Not Taking Meds Made Me Do It: Kill My Partner and Myself
Carol Anne Burger (pictured), a journalist who lived in Boynton Beach, stabbed her partner, Jessica Kalish, more than 200 times with a screwdriver then briefly tried to cover the murder up before she shot herself to death a day later. She wrote for HuffingtonPost’s OfftheBus:
An editor described Burger as “very excited” about her job and not depressed in “any way.”
Hanna Ingber Win, the associate editor for The Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” election coverage, said she exchanged e-mails with Burger last week and was happy with her contributions.
“We were joking that she was on fire. She was really pumping it out,” Win said. “I would never imagine this. She was excited about the election.”
That’s just a journalistic side note, however. From the Palm Beach Post:
Carol Anne Burger was fighting for her life.
Racked by economic and romantic reversals, she struggled against moods that swung from sadness to anger.
Her e-mails and an eight-page letter, subsequently e-mailed to Boynton Beach police by a friend in close touch with Burger during her final months, depict a bright, idealistic and compassionate woman struggling to keep her head up while caught in a painful, humiliating situation.
She was unemployed and having to sell her house because of the breakup of her long-term relationship with her partner. Worse, she was still living in that house with her former mate, who had found another lover and spent happy hours on the phone and computer with that other woman.
In the end, it was too much.
“Carol Anne suffered bouts of depression and would cocoon herself for a few days until she felt better,” wrote Helen Gale of California, Burger’s close friend, in her letter to police.
“She also spoke of suicide several times last month,” Gale continued, “because of concerns about money and sadness at feeling isolated and trapped in a situation that was terribly uncomfortable.”
For months Gale had been trying to get Burger to take antidepressants, but Burger refused.
“I just don’t want to take drugs of any kind,” Burger wrote Gale on Oct. 15, one week before her death. “I’d rather just be sad than chemically dependent.” Angst, isolation tormented woman before killings
Gawker said, in a moment of really gross schaudenfreude about HuffPo’s take-anyone policy:
It was inevitable that the Huffington Post would somehow end up sullied by recruiting such a massive army of unpaid contributors. But few would have imagined something this awful….
In many ways, Burger had stacked the deck against herself: She continued to share a home with the former lover, in Boynton Beach, Florida, more than a year after they had broken up. She refused antidepressants.
Liz | 2:57 PM | Uncategorized
While this is a major tragedy the way you titled your post is ludicrous beyond the pale. Lack of drugs is not what killed Burger.
Burger killed herself by her own hand of her own volition shortly after choosing also of her own volition to kill another human being.
I am a survivor of several suicide attempts as you well know Liz Spikol and none of those suicide attempts from my teens to my 20s was due to lack of antidepressants. They were due to desperation and a sense of lack of options.
Like Ms Burger I too refused drugs and like Ms Burger I had logical, rational reasons for doing so. Taking drugs is not a responsibility.
Although we will never know for sure Ms Burger may already have been well aware that antidepressants lose in study after study to both placebo control and exercise ergo there is no reason to believe they would do her any good anyway.
It is possible taking drugs is against her morality. She may have been raised as I was to be staunchly anti drug. My own mother has suffered sometimes crippling depression her entire life over five decades and steadfastly refuses to take drugs to this day and I don’t have a problem with that. I suffered from equally crippling depression and I learned to cope in a way that neither my mother or Ms Burger knew how to do.
My mother’s depression is not due to lack of drugs. Ms Burger’s suicide was not due to lack of drugs and my suicide attempts were equally not due to a lack of antidepressants.
All of us in the mental health blogosphere must be aware that not everyone responds the same way to drugs, chemicals, toxins, food, supplements and the like.
Even if she had experimented with them, they might not have worked for her in the same way they don’t work for a lot of other people too.
What would your post title have been then Liz?
‘Not playing the drug roulette game in a bid to find one magic pill out dozens of contenders all of which have demoralizing side effect profiles made me do it’
And if she had experimented with say.. five different meds and she found all of them ineffective would your post be titled?
‘Lack of ECT made me do it’
or
‘Lack of good drugs made me do it’
When a person attempts to kill themselves it is due to desperation.
Frankly given the facts of both the domestic and financial situation I can say I am really not that sympathetic.
By the time I had was 18 years old I had been through far worse things than that. If she had had my memories she would have killed herself a long time ago.
While I empathize with being suicidal, I too had a lot of people on my shit list that I thought deserved to die and I thought about killing many of them. In the end, I chose to let them live and try killing only myself.
For her killing her partner, I have nothing but contempt.
She could have dropped it all and run away. She should have dropped it all, taken as much liquid cash as possible and run for Mexico or Panama and started over. There would have been nothing wrong with that and I would be both understanding and sympathetic. That’s what I did, and that’s why I am still alive. I busted myself down to a homeless, jobless bum in a strange state where I did not know anyone but I did not kill the people that had harmed me.
The most spiritually, emotionally and mentally difficult decisions I ever made was to let them go and let the Universe handle it.
For all the stories we have about SSRI suicide/homicides had she been on antidepressants she might have killed herself and her partner much sooner.
I repeat words from your post, as I think that they need to be seen again:
“Carol Anne suffered bouts of depression and would cocoon herself for a few days until she felt better,” wrote Helen Gale of California, Burger’s close friend, in her letter to police.
“She also spoke of suicide several times last month,” Gale continued, “because of concerns about money and sadness at feeling isolated and trapped in a situation that was terribly uncomfortable.”
For months Gale had been trying to get Burger to take antidepressants, but Burger refused.
“I just don’t want to take drugs of any kind,” Burger wrote Gale on Oct. 15, one week before her death. “I’d rather just be sad than chemically dependent.”
It is an absolute travesty, that a young woman, so clearly in need of help, was left to founder.
I have been sick enough to want and even attempt to die. I am only here due to the kindness of friends.
It is tragic, this story, on so many levels. I’m not savvy enough to know what sort of help this young lady needed, but she was clearly hurting.
This is just another sign for the public: we need to take care of people beyond the physical. We need to take care of their minds.
This is a tragic story. I wonder if she refused meds only recently, while having previously taken them and found them to be just not for here in some way (maybe they just didn’t work?)? Lord knows I’ve tried every antidepressant in the book, and none of them were any good. And I was excited about the election too, but man oh man it stressed me out. And going on HuffPo every day certainly didn’t do me any favors. I think that website contributed to my anxiety. But even with all these imagined scenarios, she truly sounded like she had no idea how to get help. Having no perceived options can lead a person to do unthinkable things.
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