Gone at Midnight, page 15
This post, which extends on in considerable length and grows more intense and incoherent, clearly suggests hypomania. Among the many aspects we could point out here, let’s note that in one passage she acknowledges experiencing psychomotor agitation as well as the temptation to indulge in certain activities with a high potential for negative consequences.
The hypomania seems to have lasted for days, during which time she was hardly sleeping at all. Then, on June 13, she posted: “I’m sleeping a lot to avoid facing the fact I am a horrible student and may not be suited for university.”
It seems she had finally crashed.
On October 26, Elisa wrote a sequel to her hypomania series, “Adventures in hypomania Part II,” another rant in mostly capital letters in which she excitedly embraces her bipolar condition. It is also interesting to note that in the hashtags of this post she mentioned having run out of sleeping pills. Is she talking about prescription sleeping pills? If so, this is an additional prescription that has gone unreported. If this prescription was Ambien, it’s possible that the lucid sleepwalking scenario, discussed by websleuths like John Lordan, may be worth considering.
By September 17, 2012, Elisa was terrified of her mental illness. The mood disorder component of bipolar was exhausting her, and she found herself angry and agitated much of the time. In a post from that day, we also see the return of suicidal ideation.
I want to kill myself
it scares me so much that I am thinking about it because this is the lowest point to reach
I’ve never ever attempted to kill myself
I’m too much of a coward
but I see no purpose in living anymore
I’m waiting for this to pass and tomorrow it will hopefully be gone
This is horrible but the reality is that if I want to be taken seriously, I will need to actually attempt suicide. My psy-chiaderp seems tired of my tears and I’m tired of dealing with me. It is up to me whether or not I want to change my situation she says.
Once again, we see an obvious suggestion of suicidal ideation. Of additional importance is Elisa’s characterization of her psychiatrist, who she believed is weary of treating her. Elisa would write elsewhere about her disdain for the triage system of Canadian healthcare, which she felt made it difficult to convince doctors of her suicidal risk. The only way to really do that, she believes, is to actually attempt suicide.
SEXUAL ASSAULT AS A MENTAL ILLNESS TRIGGER
Another troubling question worth considering is whether Elisa’s psychiatric problems were triggered by a sexual assault trauma. It is widely believed that both severe bipolar disorder and depression can be set into motion by traumatic events. This is even more common in people who have a genetic predisposition toward mental illness.
I have not seen any other analysis of the following posts and they may be an important unreported aspect of the psychiatric dimension of this case.
Sexual assault is one of the most well-established traumatic events that can trigger mental illness. In fact, one study concluded that “80 percent of teenage girls” who are sexually assaulted experience mental illness afterward, sometimes for many years into adulthood. Was Elisa sexually assaulted at some point in her life? She addresses the issue twice in her blogs, directly yet paradoxically.
On September 1, 2012, Elisa wrote:
No I haven’t been raped or abused. No I’ve never OD’d because I’m not addicted to anything. No I’ve never had an eating disorder. No I don’t self-harm.
This would seem to directly answer the question. However, a couple months later (perhaps after receiving more therapy?), she essentially contradicted herself and suggested she was a sexual assault victim:
This theoretical trauma could also have been avoided, of course, if I’d never blogged at all. If I hadn’t fallen in love with writing when I was six. If I’d developed a talent for something else. If I’d been born male. If I’d not been born at all—shit, if I’d only had the foresight not to be born at all, I wouldn’t have been raped when I was 17, either. Seriously poor planning on my part–everyone knows the more invisible a woman is, the safer she is. You can’t get more invisible than not existing!
One cannot conclude from these two statements alone whether Elisa was raped or not because she contradicts herself on it. The context of the posts does not clarify whether this was a real or imagined scenario. She uses the word “theoretical” once but then makes a very specific reference to being raped when she was 17. The overall psychological ambiguity may be more telling. The medical community commonly states that rape victims will often deny—even to themselves—that they were assaulted for years, sometimes decades.
If Elisa was a rape victim, it is a distinct possibility that the trauma of this triggered her years of depression or worsened it considerably. Later, as we assess the evidence for whether Elisa was the victim of a sexual predator prior to her death, it’s important to keep in mind that she may have already been a victim before ever stepping foot in the Cecil. This could explain her enhanced state of alarm in the surveillance tape.
CASE CLOSED?
Many have questioned whether Elisa’s bipolar disorder triggered full-blown psychosis. I’ve seen online debates between people who declare themselves to be on the spectrum of bipolar disorder disagreeing pretty intensely about whether the illness could manifest the symptoms Elisa was exhibiting, or whether it is even possible that a manic state could cause such a state of delusion as to convince someone to climb into a water tank.
One long account I read struck me as particularly relevant. In it, a person who identified as bipolar said he was “prone to acute manic episodes, and have experienced everything from mild hypomanic states to delusional mania that ended in full-on violent psychosis that landed [him] in jail.”
As he watched the elevator surveillance, this man saw echoes of his own behavior during “mixed states.” Using his own manic episodes as comparison, he argued that every one of Elisa’s actions would have been logically justified in her mind.
