twice about using her last P10 on the STFAP application forms, but then finds that she has no choice. Who sits and ticks off a long, long list that asks about her family’s living conditions (What kind of cooking range do you have? How many computers do you have? Do you have an electric heater?), her current lot in life.

Who wonders about being asked of her parents’ educational attainment, which to her doesn’t mean much because they are both working odd jobs, their college degrees in the maritime institute practically useless. Who thinks, where do I get a camera to take photos of my home, to prove how small it is for a family of six, my parents and I, and my three other siblings. Who thinks, how will they assess my poverty based on my father’s earnings as taxi driver, when that is unstable at best?

Say, the insecurity that the STFAP creates in poorer students of the State University, who are faced with a disparity in social classes unlike any they’ve had to live with before. Yes, they know of the rich, but to be within the same space as them? To be on a list that stratifies the studentry from the millionaires down? And to find that one is at that lowest bracket, and even then have such difficulty paying?

What the UP Administration and the governments who have supported that 300% tuition fee increase have created here are the conditions for the poor’s discomfort and embarrassment, in a space that should be the bastion of equality and sameness.

In the 90’s, paying at most a P5,400 tuition fee, one of us was not better than another, and in fact, discomfiture was for the rich who were even there at all. In the 90’s, the best and the brightest from the public schools and provinces outdid all of us middle class and rich in the classroom: they were in the State U for reasons that had everything to do with their skills and intelligence. The rest of us were statistics, the smaller number of students who paid full tuition, because we could.

In 2013, you can only imagine the kind of stigma attached to a student being told by a teacher that she has to step out of the classroom because she has yet to pay her tuition fees or student loans.

Imagine what goes through a student’s head, faced with the fact of unpaid fees, but wanting to learn and thinking the world still of education, and of the State University in particular. Imagine what it is like to go to school for five months, with only the desire to learn fueling you, the empty stomach and pocket things you can ignore.

Imagine a context within which you are the strange one having a difficult time, if not the one who has nowhere to run. Imagine a University whose bureaucracy is most unkind, and which instead of being source of comfort and identity, becomes stark reminder of how hopeless one’s poverty is.

This is the systemic dysfunction that is in the STFAP, that is in the State University’s P1,500 per unit tuition fee, that is in this task of creating the conditions for making sure that all State colleges and universities become self-sufficient. This is what the poorer students among us suffer through, because government decides that it will cease to provide education, that it is not the priority here.

This is what killed Kristel Tejada. This is what pushed her against a wall, and made her believe there was no other way to ease her emotional pains and face her family’s financial woes.
This is why UP has blood on its hands.

We rage.

it’s the economy, stupid!

so, on facebook, someone’s blaming inveighing against the father now for “washing his hands in public of any responsibility he may have had in this tragedy” and of turning the university into the “sole scapegoat.”  (19 likes so far.)  so whose fault is it really that the father, a college graduate, was laid off and could find no job, kaya parttime taxi driver lang?  the father’s?  he didn’t try hard enough?  heck no, it’s the economy, stupid!

Impoverished

By Conrado de Quiros

I’m aghast at and overwhelmed and thoroughly defeated by the death of Kristel Pilar Mariz Tejada. Some deaths do not particularly weigh heavily on the mind; others do. This is one of those that do.

… UP officials theorize that Tejada may have had all sorts of personal problems. But they do not rule out the possibility that her financial troubles might also have contributed to it. They have since sent their commiseration to the Tejada family and, not a little ironically, financial help to see them through in their hour of need. They cannot blame the Tejadas if the Tejadas regard their overtures less than appreciatively and remember the saying about “Aanhin pa ang damo….”

It’s tragic in all the ways that tragic can be.

At the very least, it’s so in that it’s truly tragic to be poor, mahirap ang mahirap. Many years ago, I wrote a speech titled “Tongues on Fire,” which also became the title of a book of speeches I later published. There I talked about a horrific insight I got about what it means to be poor. I’ve known poor, I’ve breathed poor, I’ve lived poor. And I’ve not forgotten the sight and sound and smell of poor, I’ve not forgotten the fear and trembling of poor.

But nothing quite prepared me for a news story I read about someone not just taking his own life but those of his entire family from having nothing in life. Nothing to see him through, nothing to look forward to. The guy had tried to keep his wife’s and five kids’ bodies and souls together, but adversity kept thwarting his efforts. The sound of his children crying themselves to sleep on their empty stomachs haunted him, and finally he and his wife decided to end it all and drag their children into it. The man came home one day, mixed insecticide into a last meal, and they went to sleep without ever waking up.

An insanity? The action of a thoroughly deranged man? To be sure. But it also gives glimpses into the pit of desperation, into the darkness of despair, into the nightmare of the poor. It is the feeling of having no one to turn to, no refuge to go to, no means of escape. It’s the feeling of being boxed in, you cannot move an inch however you squirm or thrash about.

You look at it with rich or middle-class eyes, you’ll find P6,337 or even P8,000 the silliest thing to die for. Indeed, the most incomprehensible thing to kill yourself for. Which, too, should give us whole new insights into our relative valuations of value. A peso may be bubog to us, but it is life and death, or at least food and hunger, to the street kids that regularly scour the streets badgering cars for coins.

But what makes this even more tragic is that it has to do with education, with learning, with enlightenment. It has to do with escape, with freedom, with a heroic effort to better one’s lot. What makes this even more tragic is that whatever drove Tejada to still her breath, whatever other grief she may have had in life, a good part of it was also that she could no longer go to school, she could no longer escape, she could no longer dream the dream. How can you not weep at the utter wastefulness of the wanton destruction of this girl? How can you not feel bereft at the loss of so precious a life?

That Tejada was studying at UP to begin with must suggest that she was a bright and promising kid. You cannot get to UP without being so, poor alone doesn’t cut it. That she was taking up behavioral science hammers home the loss, or the irony of that loss, all the more. To want to understood how people behave, why people act the way they do, but to not understand in the here and now why people do what they do, why life takes on the aspect of something unfeeling, something cruel, something deadly—that is the most infuriating and depressing thing of all.

Tejada may have died by her own hand, but so only literally, so only visibly, so only immediately. In the end, her hand may have been pushed to it by other things, by other beings, by other people. In the end, her death is an indictment of this country, it is an indictment of all of us, that we can allow things like this to come to pass. John Donne once said that the death of a single person diminishes us all. Certainly, the death of this one person diminishes us all.

The death of this one child impoverishes us all.