Oswald's Mental Health

 Libra portrays Oswald in quite an odd way. I felt sympathetic for him lots of the time, kind of admired him at times, but also really didn’t like him some of the time. Before reading Libra, the only things I knew about the JFK assassination were that JFK was shot and that there were lots of conspiracies about it. I hear some people say that Oswald was just a wannabe historical figure, that he was an awful person, some say that he was set up and innocent, and many other things. But, what if he’s just mentally ill?


Mental illness is sometimes used as a scapegoat for stupidity or immorality. I myself have used mental illness as a scapegoat on multiple occasions, but when is it actually okay to use it- when is it not a scapegoat? I love this topic especially because of Kanye West, Hitler, my mental hospital homies, and pop culture psychology. When looking at Oswald, I’d like to explore some different perspectives of his actions. One way to look at Oswald is as a troubled mentally ill man who shouldn’t be blamed for anything. We could look at his social weirdness and attraction to communism and diagnose him with social anxiety, attachment disorders, maybe autism? We could say he has an obsession with becoming an important historical figure due a crippling need for love and attention because of the lack of a consistent father figure. We could look at his murders and point to a wide variety of mental illnesses as scapegoats. Maybe he was schizophrenic and delusional, causing him to think he was destined to kill those people or that he was saving the world. In manic episodes of bipolar, people can experience delusions, psychosis, a god or messiah complex, and impulsivity. Perhaps Oswald believed he was the messiah and had delusions that led him to kill the president, and if he had gotten professional help at some time throughout his life he wouldn’t have done any of these awful things. 


What the hell does it mean to be mentally ill though, and couldn’t you just use mental illness as a scapegoat for every bad behavior in existence? When deciding someone’s prison sentence, how much should mental illness be factored in? People used to say that homosexuality was a mental illness. People used to torture autistic people to get the devil out of them. 


Another way to look at Oswald is as a mentally healthy but pathetic and evil person. He’s a loner incel, unintelligent but with a crippling desire to be important and doesn’t care whether he hurts people or not. He killed Kennedy because he wanted to be important to history and was just plain evil. He killed the cop because he was just plain evil. Sure he might have had a rough childhood, but people have rough childhoods all the time but they don’t turn out to be killers. He deserved a cruel life in prison full of pain and suffering. 


Ultimately I think it's a combination of both, but I have no idea how to judge him- mental illnesses have spectrums and it's very difficult to determine the severity of Oswald’s potential mental illnesses, but even if he had really strong ones, how much does that matter?

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