Friday, February 16, 2018

Why Mental Illness Matters

According to Coeur d’Alene police, Odom has a history of mental illness. In his manifesto, he outlined his path to Sunday’s shooting in clear but increasingly paranoid prose.
He admitted to plotting to shoot Remington. He also claimed that the pastor was part of a vast alien conspiracy to enslave the human race — a conspiracy that Odom believed extended to Congress.
“My last resort was to take actions to bring this to the public’s attention,” Odom wrote in the manifesto. “I hope that something good comes of it. Just realize that I’m a good person, and I’m completely innocent. Also realize that the ‘people’ I killed are not what you think.”
Then his disturbing drawing of the Martian.
“Everything started while I was at University of Idaho,” Odom wrote. “Spring 2014 was my final semester and was taking a heavy course load. I was very stressed due to the intensity of my schedule, so I searched for a way to cope. I discovered meditation, which seemed to help, so it became part of my daily routine. As I learned more about meditation, I became interested in consciousness and our ability to affect it. I kept working on my meditation techniques and began achieving extreme states of consciousness.”

One night in February 2014, Odom was meditating when he said he had an out-of-body experience.
“I entered a space that was completely dark and had no awareness of my physical boundaries/orientation,” he wrote. “I felt very peaceful there until a blue light began to approach me. As the blue light got closer, I realized that it was another being.”
When Odom awoke, he had tears in his eyes, according to his manifesto.
At first, the alleged alien encounter seemed like a blessing for Odom. “The remainder of the semester became exceedingly easy for me,” he wrote. “It felt like I had tapped into some kind of power. I was exerting no mental effort even though the classes had been extremely difficult before.”
But Odom’s close encounter would prove to be the beginning of his nightmare.
Odom accepted an offer from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, to work on a PhD in human genetics, but he quickly dropped out because the work was too easy, thanks to his alien awakening, he wrote.
“The day after I decided to leave, my life became a living hell,” Odom wrote. He couldn’t sleep. After a few days, aliens posing as classmates tried to provoke him to become “the next school shooter,” he wrote, so he left Texas and returned to his home town of Coeur d’Alene.

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