What is wrong with this guy?
What we have is a shy kid, a boy who didn't engage when others tried to talk to him. Or so says a San Diego neighbor, a young man who played on the same soccer team in high school. He never socialized, never had friends.
What we know is that James Holmes is a brilliant young man. A neuroscientist, at the top of his university class, an honors student. Then, after graduation, no jobs. He flipped burgers.
Graduate school, obviously, a PhD should be the next step. Why wouldn't that be taken for granted? Why McDonalds? McDonalds????? Something's not tasting right with that.
So he started school in Colorado, but he quit in June. Quit? Why would a nerd, clearly destined for academia, quit graduate school?
Tempting to think--psychopath. Or Anti-social Personality Disorder, Social Phobia, Schizoid Personality Disorder. Even people with Asperger's can't handle the social pressure of college. It isn't the academics, not usually. It's the socialization, the expectations. We live in a social world. But violence isn't associated with Asperger's.
And psychopathy is diagnosed during childhood. James didn't even have a traffic ticket, let alone an altercation, a fist fight, a stolen candy bar. This 24 year old man didn't pick pockets.
It is likely we'll hear that he suffered from Schizophrenia. Or another psychosis, even Bi-Polar Disorder (see how not romantic that one really is). Paranoid Schizophrenia affects reasoning, patients hear voices, believe that God talks to them, tells them to do things. Some think they are Jesus Christ. And some think. . . they are the Joker.
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