Aaron's mental health

If you were to venture into a hospital which housed people who had suffered from a schizophrenic reaction or psychosis as recently as ten/twelve years ago, you would have met individuals who walked as shadows of what they had once been, with whom it would have been difficult to hold a conversation, would have found it difficult to sit still, concentrate on anything at all and who when they spoke, talked of being Catherine the Great, Napoleon, were hearing voices telling them to do various (often quite outrageous/offensive and bizarre) activities. As far as physical appearance went too, they were mere shadows of their former selves, shuffling about, pale and thin eyes sunken and haunted looking. Above all there was no return to their former selves apparently possible because the onslaught of the psychosis had devastated them so completely. It was nevertheless clear that such individuals were completely harmless and moreover could live on like this for many years.

When they describe poor Aaron like this-eating out of gutters and having outside powers as he appears to have believed to be running his life for him, it suggests to me that his illness had reached that point of no return, described above,
that he was not responsible for his actions and would never be cured. If Aaron Kosminski was JtR , the first murders would have been committed most probably during some psychotic reaction I would have thought, and the murder of Mary Kelly would have been the result of an extreme psychosic breakdown which left him so broken down as to be without the necessary faculties to carry out any more murders of a similar kind. Indeed his paranoia might have departed and left him relatively harmless.

Does this explain why (If the murderer was Aaron) he stopped killing and could be left for a series of months without any surveilance by police prior to the Identification?

I think it's possible. It is true that people do not have much control over their actions when the have that illness. So I think it is a good possibility that's the reason why he stopped killing.

Of course, if you know the nature of the Mary Kelly killing, you would struggle to find anything worse that you could do to the poor creature. I mean, the mental state he was in after he literally went crazy in there must have been bordering on total collapse, and I feel sorry for him. Also, he would have been well aware that he had been witnessed, and this would have made the killer all the more wary about going out, although the possibility of an impared mental condition combined is more than likely. This being a massive problem to Ripperologits, I can safely say that this is may be a valid solution.

I'm not sure what Mary Kelly Killing is to be completely honest. And yes, I feel sorry for him as well.

The Mary Kelly Killing is his final, most horrific slaughter. You shall find out about it when I post about her in her thread. He decorated the room with her organs and bits of cut off flaps of skin, he scraped the flesh from the legs all the way down to the bone, completely chopped up her face till it was unrecognisable. her breasts were removed, these was carnage everywhere, and she had to be identified by the shape of her ear. She was that messed up. He must have spent an hour in there doing his dirty chop around. One man followed him and Mary Kelly to her room and waited outside for 45 mintuts. He gave up in the end, but only just missed Jack by a few minutes as he emerged literally red handed.

Wow, he had a really bad hatrid for woman.

Again, I can offer an explaination. When he was younger, and we're going back to the age of 4 or 5 living in Poland in a Jewish ghetto, understandably the family would have been in a poor state. The conditions at the time were far from ideal, and there was a lot of racial hatred towards them. Living in suggested poverty, Aaron would have had to share a bed with one or both of his sisters, and Betsy at the time would have been about 12. Five is the crutial age where gender recognition takes place, and a similar story almost identical to Aaron's reveals that this could well possibly be the case: Aaron witnesses Betsy's menstral bleeding, and immediately assosiates blood with sex. This twisted image leads him onto developing distorted sexual fantasies, and confusion is primordial. A similar circumstance happened when the modern day serial killer witnessed his aunt's miscarriage while sleeping in the same bed, and developed a fasination with the female sexual organs. Later when his girlfriend was sexually teasing him, he felt like taking up a knife and stabbing her. As for Aaron, it is clearly noted that he suffered from compulsive masturbation, and this would have caused much rejection from his sisters. The hatred towards females may well have stemmed from the hatred and deep hurt he suffered from being ridiculed by his sisters. Moreover, his father died when he was eight, leaving him in an environment dominated by females. Later on attacks to his villiage are carried out by Russians and many women were brutally killed and raped infront of them. It is very likely that Aaron witnessed the rape of some of his family members, and even sisters. Imagine what devistating effect this would have on a 16 year old boy. With the developed attacks of schizophrenia, there is no doubt that a messed up childhood led a crutial role in his mental breakdown.

Wow, he didn't have a really good childhood. :( I feel so bad for him.

