We're All Mad Here

After his mother’s death in 1988, John duPont threw himself into sports. He built a training facility he called Foxcatcher Farms and opened it to athletes. His money turned the world of USA Wrestling around, and soon Foxcatcher Farms was hosting world-class wrestlers, training for the Olympics. John was on top of the world… sometimes. In addition to his mood swings, he started doing drugs, carrying loaded weapons around, and acting on superstitions to an offensive level. But all of that was nothing compared to the day he became a murderer.

John DuPont became a murderer in 1996. But before that, he was a boy desperate to belong. Ignored by his parents and unable to excel at his favorite thing, sports, John was a sad kid. As he grew up, his eccentricities were ignored because people loved what his money did for them, and that willful ignorance sealed John’s fate.

Why are so many Halloween costumes labelled with the word “psycho”, so many haunting stories start with suicide, so many haunted houses given an asylum theme? What is it about mental illness that scares people so much that even after All Hallow’s Eve, we both relish and fear stories about a deranged psych ward escapee? And how harmful is this to the every day stigma of mental illness?

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Alan Turing has been called one of the most important people of the 20th century. The inventor of what would become stored-memory computers, Turing worked as a cryptanalyst during WW2. His work with his colleagues is believed to have shortened the war by years and saved millions of lives. And yet, when it was discovered that Turing was gay, all that was forgotten and he was arrested for gross indecency. He had to choose between jail and repairative therapy that could very well take away his mathematical ability.