The Reality Check: Fear and Loathing in Atlanta
Posted by J.D. Dunn on 07.02.2007
The Legacy of Chris, Nancy and Daniel Benoit cannot be one of ignorance.
Foreword:
"What do you know of good or evil? What do you understand of the sum of a man's life? You see my husband as a saint, and so he must be right in everything he says and does, and then you see him as a devil and everything he says and does must be wrong. Well, my husband's neither a saint nor a devil. He's simply a human being."—Sarah Brady, "Inherit the Wind" (1960)
On Monday, June 25, Chris Benoit, his wife, Nancy, and son, Daniel, were found dead in their home. They will all be missed.
On Tuesday morning, competent American journalism was found dead. No one seems to have noticed.
No matter how many drug experts, clinical psychologists and former wrestlers say "this was not consistent with 'roid rage," the "journalists" on the major networks routinely go back to that one drug as if the question were being asked for the first time. No matter how well intentioned they are, I can't help but feel we're doing a disservice to the memories of all three people by not getting to the root of the issue — drug withdrawal and depression.
The problem I see in solving all of this is a severe case of cognitive dissonance (holding two incongruous thoughts at the same time). To boil it down into a pair of logical syllogisms:
Major Premise: All murderers are bad people. Minor Premise: Chris Benoit is a murderer. Conclusion: Chris Benoit is a bad person.
Major Premise: Good people love their families, do their jobs, and help people. Minor Premise: Chris Benoit loved his family, did his job, and helped people. Conclusion: Chris Benoit is a good person.
Two thoughts that are mutually exclusive and can only have a few rational explanations, one of which I'm going to give to you here. Whether or not my hypothesis on this is correct, it's something that really needs to be discussed about the industry (and about our society in general) but isn't being discussed because of our attitudes and prejudices.
This is intended to be part one of a two-part column. Whether I ever get to part two will depend on scheduling.
Chris Benoit is dead. Nancy Benoit is dead. Daniel Benoit is dead.
That would be enough to drive a person to tears on any normal day, but Monday, June 25, 2007 was no normal day. It appears that Chris Benoit killed his own family over the course of two days and then took his own life.
Again, that would be enough. But apparently, that wasn't enough.
What followed was mass hysteria in which truth and reason got trampled underfoot in the race to make sure *someone* got the blame in this situation. Vince McMahon and the WWE praised Benoit on Monday night, giving a three-hour tribute to a double-murderer. On Tuesday, they disowned him. You know, in either case, I can't say I fault them.
What I can fault is the negligence of the news media and the WWE for putting up a wall between each other in an effort to assign or absolve blame. The WWE has an opportunity to take a strong, hard look at depression and addiction, two intertwined brain diseases that permeate the industry. The news media has that same opportunity, one that they really can't ignore from a moral standpoint, given their job description.
And yet, both sides are content to play the blame game while 30,000 Americans per year commit suicide, and 90-percent of those cases involve some kind of substance abuse.
Knowing what I know about addiction, depression, risk-taking and wrestling, I really couldn't let this go any longer without adding something, in part from personal experience, but mostly from research over the years. If you need a number, I'd say 10-percent of this is from my own experience and 90-percent is based on research (and no, none of my sources is Wikipedia, except when I need to look up other sources). In fact, this began as an update to the original Reality Check on Kurt Angle and where you draw the line between helping addicts and allowing people personal freedom.
Chris Benoit is not a murderer. At least not in the strict moral sense. Yes, his wife and child died by his hands. I'm not going to give you some conspiracy theory about how it was "staged." But, this was not Rae Carruth putting a hit out on his ex-girlfriend because he didn't want her having his baby. This was not OJ Simpson going into a rage and cutting his wife's head off in the ultimate act of control. This was not a murder for profit, not a murder for gain, and not a murder for ego.
This was, in Chris Benoit's mind, a way out.
How do I know? How can I be so sure without toxicology reports or talking to Chris personally about what he was going through?
Simple. Human beings are not that different.
