April Showers, April Shootings

Leah McLaren, who I love to hate (and who fully stole the first seasonal reference of April being the cruellest month from me), wrote about her negative physiological and psychological reactions to spring in her column this past Saturday.

While the rest of us are coming out of hibernation and experiencing a lift in spirits, it appears that those with mental illnesses like manic depression and psychosis experience an increase in symptoms in the spring. McLaren interviewed Tatyana Barankin, a clinical psychiatrist affiliated with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health:

"April and May are not easy months for psychiatrists," she told me over the phone between patients. "Manic behaviour and psychosis are often exacerbated by the weather. Our moods are very affected by the amount of light we get and while very often depression lifts, that does not apply to anxiety or manic behaviour."

Interesting, I thought, and continued reading the Style section.

But then yesterday, the shooting at Virginia Tech occurred. And it reminded me of Columbine, which also happened in April during my first year of university.

Of the 19 shootings in the past 10 years that have occurred in US schools, nearly half (42%) have happened in March, April or May. Compare that to 26% of the shootings occurring in September, October or November. February, June and December each have one shooting occurrence whereas January, July and August have seen no mass killings at US schools.

McLaren’s reaction was diagnosed as “anniversary reaction” brought on by the memories of exam stress. One would expect that Cho Seung-hui, the man named as the shooter at Virginia Tech, and who had been referred for counselling because of work produced in his creative writing course, perhaps had more going on.

Maybe he would have identified with the awkward and painful reawakening that Eliot writes about in the first few lines of his oft-quoted poem, The Wasteland:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.