Roskomnadzor continues to deal with publications on suicides on the Internet, and now the UK joins him. This means that it is time to return from the holidays with the “suicide of the day”. Today is the story of a teenager who really wanted to always and do everything right.
1.
When on February 18, 2009, the seventeen -year -old Taddy Gombard, having flown eleven floors, spread out on the sidewalk in the courtyard of one of the most elite schools Manhattan, teachers, classmates and neighbors, recovering from shock, immediately began to guess: that this could happen with a beautiful and smart guy, an excellent student and an athlete that he suddenly decided to commit suicide a week before the end of the school - With the highest marks. Those who were not close to him were suggested that the teenager did not accept in Harvard or his family went bankrupt. “If you were so smart, so why did you jump out of the window?”, Those who envied his estimates reasoned, and built hypotheses: maybe Teddy sat on drugs or was afraid to tell everyone that he was gay?
After the incident in the Dalton school, for a long time, they excluded from the program “Anna Karenina”, “Noise and rage” and other books, the heroes of which are committed by suicide - the administration was afraid of the “Werther effect” - a wave of imitating suicide. The editors of the school newspaper were asked not to use the word “suicide” in an article on Teddy Gombard. The mothers of the deceased teenager were paid a lot of monetary compensation, and they tried to hush up the whole story as soon as possible - a prestigious school did not need a bad glory, and newspapers could easily accuse the teachers of giving students too much their load or do not care about their psychological state.
Speaking of teenage suicides, psychologists usually explain that if you notice depression and suicidal inclinations in time in time, the tragedy can be prevented. Parents are advised to be wary if the child has become closed and gloomy, stopped eating, sharing his plans for the future and studying normally, and got into a bad company. But nothing of the kind happened to Teddy: the other day he found out that he was accepted for an internship at the School of Business of Columbia University, and could not wait for the program to begin. On the evening of February 17, on the eve of his death, he excitedly told his mother about the problems of artificial intelligence, and at the same time convinced her to order new running sneakers to him. School psychologists are sure that the guy did not suffer from depression, and the pathologist did not find in his blood either alcohol, steroids, or any other suspicious substances. Teddy also had no conflicts with classmates or teachers - despite the light form of Asperger's syndrome, he studied very well and got along with everyone. A ton of literature, having talked with specialists and asking her son's classmates, Karl - Teddy's mother, dropped her hands. It turned out that what happened was the so -called "impulsive suicide." The one that is performed suddenly, without previous depression and obvious motives. Many psychologists, including school, love to use this term: he, as it were, removes responsibility for what happened. If the teenager passed away spontaneously and for no reason, then this could not be prevented, and there is no one to make claims here.
True, not all experts recognize this term as such. To any, even “impulsive”, suicide is preceded by the so -called presucyde - an acute state in which a person is closest to committing suicide. It’s just that in this case the development of such a state takes much less time.
And if the cause of suicide is incomprehensible to others, this does not mean that it is not.
After all, what others will not pay the slightest attention to, for someone can turn into a real disaster and cause an instant and irreparable solution. About this happened to Teddie Combard. The school administration did not at all try to intentionally conceal the story that happened to him. The fact is that no one simply managed to connect all the events together and guess that some, at first glance, stupidity, could bring a seventeen-year-old guy to suicide.
2.
Carla has been successful and lonely all her life. One of the few graduates in her course, she was used to competing with men and building a career while her friends and women sat at home and cooked soups. Starting with startups after the college, she quickly became a successful media manager, but by the age of forty, Karl realized that she was not enough for her career and she wanted to have a family. She looked around and came to the sad conclusion: she still never met the man from whom she would like to give birth to a child. Those with whom she tried to establish a relationship turned out to be too weak and passive, and she did not get along with them. Some ran away themselves, explaining this by the fact that she had too strong-willed character, and they need someone whom they would take care of and because of whom they would not have complexes.
As a result, Karl decided that she was not at all to look for a man of her dreams in order to create a family. And in general, no man needs to look - she will give birth to a child with artificial insemination and heal happily. In the end, she had plenty of money, energy too. Before getting down to business, Karl even consulted with a psychologist - should she really have a child? Will she deal with him, is she ready for this? The specialist assured her that she would be a wonderful mother, and in the clinic of artificial insemination for Carla a suitable donor was picked up. On February February, 1991, she became pregnant, and after nine months she gave birth to a boy - Teddy. He quickly began to walk and speak and very soon began to ask serious questions for years: even before school, he was wondering how and at what speed the sound was transferred and what infinity is. In 1996, when Teddy was four, Karl decided that he needed a younger brother, and adopted a boy named Clay from a shelter. Taddy quickly got along with him - without resentment and jealousy.
When Ted went to school, it became clear that, despite curiosity, not everything is easy for him. He easily solved mathematics problems for high school, but literature was given to him hard: he did not understand how to think with images, and any metaphor plunged him into a stupor. Often he sat at the textbooks, trying to understand what was said in some small poem. He also remembered the names heavily, and it was difficult for him to write by hand. But Karl did not really worry all this, it seemed to her that if the guy had a talent for the exact sciences, then there was nothing bad in this, and distraction is a completely normal human quality. But at twelve years he had already figured out the theory of relativity.
The first to understand that something was wrong with Teddy, he himself was-in the seventh grade in the literature lesson, schoolchildren were asked to read "Flowers for Elgernon." Although the main character of the novel was not like Teddy, it seemed to him that for him this book should play some special role. He began to read about different forms of developmental disorders and mental disorders, and, the more he read, the more he was convinced that his poor handwriting, problems with literature and terrible memory for names are somehow connected with each other. Once, when Karl came home after work, he asked her: “Mom, what do you think, I can’t have autism?” - Of course not! What are you saying? - Well, I studied the question here ...