“In my bipolar episodes,” he wrote, “I went on shopping sprees and bought hundreds of Nerf toys, cosmetics (I’m male) and other weird random crap, decided to go on a cross-country bus trip to meet the President, dyed my hair and got tattoos, tried to legally change my name, believed I was on missions from God, etc.”
One psychologist argued that Elisa’s behavior in the surveillance tape is not particularly strange and does not seem like a psychotic break.
Another commenter wrote: “[It’s] important to note that even if she was bipolar and symptomatic, she still could have been murdered. It just makes her an easy target. It also makes it more likely that her death would be written off as an accident.”
In other words, Elisa experiencing a severe manic or psychotic break and being the victim of foul play are not mutually exclusive.
A large number of posters had begun to share their experiences with mental illness, depression, and bipolar disorder. Sites like Reddit and Websleuths ended up becoming de facto crowdsourcing platforms for identifying the symptoms of mental illness.
The question that had to be answered was could bipolar disorder cause such aberrant judgment as to lead someone to climb into a water tank on the dark roof of a hotel?
One woman, a moderator for the subreddit Unsolved Mysteries, took to Reddit to write out her thoughts on the case. Sam Oliver, or username hammy_sammy, started a thread entitled “Resolved: Elisa Lam (long, link heavy)” in which she described why she thought the case was solved.
Sam argued that in the absence of any evidence of foul play, the only logical conclusion was that Elisa climbed into the tank during a manic episode. “The symptoms of her mania—impulsiveness, sense of heightened abilities, hallucinations—would reasonably lead her to climb in the tank and shut the lid,” Sam wrote. “God knows what she might have been hallucinating that motivated her to climb in that tank and shut it.”
Sam also shared her own experience with mental illness, stating that about five years earlier she had suffered three psychotic breaks for which she was hospitalized for six weeks at a time. She wanted to offer an interpretation of the case from a “patient’s perspective” that took the reality of mental illness into account. Very strange, irrational actions result from mania and psychosis. They can lead to deaths that look suspicious.
“[T]he case of Elisa Lam is not a mystery,” she wrote. “It’s a tragedy.”
My interest in bipolar disorder resulted to some extent from the fact that it runs in my family. My aunt Jill had it. My memories of Jill are of a sweet, vivacious woman who would cackle for hours with my mom. Despite this cackling, for years after her death I had struggled to comprehend that she had a mental illness.
This was also the case for several close friends of mine. Bipolar disorder took a significant toll on their lives, nearly causing death in some cases.
It seemed incredible to me that an illness native to so many people could be so misunderstood. Over two million Americans have it. To look at the larger picture, one in four American adults experience the effects of a mental illness in a given year. During that same time around the world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), 800,000 people die from suicide. Yet how many conversations do you hear about these issues? If it weren’t for the occasional celebrity suicide, we might not ever hear about it on the news or in social-media chatter.
A final bit of irony, in 2014, a writer/director team announced they were developing a horror movie based on the Elisa Lam case. The film was called The Bringing. They sold an option to the script to Sony for a six-figure advance, drawing the ire of the public, who charged them with exploitation.
I wondered if the people who were mad were aware that the vast majority of the online videos and blogs devoted to the subject were monetized with Google Adsense. Every time they clicked on one of these articles or videos, they were essentially feeding an industry that was financially gaining from the case and Elisa’s death.
The plans for The Bringing were announced in March 2014, only days before World Bipolar Awareness Day.
CHAPTER 12
David and Yinna Lam vs. the Cecil Hotel
BY THE SUMMER OF 2015, I was on the verge of abandoning the case for good. The police had shut down their investigation and refused to comment on any aspect of it whatsoever. The Cecil Hotel also refused to comment.
My state of mind had worsened considerably, and I needed a change of pace. I packed up what remaining possessions had survived the purge of my apartment and drove to the East Mountains of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to live with my parents and work there remotely.
In 2015, Elisa’s parents, David and Yinna, who hadn’t made any public statements regarding the case, sued the Cecil Hotel for criminal negligence.
The lawsuit, filed by the Lam family attorneys, maintained that the Cecil Hotel bore criminal responsibility for Elisa’s death because of the safety conditions on the roof. This lawsuit was important because it likely meant that the LAPD detectives would have to reveal some of their investigation notes. Such disclosures could include information regarding whether any witnesses or suspects were questioned.
The civil trial was set for February 2016 in Los Angeles superior court. I planned to be in attendance.
GETTING SICKER
Elisa hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours. During that time, she left her room twice. In fact, she only left her bed three times. Twice to use the bathroom and sneak into the kitchen to scavenge for food and once to plug in the battery charger to her laptop.
Things had been good for a minute. Elisa’s first major paper at the University of British Columbia was about Buddhism in China. She was confident in her abilities. She had a boyfriend she adored, who made her feel all the things rock ballad love songs talk about. The last time she had confessed her love to someone, it didn’t work out so well; the guy saw her as more of a bro. But this time was different. Maybe she’d finally turned a corner.