Remember the case of Andrea Yates, Texas mother of five? On June 20, 2001, Andrea waited for her husband to go to work, filled the bathtub with water, and proceeded to drown her five children. In 2002, Andrea was found guilty of killing her five children, despite her defense attorney's insistence that she was not in her right mind. In 2006, a Texas jury overturned that decision, finding her not guilty by reason of insanity. During the trial, it was revealed that her doctor had taken her off the anti-psychotic drug Haldol just two weeks before the killings.
Two depressives. Two murders. Two cases of where not understanding the reality of the situation led to tragedy.
Before you click the "Back" button, thinking I'm just trying to find a way out for my hero, let me say that I'm truly not. I'll get to Chris Benoit's culpability at the end.
First, though, I want you to think about the brain. Most of us rarely think about how our brains work. We just take for granted the thoughts we generate, whether it be the ability to do complex math equations without pen and paper or the ability to imagine Fergie naked.
As much as we like to think of our thoughts as some mystical, ethereal phenomena, they really aren't. They're just a series of chemical reactions in the brain. You want to solve π to the 23rd digit? You simply access that part of your brain, the synapses fire up, and, if you've exercised the math portion of your brain enough, you can figure it out. Sitting at work and wishing you were out in the sun working on your tan with Jessica Alba slathering lotion on your back? All you have to do is bite your lip, close your eyes, and take yourself away to paradise. The healthy brain has the ability to do that.
But that's not all the brain does. It also regulates drive. How do you know when to eat? Other than the societal conventions of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, how does your body know that it needs food? Your stomach can't do it on its own. Your brain has to tell it that the body needs food. Notice your chest heaving up and down a little? Your brain is needed to tell your lungs when to expand and when to contract. And, contrary to popular axioms, when a man meets a woman, it is his brain that is attracted to her.
How does it do all this? Simple. Well, not really simple, but the explanation shouldn't be too hard to understand. A series of chemicals are secreted and transfer thought from the brain to the body. Pheromones, serotonin, histamines, testosterone, dopamine — these are all carriers of some sort of regulatory or behavioral function.
Of course, those two acts – regulation and behavior – are intertwined. I need food; I initiate behaviors that will get me food. I need sex; I initiate behaviors that will get me sex. I need air; I initiate behaviors that will get me oxygen. I need drugs; I initiate behaviors that…wait a minute. What do drugs have to do with behavior?
Ever hear of a grown, heterosexual man performing oral sex on another man for crack money? Ever hear of a man sifting through his own fecal matter, trying to see if there are undigested pain pills in there. It happens. Yearly, monthly, daily it happens.
Before you sit in judgment of addicts, let me ask you this: if you were starving on a desert island, wouldn't you perform oral sex someone for a piece of pineapple? If you felt you were about to thirst to death on a life raft, would you drink your own urine? Just how far would you go to preserve your own life? No matter how honest you try to be with yourself in answering these questions, you can't know what you would do in those situations. When your body is pushed to the brink, whether from lack of oxygen, lack of food, lack of water, the rational mind recedes, and the drive function system of the brain takes over and will do whatever it takes to get what it needs.
Therein lies the tragedy of addiction.
Sadly, we were just having a discussion in the forum the week before the Benoit tragedy about addiction because the American Medical Association was considering including guidelines for treating addiction to video games.
I know what you're thinking, and I agree. It goes against everything we were taught in high school about the addictive properties of drugs. But, of course, people were taught that the sun revolved around the earth once. It just took us thousands of years to realize we were wrong. And just think, we've only been studying the brain extensively for about 200 years or so. Can it really be so surprising that what we knew about addiction for the first 180 years of that study was only half the story?
If you're like me, you were always taught that there are drugs that are addictive (alcohol and painkillers) and non-addictive (pot, cigarettes, pot, steroids, pot…uh, what dude?). Over the last 20-30 years, we've come to learn that addiction is less about the type of drug someone is taking, and more about their genetic and social makeup.
Again, I know what you're thinking. "He's trying to give me some cockamamie story about how addicts 'can't help themselves'." No. Not really. All I'm giving you is a healthy Rx of reality. If you want to digest it or not, that's up to you, and who are you to question me if you're still using "cockamamie?"
