Troubled Soul
What goes through the mind of someone planning suicide? While browsing through my RSS feeds on tech news I came across a very disturbing story about an individual who not only took his own life but warned the world he would do so both on his blog and in a tech news forum.
Fellow Winnipegger Chris McKinstry, founder of the Mindpixel project, was active in the field of artificial intelligence and lived in Santiago Chile at the time of his passing. From what I’ve been able to ascertain he also suffered from an illness in which he had frequent thoughts of suicide.
It’s always sad when something like this happens. It’s even more troubling when the person involved is as intelligent as Chris was. What further contributions he would have made not only to his field of research but to society in general we’ll never know.
I hope you have finally found the peace that alluded you for so long.
Further reading including links to his blog, the forum and background info here.
Have to say I am a little disturbed by this post.
It really unnerved me when I first came across this story. I find myself still thinking about it.
I see that ryanpark.org has now removed the discussion threads they archived from the original site. They were really disturbing. Chris, who was a member of the forum in question, had engaged in discussion for a period of time with other members before he finally died. The thread consisted of the other members pleading with Chris to reconsider as well as discussing amongst themselves what to do about the situation. Very haunting.