Correction, too much of this stuff:
Posted on 02/07/2007 5:59:20 PM PST by HAL9000
Excerpt -
HOUSTON - Lisa Nowak chose a juggling act of dauntingly high difficulty: to be an astronaut and a mother of three. Her background — high school valedictorian, Naval Academy graduate, test pilot — seemed to equip her for the challenge. Yet as she and some of her acquaintances acknowledged, the stresses on her and her family were extraordinarily intense.On Wednesday, transformed from space hero to criminal suspect, Nowak returned to Houston for a medical assessment, a day after she was charged in Florida with attempted murder and attempted kidnapping in what police depicted as a love triangle involving a fellow astronaut.
The woman viewed as a role model by the schoolchildren she often addressed was met on the tarmac by police and escorted into a waiting squad car after her release on bail. Her head was covered by a jacket. She faced a medical exam at Johnson Space Center.
NASA, at a loss to explain what went wrong, said it would revamp its psychological screening process in light of Nowak's arrest. The review will look at how astronauts are screened for psychological problems and whether Nowak's dealings with co-workers signaled complications.
~ snip ~
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Good point. Bipolar disorder can lead to some really odd out-of-character behavior by otherwise highly intelligent and extremely accomplished people.
And mid-life stressors can trigger these episodes. I've seen it happen.
Nowak's behavior was just too weird. That doesn't mean she's not responsible for what she did. It does mean that if she was suffering from diminished capacity due to mental illness, that ought to be considered in mitigation in any criminal disposition of her case.
Made it through service academy, pilot training, test pilot experience, astronaut training, space mission, etc. She could never have functioned so highly for so long. That wouldn't be my guess at all. This is an acute stress reaction over funky messed up relationship issues, which take different strengths and skills than her professional accomplishments-- skills NASA wouldn't have been especially focussed on in their evaluation.
I've seen otherwise mentally intact people do crazier things than this in the throes of a crazy relationship quagmire.
Some of the upper level seats in Redskins' stadium (Fedex Field) are so far from the field you may as well be watching the game from outer space!
By the way, I didn't mean to pile on this *clearly* distressed individual. Just makin' a Tang joke, that's all!
Stick to your guns----don't let these 'so-called' experts beat you down and ignore their insulting attiudes---as a fellow vet, thanks for being there when the Nation needed you
Not as crazy as you might think. Astronauts, at least the females, wear then on launch and reentry. I think women pilot of fighter type aircraft also wear them. Kind of hard for them to use a "relief tube". So she'd be used to wearing them, on her actual mission, but probably also in some of her training.
The friend I mentioned in an earlier post graduated magna cum laude from a very good college and was rocketing up the management chain in a good company when he suffered a psychotic break at age 36. He isn't functioning at a fraction of his previous capacity now. Even so, he can carry on and appear perfectly normal 95 percent of the time.
I'm not saying you're wrong. A situational stress reaction makes sense in this case. But it is not unheard of for a highly accomplished and highly intelligent overachiever to develop paranoid schizophrenia later in life.
Howlin: LOL........you must not have seen that movie!
Actually that 'movie' (The Right Stuff) is one of my all time faves, as is the Tom Wolfe book which I've read and reread many times. In the movie, after Grissom's sinking capsule thing, the press liaison to the Air Force says "Nothing these guys do would ever be considered a failure", to which Yeager after a bit of banter on the subject proclaims "Ol' Gus, he did alright"
It was of that perception with the public that I wrote the above quote. That within the ranks it was agreed that the Astronaut 'screwed the pooch' as it were, but that such an opinion would never get past the flight lines and into the press.
All that perception in the public's eye has now changed with this criminal act by an 'exhaulted' Astronaut. Very sad indeed.
Its ok, such things used to bother me, but I don't blame people for their attitudes; they are attitudes based on ignorance of the facts reinforced by society. But we are getting better. We used to think people with mental illness just had some character flaw, or poor parents, etc. Now we know for certain that these disorders are caused by very real, physical, measurable differences in brain structure and chemistry. Fortunately for our family (and my son), when he suffered his first break, it only resulted in very bizarre behavior, not criminal behavior.
A young lady we know who is now successfully managing her Schizophrenia with medications had her first “break” when she was in college. She developed a sudden, inexplicable obsession for the musician “Sting.” She was a straight A student but quit school to travel to England to be near Sting and was arrested trying to break into Sting’s estate. She was a guest speaker in the class “Family-to-Family” that my wife and I now both teach. I AM NOT saying that mental illness excuses anyone from the consequences of criminal behavior, I’m just saying that IF this lady in fact has some definite mental illness which suddenly manifest itself like it did in our son’s case, then she needs to face the justice system, but she should also be viewed with compassion and get the treatment that she needs.
There seems to be Three types of space involved here. The space up there. The space down here. And the space between her ears.
Sad, but true. Prigs among us.
White adult female, ca., 50 yrs., lesbian, well-educated, superior IQ test scores and manifest accomplishment consistent with measured intelligence:
The woman played in my blues band. We were long-term friends (>10 yrs). She spoke of vague complaints of not being able to find a lover. We worked and socialized together, routinely. She lived with her not-so-elderly mother, who was sharp and attractive. Her mother died suddenly last 2 yrs ago in a car accident. My friend said (about 4 months thereafter) that since her mother wasn't around to watch over, my friend now felt free to "overtly pursue her lover." (her words).
Her lover, my friend said, was a beautiful, sexy world-famous radio dj and vocalist who was going to perform nearby in Columbus, OH. And, who didn't really exist---purely a delusion. But my friend would simply accuse women who looked like her delusion as being her coy lover---thus so, she would pursue, relentlessly, soem innocent victim with the full conviction that that was her lover, "just being a little coy..." she would say. My friend went to the concert (a gay pride event), found her lover and ended up in the Franklin Co. jail charged with menacing with a gun, stalking, etc. She did time in the jail as her sentence and was released with two restraining orders against her being within 500 feet "her lover."
After jail, counseling and proper meds,she was just fine...
Year later: meeting at a bar for our band's new year's gig: My friend shows up at the bar with a wig on, a goatee glued to her face and dressed in a man's suit, complete with white shirt and necktie.
"Donna's in church!" Nan (my friend) said, urgently. "Drive me to the church now!"
"Nan! We're on-stage in 30 minutes, you can't go anywhere!"
"That's it, I'm outta here!" Nan corralled some nameless guy, on her way out of the bar, to "give her an emergency lift." He and her took off in his PU. Nan saw a woman who she thought was Donna, she demanded nameless guy stop the truck. Nan got out and confronted a startled innocent lady, demanded that the lady remove her disguise and show that she was really Donna.
Again, Nan went to jail, with an MO not unlike our astronaut.
Both incidents were duly investigated and not a shred of evidence of improper activity was uncovered. Instead it was clear that the complaining engineer in each instance had put an unwarranted sinister spin on completely innocent evidence or behavior.
I am beginning to suspect that the engineering profession has more than its share of paranoid or just strange people!
To be immediately followed by the day that all criminal and antisocial behavior is declared a medical problem. There has to be a balance. Even granting the presence of brain disorders that cause antisocial behavior, the brain is not the pancreas. To declare it just another organ relieves us all of any responsibility for anything.
It would first seem that she had a sudden psychotic break, but there's something about the elaborateness of her planning and the duration her actions required. This is not a disorganized reaction. It is a well-contrived act.
Brief reactive psychosis does not do that.
No, I didn't ... what are they?
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