As a result, Ted insisted that Karl take him to the doctor and allowed him to take the tests. It turned out that the guy had an easy form of Asperger's syndrome - one of the varieties of autism. People with this syndrome are often awkward, they can be difficult to communicate with other people, and the circle of interests is very narrow. It can be difficult for them to distinguish between faces of others or to write competently, often dyslexia or dysgraphia are found with Asperger syndrome. At the same time, many people with a similar disorder have IQ above the average, and if they are seriously carried away with something, they can achieve great success in this.
Having passed the tests, Teddy finally began to understand why he could sit for hours and enjoy solving mathematics problems, but cannot force himself to focus on a work of art, why it is so hard for him to communicate with classmates, and physical education cannot cope with coordination exercises. Karl, having learned about the results of the examination, raised her head for a long time: can it be that the geneticist of the donor from which Teddy was born is to blame? After all, she never saw this man and did not know anything about him. Should she blame herself or doctors?
However, her son clearly did not make a tragedy from his discovery. At school, he loved to pass tests and could never go to bed until he did all his homework - he often has even a too diligent student. All this, as it turned out now, was connected with his violation, but Teddy believed that he was only in his hand -
Is it bad to strive for an ideal in everything and finish each task to the end? Yes, sometimes he suddenly began to get angry for no reason and could be overwhelmed. He had real outbreaks of anger. But then he always apologized to those whom he accidentally offended. He began to play sports - those species that required not dexterity and concentration, but strength and speed, and as a result ceased to be awkward a guy lagging behind their physical education. Ted began to take the recipe tablets and go to a special group for children with Asperger syndrome, where they helped with the communication skills. He tried so hard to become the same as all other children that he almost succeeded-many teachers at the school did not even know that the guy had any features.
Often Ted could interrupt someone in a conversation, not even noticing this, or laugh out of place. But he never judged those around his clothes and appearance and knew a lot of interesting things, so he still had good friends at school, and the younger brother of Clay's soul did not bow in him. If Teddy undertook to help someone, he approached this with the same zeal as to any school assignment. Few people understood that this was also part of his disorder. Leave the matter incomplete, do something imperfectly-he simply could not imagine this. In his world, everything was supposed to be laid out on the shelves and brought to the end.
Teddy also did not suffer any ambiguity: all his own actions and actions of others were unequivocally bad or good for him. People like him often cannot or simply do not know how to lie. If someone acts dishonestly, for them it is a failure in an already complex system. It may seem that all these are undoubtedly positive qualities, and they simply cannot be symptoms of disorder. But partly, it was they who eventually brought the guy to the tragedy.
3.
On the evening of February 17, Ted suddenly discovered that he was completely not ready for tomorrow's test in Latin. Languages were not very good for him, and he also blabbed the previous week and missed all the preparatory classes. All night he sat at his desk, trying to catch up, but Latin is not mathematics, and by morning he did not feel the power to take this test. And then Taddy came up with unheard of arrogance - his own idea should have seemed completely wild and terrible to him. But still, it was even worse to fail the test.
Unlike classmates who solved all the tasks on the control manually, Teddy passed tests on the computer - in their school class lay a laptop, where all the tasks were loaded for him in advance. The school administration introduced such a system so that the student with Asperger syndrome during verification work does not interfere with his problems with fine motor skills. On that day - February 18 - Taddi secretly from everyone a few hours before the exam made his way to the computer, looked at the text that he later had to translate, and downloaded his finished translation from the Internet. Of course, he did not think that the teacher had remote access to this computer and that he saw everything. Later, during the test work, the teacher watched the TED inserts ready -made pieces of text into the file. He did not stop the student. Only when he was about to print and take the finished task, the teacher stopped him and asked to leave the class, leaving the computer turned on.
Classmates who still finished the task watched a strange picture for several minutes: Ted, having left the class at the request of the teacher, suddenly returned terribly excited and wanted to say something, but the teacher interrupted him and asked him to come out again. After a couple of seconds, Teddy still returned and again tried to start explaining something, but he was once again asked not to interfere with the class. When this was repeated several times, the teacher said that he would be ready to discuss all issues after the lesson. The next twenty minutes, Ted did not find a place for himself and went back and forth along the school corridor.
What exactly did the teacher say to him when the test ended - no one knows for sure. According to the teacher, he explained to Taed that he saw how he bombed, but was not angry and will help the guy prepare to hand over the test work again. After the conversation, the student climbed the top floor-to the choreographic hall, where he had come to hip-hop classes before. The choreography teacher was there at that time, he spread with Ted a couple of words, did not notice anything unusual and left for lunch. Teddy, left alone, threw off his backpack and a jacket and began to climb the window grill - she did not allow to completely open the lower part of the window, but on top - where it ended, it was quite possible to get out.
During the time that Ted climbed the stairs to the eleventh floor, he managed to meet several of his friends. But neither they, nor the teacher of Latin, nor the choreographer even thought that such a trifle as one littered control could become decisive for the student. And none of them never asked why he would generally go to the choreographic hall.
Teda classmates wrote another test, this time in mathematics, when they heard some strange sound under the window, as if something big landed on the asphalt. Then screams were heard from the street - the teachers drove fourth -graders from the court, who went there for a break. After a couple of minutes, the high school students distributed newspapers and said to urgently glue the windows overlooking the yard. Clay at that time was in a physical education lesson, the coach asked him to go out the door, and he was indignant: “What did I do?” They explained to him that his mother was waiting for his door, and she would explain everything. Upon learning that his brother died, Clay first did not believe: “But he promised that he would teach me how to program!” He knew that Ted always holds his promises.
Text Julia Dudkin Moscow 