The fact of addiction is that the predisposition for addiction is inherited. If either (or both, it makes no difference) of your parents is an addict, you stand a 50-percent chance of inheriting the genetic structure of an addict. And why shouldn't you? You stand similar chances of inheriting your father's hair or your mother's eyes, and those are just pigments. Does anyone truly think that Eddie Murphy and Scary Spice's baby is going to come out looking like Dakota Fanning? So why is it so hard to accept the fact that behaviors, which we've already established are driven by chemicals in the brain, are based on the genetic predisposition to produce those chemicals?
Don't bother e-mailing me. I already know why. It's that, in America, we so value our free will and idea of personal responsibility that when it appears that anything will come in conflict with those ideals, we tend to think of it as "junk science" or some kind of excuse-making endeavor. I have no doubt some people will use it that way, but you can't ignore facts just because they don't fit in your worldview.
"But," you must be saying. "If addiction is inherited, then there's really no hope. It's something that is going to happen, and they're not responsible. Do you really want to go down that road?" Ah, but I didn't say that it was entirely inherited. The other half of the equation is the addict's attitude about the drug.
Let me paint you a scenario. You have the addictive allele (gene), and you've been raised to believe that marijuana is really no big deal. You toke up once at a party. It's okay. Nothing special. You do it again after school. Again, it's okay, but you thought it would be better. You do it a third time and, suddenly, you have this euphoric, orgasmic experience from it. Congratulations. You're a pot addict, and your friends, who don't have that addictive allele are stuck wondering why you're "such a pussy who can't handle his shit." Now think about a wrestling locker room's attitude toward steroids and HGH.
Still don't believe me? Grab 4-5 people around the office or at home. Pour cups of Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke for all of you. Now drink. Does it taste sweet, or does it taste like Dennis Leary's urine sample from 1993? If it tastes sweet, you're what we call a "non-taster." You have a genetic structure that doesn't allow you to taste 6-n-propylthiouracil, a chemical used in the production of aspartame (just think NutraSweet or Equal, if you've gotten lost). The properties of the chemical taste bitter to a lot of people, but to a few who can't taste it, it produces a sweet flavor not unlike the sugar used in regular drinks.
Still don't believe me? Go ahead and test yourself. Color-blindness is a genetic trait in which the brain doesn't recognize certain colors or doesn't recognize them the same way as others do.
So, given that there is a genetic phenomenon that doesn't allow you to taste aspartame, and given that there is a genetic phenomenon that doesn't allow you to see green, is it so far-fetched to believe that there is a genetic structure that doesn't allow some people to be affected by Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive drug in cannabis?
I can feel that I'm losing you, though, so I'll just back out a bit.
"What does this all have to do with Chris Benoit? He wasn't an addict, according to his closest friends. And he passed his last drug test. This was a guy who was a cold-blooded murderer."
I wouldn't have brought you along this far without a purpose.
All drugs that have the potential for abuse, among which are steroids and painkillers, work on the brain in the same way. They release a chemical in the brain called dopamine. It's a chemical that is involved in, among other things, the brain's reward system. No one would take drugs if they didn't have benefits. No one starts taking steroids in order to see their testes shrink. No one starts snorting cocaine in order to feel the rush of blood coming out of their nostrils non-stop. And no one starts drinking because they want to stagger through a trailer park with their skirt up over their head and land in a pile of their own vomit on their boss' lawn.
Dopamine works by creating "good feelings" throughout the body. It happens when we're having sex, when we're eating a tasty meal, or when we're doing just about anything we love. Dopamine is your brain saying, "This is good. I like this. Let's do this more often."
That's what makes addiction so deadly. These substances trick your brain into releasing dopamine in various amounts. Dopamine doesn't think. All it knows is that it likes what's going on. That's where our drives come from. In fact, when researchers injected rats with a dopamine blocker, the rats wouldn't eat on their own and had to be force-fed. That's how vital this chemical is to our brains. On the other hand, too much dopamine can cause the reward-system to derail. Overproduction of dopamine is one of the attributed factors to ADHD (which is also associated with Fragile X, the syndrome which Daniel Benoit allegedly suffered).
