- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
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.
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Winnebago Mental Health Institute
Sounds chill
A lot of people in this thread really down playing or overlooking she willingly stabbed someone 19 times.
Carl, that kills people!
Yeah, that’s the thing that stands out for me too. 19 freaking times. Over and over. Horrible.
It’s unclear to me why people are downvoting you here.
Well it’s the fact that she did this as an untreated mentally ill 12 year old, and now they have a decade of treatment under their belt. The request actually contains a request to be assessed by an expert.
The one-page petition doesn’t include any arguments for Geyser’s release. Instead, it cites state laws that require Bohren within 20 days to appoint at least one expert to examine her and produce a report within 30 days of being appointed.
If she hasn’t been assessed there’s no reason not to assess her now that she’s requested it.
There is a link in the article to an earlier article that covers her 1st request, in which there was an assessment:
Judge Michael Bohren ruled against Morgan Geyser, now 21, despite the testimony of two psychiatrists, including the medical director of Winnebago Mental Health Institute, who said she was ready to depart that hospital and return to the community under certain conditions.
Yeah, it’s not clear if they were the court appointed psychiatrist and if they assembled a report like the law requires. If they did, and the judge ignored it and their testimony he’s being a shitbird.
People downvoted them, as best I can tell, for saying that being stabbed 19 times is “horrible”.
Stabbing someone 19 times is horrible, but it is immaterial a decade later in determining whether or not that person requires psychiatric care. We know why she’s in there, but the legal system is saying she should continue being there even when nurses and the director of the psych hospital all say that she doesn’t require further involuntary commitment.
She was found Not Guilty by reason of insanity. If the psych hospital she’s been confined to for the past decade says she’s ready for supervised release, keeping her there as a punishment is flat-out unconstitutional.
This sounds like your first injustice. In fact, people are quite commonly held back for years or decades after their sentences for stuff like this. It suck, it really does. You have to vote/get involved if you want to change it.
Right, it’s obvious that it’s horrible, it’s tone deaf to harp on it when she’s been incarcerated for a decade.
Got it, you’re an apologist.
No, I want to have patients assessed for release like the law requires and actually have the system do something more than abuse people.
So she was 12 when she did it, but is still a danger to others 10 years later if I’m reading correctly.
Was the psychiatric hospital meant to rehabilitate her?I’d recommend reading this article that was linked in the AP article which has more details about the sentence and following appeals:
https://apnews.com/article/morgan-geyser-slender-man-stabbing-release-petition-09a2537704c926675c39349a45f9bfdeWas the psychiatric hospital meant to rehabilitate her?
You’re cute.
This is America.
Was the psychiatric hospital meant to rehabilitate her?
If possible, otherwise keep her away from pointy items. Working in psychiatry years ago, I’ve met people for whom their psychiatric diagnosis was chronic, and whom you could dope all you wanted, but their psychosis never retreated. All you could do was keep them from hurting themselves or others.
Sometimes we need a way to shield individuals from the general public, without it actually being a punishment. Lady in the story sounds like an example.
Being put in a criminal psychiatric facility for life doesn’t sound like “without it actually being a punishment” to me.
Especially not in the U.S.
Just a question… Are there any mental health issues which cannot be treated? As you have worked in psychiatry, any input will be highly appreciated.
Psychologist here, depends on what you mean by treated. Most mental illnesses aren’t like a cold where you’re able to take some medication and get rid of it, they’re more like a chronic back injury that you learn to manage. For most people, some combination of therapy and chemical treatment is sufficient to allow them to live a life where their mental health is managed. There are people whom chemical treatment doesn’t work on, sometimes because of unhealthy brain chemistry, and who are unwilling or unable to participate in therapy. Unfortunately for these people, there’s not much that can be done for them short of a miracle.
Have you had any patients with a history of violence at this level?
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.
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.
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.
For all of you saying this girl is a lost cause, I suggest you look into the Parker-Hulme murder. It was turned into the film Heavenly Creatures.
Two girls murdered one of the girls’ mothers. It was a premeditated murder. The mother was not some horribly abusive woman, the kids had developed an incredibly unhealthy fantasy life which was replacing reality for them and they got separated. There was queerphobia involved, but it was the 1950s so that’s not surprising, but the fantasy thing was a much bigger issue.
During their relationship, the girls invented their own personal religion, with their own ideas on morality. They rejected Christianity and worshipped their own saints, envisioning a parallel dimension called The Fourth World, essentially their version of Heaven. The Fourth World was a place that they felt they were already able to enter occasionally, during moments of spiritual enlightenment. By Parker’s account, they had achieved this spiritual enlightenment because of their friendship.