Knowing all this, I find it quite unbearable to listen to people who claim him to be a total inhuman monster! It wasn't like he was born like it. I feel deeply sorry for him, and I really wish I had been there to make him feel a bit better about himself, since he reportedly had low self esteem and was slightly withdrawn from the rest of society.

I think he would've loved to have someone like you next to him. ^^

You think? Even though I'm a girl, I don't really act like one if you see me. I tend to get on better with boys strangely, so maybe he would have liked me.

So back on topic - I still have a burning question in my mind about his sexual dysfunction. (I should really change this topic to discussing about his mental health. I'll do that later.) So onto that, if this really is Jack the Ripper we're talking about, I wonder if he ever had a girlfriend, or if he was still a virgin. The fact that he didn't use the prostitutes and was still single at about 25 makes me wonder if he didn't feel comfortable with sex or having a partner? Some say that the murders were out of sexual frustration, and I agree that that played a role in it. I know this is going a little deep with Aaron, but it's a topic I most certainly would like to investigate.

(Ya, I see you changed the title)

I'm not sure. Maybe it was because of his childhood and/or maybe he just didn't trust women.

I personally think he got a negative reation to sex, with the rape and the blood and the hoards of prostitutes around Whitechapel who would just do it against the wall round the corner. So being a virgin is a strong possibility. It doesn't mean he wasn't capable of doing it, and I'm pretty sure that he was functioning normaly in that respect. However, I think deep inside he was feeling sexually frustrated and this may have contributed to the viciousness of the mutilations.

Yes, I think that could mess with a persons metal health. It's sad that he had to live through all that.

Not only that, but he heard voices in his head after he developed schizophrenia. He apparently had an instinct that guided him and told him not to wash. Also, he thought that people were poisoning him so he drank from the taps and picked up bits of bread from the gutter and ate them. It is unclear whether this was before or after the Whitchapel murders, but my bet is that it's after, since these are wuite bizare characteristics that people with paranoid schizophrenia may well develop.

Ya, I can imagine that's one of the reasons he had a break down. It must've been awful to live that way.

It is clear from the Asylum records thta over the years he slowly slipped away into his own little world till he was incoherant and couldn't answer simple questions. With no proper treatment, all they could do was drug him up till he was almost brain dead. It must have been an awful existance.

I feel that way when I get a migrane. Exactly that way. It must have been torture to him.

I doubt it would have been painful for him, but nethertheless, Aaron knew that he was getting ill. That might have been the scariest part, actually - knowing that you are indeed slipping away, such as what happens with demensia patients. One of the scrubbed out messages giving too much detail in his asylum records showed that one of his hallucinations was that he was being protected by the Russian embecy.

Well, no, I wasn't talking about pain. When I have a migrane, I can't understand what anybody's talking about. You ask me to walk down the hall, I would ask what a hall is.
But, yes, that would be pretty scary. Poor Jacky. :(

Ohh! Okay! Yeah, I guess that would be the same then. He went through sometimes hyper, sometimes depressing periods, his mental state worsening. Sometimes he would only want to speek Yiddish in the asylum, and other times hw would use a mixture of both.

Ya, I'm starting to question my mental health now. . . I still feel bad for Jack. Bad mental health must not go down well to others. He must've gone through a lot of mockery, because that's usually what happens, which is a shame. :(

Don't. Migranes aren't a mental health problem, just I biological slip thta happens to some people. When you start seeing and hearing things, you know something's wrong.

I can safely say he didn't go down well with his sisters. It appears that he was moved from house to house, and his mother only came to England after they had secured him a place in the asylum as I can imagine it wouuld have been upsetting for her to see him like that. The records for his dispatchment and arival show him to be living at 3 Sion square and 16 Greenfield street, so between Betsy and Woolf, and Matilda and Morris. This cooperation between family memebers suggests that he was very difficult to live with.

No, not that. I won't get offtopic though, plus, I don't think so, but you might think I have completely lost it. Actually, I'm just questioning my general health.

That's a horrible existance! And I've heard you mention Woolf in RP. I figured he was a brother.

You can talk about it in Whatevs with a drop of blood. I'll make a thread for you. (:

Woolf is actually his brother in law. His biological sisters living in Whitechapel are Betsy and Matilda, and he aslo has a brother issac. Woolf and Morris weren't actually related.