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Intro
Welcome! You are listening to A POP of Psych, a chill and educational podcast about using psychology to give you more insight into the world around us.
Hey guys I’m Julia, a rising junior from New Jersey and I will be your host for today’s episode. Today I will be talking about the psychology and mental health of two young girls in a criminal context. The criminal case I will be talking about is the Slender Man Stabbing.
Topic 1: What is Slender Man Stabbing? Background
The Slenderman Stabbing case occurred in 2014, and involves three 12 year old girls, the victim being Peyton Leutner (lightner) and the perpetrators being Anissa Weier (wire) and Morgan Geyser. (guyzer)
To start, the girls found out about Slenderman through a website called Creepypasta wiki.
He is a fictional character and is depicted as a tall, slender creature with white skin and no facial features. The story was created by many individuals online and was added to over the years, with fictional lore, hoax videos of sightings, and altered photographs.
Also, he is often depicted in a dark suit with a pale blank face and sometimes has tentacles reaching from his back.
After reading about slender man the girls believed he was real
The night before the crime was committed, all three girls had a birthday sleepover. On the morning of May 31st, the girls went to a local park where Morgan and Anissa had intentions to kill Payton.
Investigators said Morgan stabbed Payton while Anissa urged her on. After stabbing Payton 19 times, Morgan and Anissa left her in the woods and traveled 5 miles on foot to find Slenderman’s mansion. They thought they would be his servant and live in his mansion.
When the police found the girls, they explained that Slenderman made them do it and were told by Slenderman that they had to kill someone to be worthy of living alongside him and if they failed their family would be killed.
Payton miraculously survived the attack by managing to crawl out of the woods into an open patch of grass where she was found by a cyclist. She was found with stab wounds to her chest, abdomen and arms. Doctors stated that she was one millimeter away from death, as the kitchen knife used to stab her barely missed her heart.
Even though the girls were only 12 years old, they were charged with attempted murder and have been tried as adults.
This was possible because Wisconsin law states that an individual over ten years of age can be tried as an adult in attempted murder cases.
Anissa wire, who urged Morgan on, pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree homicide due to mental illness or defect in the stabbing as part of a plea agreement.
During the trial, a psychologists testified that Anissa developed a condition called shared delusional disorder, in which she came to share Morgan’s delusion that Slenderman was real
Anissa was sentenced to 25 years in a mental institution.
Morgan guyzer, who stabbed Payton, pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder and was sentenced to forty years in a mental institution and was diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic spectrum disorder, which made her prone to delusions
I will be discussing the disorders the girls suffer from in the next section.
Topic 2: Psychology behind it? Why did they do it?
Morgan was diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic spectrum disorder.
Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. When schizophrenia is active, symptoms can include delusions, hallucinations, trouble with thinking and concentration, and lack of motivation.
People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality, which causes significant distress for the individual, their family members, and friends. If left untreated, the symptoms of schizophrenia can be persistent and disabling
However, with treatment, most symptoms of schizophrenia will greatly improve.
Schizophrenia is typically diagnosed in the late teen years to the early thirties and tends to emerge earlier in males than females
A diagnosis of schizophrenia often follows the first episode of psychosis, when individuals first display symptoms of schizophrenia. Gradual changes in thinking, mood, and social functioning often begin before the first episode of psychosis, usually starting in mid-adolescence. Schizophrenia can occur in younger children, but it is rare for it to occur before late adolescence.
The symptoms of schizophrenia generally fall into three categories
Psychotic symptoms include altered perceptions such as changes in vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste, abnormal thinking, and odd behaviors
People with psychotic symptoms may lose a shared sense of reality and experience themselves and the world in a distorted way.
Negative symptoms include loss of motivation, disinterest or lack of enjoyment in daily activities, social withdrawal, difficulty showing emotions, and difficulty functioning normally.
Cognitive symptoms include problems in attention, concentration, and memory. For some individuals, the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia are subtle, but for others, they are more prominent.
Some risk factors of developing schizophrenia are genetics, environment, and brain structure and function.
The causes of schizophrenia are complex and are not fully understood, so there is not a definitive cure.
Some treatment and therapies include antipsychotic medications, psychosocial treatments, family education and support, coordinated specialty care, and assertive community treatment.
Some way to help someone you know with schizophrenia is to help them get treatment and encourage them to stay in treatment, remember that their beliefs or hallucinations seem very real to them, tell them that you acknowledge that everyone has the right to see things their way, be respectful, supportive, and kind without tolerating dangerous or inappropriate behavior, and check to see if there are any support groups in your area.
Researchers suggest that the diagnosis of schizophrenia has been shown to have limits in specificity, so as a broader approach to such symptoms, psychotic spectrum disorder was named. Schizophrenia falls under psychotic spectrum disorder.
Also, Morgan has previously told psychiatrists she could communicate telepathically with other fictional characters, including Harry Potter and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Anissa was diagnosed with shared delusional disorder.
Shared delusional disorder is an unusual mental disorder characterized by sharing a delusion among two or more people who are in a close relationship.
The inducer, in this case Morgan, has a psychotic disorder with delusions that influences another individual or more with a specific belief, in this case Anissa.
In most cases, a second person is dependent on, or has a passive relationship with, the primarily affected person. It is sometimes difficult to determine who is the primary and who is the secondary. The individuals involved are usually close and may be isolated from others.
A major risk factor for developing a shared delusional disorder is to have a close family member with a psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia, mood disorders, or delusions.
These are all of the disorders diagnosed to the girls involved in the case
Outro
Today some mental disorders related to a criminal case were discussed.
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