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Change IS necessary - but where?
There is so much to ponder from the suicide of Leelah Alcorn, the damage of
reparative "therapy" aside: how responsible were the parents, Doug
and Carla, of her death? Dan Savage makes the analogy that if the culprit in
Tyler Clementi's suicide was convicted, so should the parents of Leelah Alcorn.
This rather extreme view hangs on one thing: accountability. And after additional
posts on Reddit came to
light, the Alcorn's accountability seems more severe.
On Reddit, in a post she titled, "I'm
sure someone on here can convince me not to kill myself," she wrote
she was taking what is a powerful (and popular, albeit older) anti-depressant.
"I've been on prozac for about a year, and my dosages have been going up every couple months or so," she wrote one month ago. "I'm currently taking 60 mg every morning."
She wrote her parents "never physically hurt" her, "but they always talked to me in a very derogatory tone."
They would say things like "You'll never be a real girl" or "What're you going to do, f*ck boys?" or "God's going to send you straight to hell". These all made me feel awful about myself, I was christian at the time so I thought that God hated me and that I didn't deserve to be alive. I cut myself at least once every couple days, and I was constantly thinking about suicide.
60 mg of Prozac. Who would prescribe 60 mg of Prozac for a
teenager? 2 increases in a year are alarming.
Other disconcerting factors:
- Leelah was taken out of school and deprived of any interaction with friends.
Social media was verboten.
- The Alcorns' story changed concerning their reaction to Leelah's request:
"We don't support that religiously" became "we didn't have the
money for anything like that."
- Carla Alcorn insisted that Leelah came to her only once about being transgender.
Then there's this:
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