Anyway, they decided to murder Hulme’s mother so they could stay together and ended up both in prison. They were older than this woman was at the time they committed their murder.
Both were released after a five years in prison.
Neither murdered again.
This is also why conservatives rail against things like Dungeons and Dragons.
Dungeon and Dragon players actually learn to follow rules.
Homebrew players are obviously satanists /s
well then they should do something about the Bible first
No, but you see, that’s different. Trust me, (wink).
Also, America’s extreme sentence lengths have not been found to reduce recidivism. I don’t like prisons in general, but in particular I hate that we seem to not give half a shit if the harm we authorize them to do actually improves anything, especially before allowing them to do more harm. This is especially true when we’re talking about someone who successfully pled insanity, which is really fucking difficult actually
I hope this woman gets the treatment she needs then is released and commits no more crime.
I remember when this happened. I think it’s wild that she is still being detained for it.
… really? It’s really crazy to you that someone who
murderedattempted to murder a little girl and blamed a meme has been in a mental hospital for 10 years?Edit: meh. I’m at a “everyone sucks here” conclusion. The abusers suck, and the US prison / mental health “totally not prison” systems all suck.
Uh yeah cuz she was fucking 12 years old when she did it…
Her parents should be in jail for not noticing her condition earlier.
Every evil person was already who they were at the age of 12.
“There are people out there with bad person brain™ and we should just kill them.”
You really need to stop watching content made by fake “narcissism experts” and maybe fucking educate yourself on what mental illness actually is.
You’re a worse person than the woman in n the article.
Going ad hominem really makes your argument seem weaker. To say “because you don’t see things the way I do you are a bad person” is some pretty shitty behavior.
Reading through what you say in this thread you clearly don’t want to listen to any reasonable arguments and just want to put away the evil monsters.
Actually I’m generally against the concept of prison. It is really a way for NIMBY types to warehouse those they don’t care for and allow for cruelty to be inflicted away from the public perception. I also do not think that this girl is evil, nor do I believe that “evil” exists in the world–it is a concept that reductivist thinkers believe in. She was very obviously very sick from a very young age and probably should have received some sort of intervention a very long time before any of these events occurred. In fact, society failed her and we should all feel ashamed.
That said, this person has shown signs that she cannot be allowed in public–not because she’s bad, but because she is not in contact with reality. She can hopefully be rehabilitated to some extent but may never be safely be part of the public again. None of us have been around her and none of us know for sure. It may be precisely as people here hope–she’s fine or better and can get to a point of release.
My real argument is to ask people why they are treating this like the Britney Spears event. We knew a whole hell of a lot more about her than we do about this situation. What I get in response is personal attacks and people (literally) telling me that I am an evil person who wants others to suffer. That is now how you have a conversation. If the response is “it’s obvious and you’re a bad person for not seeing it,” are we any better than the tankies?
That 'someone" was a mentally ill child. Yes it’s crazy to lock up a twelve year old for 10+ years. Period. Full stop. But beyond that especially one that was mentally ill at the time who you were supposed to be treating for the last ten years.
You’ve misread. She is and has been in a mental health facility this whole time.
I didn’t misread, being in a criminal mental health facility is being locked up. In the US they no better than prisons.
It happens. I know a weird amount of people who stabbed someone as a kid. Two of them went to the same institution at different times and they both told told me about a girl was really tall, 6 foot at age 13, who had stabbed a few staffers with shanks and almost started a number of fires.
Apparently the staff told them she would never have a moment of freedom in her life.
Did the staff tell her she would never have a moment of freedom in her life before the stabbing and the fires started? Because that might explain them.
So many people like to ignore that mentally ill people are rarely acting out just to act out. Yes it happens, but often there’s a line of reasoning, including emotional disregulation and failure to appropriately escalate. Take someone with those traits, lock them up, and add distress to them (especially when you’re frustrated at their behavior) and they’re prone to do whatever they think they can.
When I was 12 I got into the occult pretty hard. Ouiji boards, deities, etc. Not one fleeting thought in my head was murder. These girls are dangerous.
You probably didn’t have early-onset childhood schizophrenia. This girl was undiagnosed at the time and literally thought she was talking to Slender Man, as well as Severus Snape, unicorns, and ghosts. I’m not saying she should be released, but she’s been in treatment for a decade, and she’s requesting the court appoint an expert to evaluate her and make a recommendation about her release. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
