The story occurred yesterday in Austria tells us about Artur, a young adult who was trapped in a labyrinth of murderous madness and unresolved traumatization. One has fueled the other until it generates a massacre that sees innocent and totally foreign people die to the personal events of the murderer.
Everything seems to originate – from what the media tell us – from the bullying of which the traveler Artur suffered in the years of his first adolescence, right within the school in which he presented himself yesterday armed. From that same school, A few years earlier he had come out a few years earlier, interrupting his studies, and disappearing in the world, that is, making every trace of himself and becoming invisible to everyone, even to himself. Out of school and out of the world: this could be the description of Artur’s adolescence after the abandonment of high school. It probably belonged to that category that the world first called “hikkikomori”, mediating this word from the Japanese phenomenon that at the beginning of the third millennium, saw dozen thousands of young adults disappear from real life and hide inside their rooms, however equipping itself with a digital identity. But Artur did not leave behind even fingerprints. It was apparently not inhabitant of any life, neither in reality nor in the virtual. Yet until yesterday it was alive. I live but invisible. It probably was trapped inside the path of paranoid madness. Within his mind he has cultivated a need for revenge and repair for years.
We do not know what happened to him in the first adolescence, but being back in the school of which he then became a “desaparecido” has a huge symbolic value. Because the gesture made yesterday tells the delirium in which Artur’s mind probably lived for all these years. The traumatization of which we are victims due to bullying is often so intense as to push those who suffer from social retreat. The only defense you feel capable of is to escape from the places where you are mistreated and mocked. For many boys victims of bullying at school, the awakening in the morning is like the awakening of the soldier who has to go to war, who is preparing to go into the trenches. Mentally, you imagine that the only thing that can save us is the enemy. And if this possibility does not exist, only two roads can be taken: suffer in silence or withdraw from the scene.
Clearly there is the third way: that is to face the bullying situation and change the course of events. But this is often impossible. You feel helpless, you live the shame of your state of victim, you perceive yourself exactly how the bully describes us: inept, pusillanimi, good to nothing. If in the school they have not been adopted and put in place protocols of prevention, education and addressing bullying, the subject suffers his condition as a victim, floating in an ocean of impotence and unwary perceived that give him a fragile and psychically at risk identity. Without adequate support, there is a risk of shipwrecked, precisely at that time of life in which instead it is very important to learn to hold the rudder of one’s existence in his hand and give it a direction.
Artur, first killer and then suicide, author of the massacre of Graz, He must have lost himself in the paranoia of revenge and resentment with which he decided to avenge the Pusillanime himself and inept that at 15 he had to leave the school, finding no other way to face the victimization of which he had been made. A few years later, he had the opportunity to equip himself with powerful weapons (which he could not do at 15 years) and used his adult status to become the executioner who sold a past that held him hostage without ever offering him other ways, more functional and adequate, to return to live in a competent and effective way life.
It is not only bullying what generated yesterday’s massacre in Graz. It is also the social invisibility of those who have mental health problems in adolescence. It is also the availability of weapons for private use of which the western world seems to be increasingly hungry. It is the loneliness that pervades our lives in an increasingly intense way, But in particular those of our teenagers. It is the inability of the contemporary family to ask for help and to realize that something enormous and very serious is happening in the life of a child who chooses invisibility as a strategy to be in the world. It is precisely in that hiding to everything and everyone, that the mind often produces the most terrible thoughts. Thoughts that start from crucial and very important questions of evolutionary age (who are they? Who will I be? What value do I have? How can I ask for help when I need it?), But who have never been able to find the most appropriate and functional answer.