He had “beautiful, intelligent eyes,” and his relaxed body language had a way of neutralizing the pain and anger that sometimes consumed her. He was a computer science major and extremely smart about technical stuff. He knew how to work RAM graphic cards and load Starcraft games and fix her eternally shoddy computer and, most important, would calmly listen to her freak out for six hours, all the while saying, “It’s ok. Computers are fixable.”
Of course, he didn’t know—and perhaps even Elisa didn’t know—that what she was really freaking out about was her own mind, the faulty wiring of the graphics card within. But she imagined he was assuaging her fears over that, too. It’s ok. Brain chemistry is fixable. It’s just like a computer. Right?
But despite this great thing in her life and her excitement over college, the illness controlled her. And it wasn’t long before it began to affect her life in every way.
It felt like her mind was deteriorating. She had tried multiple antidepressants before but they hadn’t really worked. Her symptoms were like a game of whack-a-mole: When she treated one element, another would pop out; and when she went to treat that symptom, the original would return, with reinforcements. It was maddening and virtually impossible to describe to her family doctor, who was compassionate but confused.
Sometimes she wanted to run away, take a trip somewhere. But she knew that first she needed to get her shit together.
She was struggling to keep up with her course load. In December 2011, she had to withdraw from two courses, which devastated her. Then she overslept one day and missed an exam that was worth 10 percent of her grade in another course.
The reason she overslept, paradoxically, was insomnia. For several nights prior to the day she missed her exam, she barely slept at all. She had stayed up all night on the Internet, primarily Tumblr.
When she looked back over what she had written, it was clear that something was wrong. There were multi-page diatribes in all caps about the most random subjects, an all-night binge of free association. It felt euphoric at the time. But when she crashed, she crashed hard. And the result was a major blow to her grade.
She considered banning herself from the Internet because it seemed to be fanning the flame of her ADD and mania, but then she realized her Internet use was an effect, not a cause. And, in many ways, Tumblr was helping her. She needed the Internet. She used Tumblr to record her life and, in the process of externalizing her inner chaos, to try and bring some order to it.
She had also found a small community of anonymous Tumblrs who shared some of her problems, namely loneliness. To one she wrote, “Pain and loneliness is universal” and she didn’t know if she was convincing him or herself.
Elisa enjoyed writing. She loved the feeling of giving form to the inchoate thoughts rattling around in her head. By pressing publish, she was making visible an internal reality that was hard for her to articulate in conversation. Maybe someday someone would understand what she was going through.
After a particularly bad depressive spell that had left her bedridden and incommunicado for days, a Tumblr anon, fearing that something terrible had happened to her, asked what was going on. She assured her disembodied friend that she was just trying to spend less time online.
But Elisa needed medical help, and she knew it. She had convinced herself for so many years that she could handle the peculiarities of her brain chemistry. But the reality is she was losing control.
She could be at the top and it would come along and sink her to the bottom; and once she was at the bottom, it could scoop her up and take her to the top. It was almost as if someone was experimenting with her head. The illness—seemingly treatment resistant with constantly changing, multiplying symptoms—was now an even bigger part of her life, and she obsessed over it. Feared it. Wrote about it.
If she didn’t get her shit together soon, she was going to have to drop out of school. She had already taken a six-month academic break the year before and she scolded herself for accomplishing nothing during that time. It seemed like her “most prized organ” didn’t even work anymore. It was under attack by some condition that seemed to adapt, mutate, contort itself to fit in her life no matter if things were good or bad.
This was when she knew it was time to get serious about treatment. The illness was slowly but surely destroying her life. It was time to see a real psychiatrist. And if that didn’t cut it, she had heard good things about electronic-convulsive treatment (ECT).
THE CIVIL LAWSUIT
On November 3, 2015, the Lam family attorneys, Thomas J. Johnston and Brian F. Needelman filed a motion at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in Los Angeles accusing the Cecil Hotel of Negligence Causing Wrongful Death.
“As a result of Defendant’s negligence, Plaintiffs [David and Yinna Lam] have suffered the loss of their daughter’s love, companionship, comfort, care, and affection . . . [they] have incurred economic loss, including funeral and burial expenses.”
Among other other things, the lawsuit alleged the Cecil Hotel management did not properly monitor access to the roof and water cisterns.
In response, attorneys for the Cecil Hotel stated that the “Decedent [Elisa Lam] was herself negligent and careless.” Further, the defense actually named the plaintiffs themselves, Elisa’s parents, as being negligent.
The Lam family attorneys had to file a special motion because they had sued the Cecil Hotel instead of the Stay On Main, which is what the Cecil Hotel Management had legally changed the building’s name to after the media attention from the case. After nearly a century of bad reputation, the Cecil Hotel management was finally attempting to clean up its act . . . by changing its name.
In other deposition testimony, General Manager Amy Price confirmed that Elisa had checked into a shared dormitory room, 506B, on January 28 and was booked to check out three days later on February 1st. The hotel received complaints, Price stated, from Elisa’s roommates about her strange behavior and on the 31st, Elisa was moved to a private room on the same floor.