Here's where Chris Benoit comes in. I don't dispute that Chris Benoit abused steroids or HGH for a number of years, probably between 1995 (when he started to make it big in the U.S.) and 2005 (the death of Eddy Guerrero). Of course, I don't know that he did, but if one looks at pictures of The Pegasus Kid in 1991 and compares them to Chris Benoit in 2001, you can see a definite addition of muscle mass. Plus, steroids were found in the house, so one at least has to consider the possibility (although not drill it into the ground like MSNBC and FNC have done).
Even if he didn't abuse steroids, there is a distinct possibility after the number of surgeries the man had, that he was abusing painkillers. Remember, Benoit was coming off a rest period to recoup from various injuries just a few months prior. It's likely that he did have a legal prescription for painkillers. Just about every wrestler who lasts more than a few years has used painkillers at some point.
Whether it is steroids, HGH, painkillers or simply alcohol is irrelevant. The point is that his drive system had likely been rewired by whatever substance he was taking. Since Benoit was not in any kind of substance-abuse recovery program that we know of, we can assume that he tried to go cold turkey. Otherwise, he would have tested positive in April. That's why I believe painkillers played a much bigger part in this tragedy than steroids. The WWE doesn't fail you for taking prescription drugs unless you're abusing them, and it's difficult to tell when someone is abusing painkillers, especially someone as reportedly stoic as Chris Benoit. And, it's entirely possible that Chris Benoit didn't know he had a problem. If you become addicted to pain pills, and you try to stop taking them, our good buddy dopamine will ensure that you start feeling pain in order to get you to take the pills again. How on earth are you supposed to know the difference between pain from injury and psychosomatic pain from withdrawal?
So, to sum up what I think happened and why I don't fall in with the "Chris Benoit is an evil son of a bitch who burns in hell" crowd, nor do I fall in with the "Chris Benoit loved his family, and this was made to look like a murder-suicide to cover up something more sinister" crowd:
We know that Daniel Benoit had Fragile X, which is a genetic disorder. It's likely that Chris Benoit had a similar defect and just never knew about it – one that caused him to be prone to depression. (Correction!: Many of you who have more expertise in the area than I have since written in to correct me on this. Fragile X can NOT be passed from father to son since sons always receive the Y-Chromosome. While it doesn't exclude Benoit from having a genetic link to depression/addiction, it cannot be used as a strong link between the two. I regret the error.)
Chris Benoit begins using some sort of drug. The type of which is largely irrelevant to the case. Steroids make more sense from a timeline standpoint. Painkillers fit the profile a bit more, though. Steroid abusers tend to cross-abuse anyway.
Chris Benoit begins to abuse his drug of choice, a fact that goes undetected because he's such a private man and not doing anything out the ordinary for a wrestler.
Chris Benoit tries to stop cold turkey, both to avoid the embarrassment in front of his peers and family and to avoid missing ring time by going through the long process of rehabilitation.
To combat withdrawal from the drug, the dopamine levels in Chris' system went into overdrive, creating a psychotic state. (Although research is still sketchy in this area, one of the routine treatments of psychosis is administering an anti-dopamine agent). Without the drugs, Benoit goes into a severe state of depression and paranoia.
Depressed, psychotic and paranoid from withdrawal, Chris Benoit began to view the world as so screwed up that he'd be doing his family a favor if he took them out of this world.
The rest writes itself.
In effect, it wasn't drugs that got to Chris Benoit, but withdrawal from not doing drugs. Quitting drugs is something we think of as desired, but very few of us stop to think that the aftermath of drug addiction can be much worse than the period of use, especially when the drug abuser tries to go it alone. The WWE (and all of us, really) would be better served by focusing on recovery rather than punishment.
Of course, I don't know that I'm right on this. It could be that Daniel inherited Fragile X from Nancy, which throws a wrench in the whole theory. It could be that Benoit didn't use any hard drugs a day in his life. The theory is still a damn sight better than the media asking questions like, "Oh, you say Dino Bravo was shot in the chest? Well, were there any steroids found on the gun? Owen Hart fell from an unsecured harness. Well, were there any steroids with him in the harness?"
What I do know is that Chris Benoit was not of sound mind when he did this. If millions of fans don't tell you that, then testimonials from the wrestlers who knew him should. You don't go for 39.99 years being a consummate professional, respected peer, and loving father to killing your wife and kid without severe depression and/or some sort of stressor to set you off.
So, no. I don't believe Chris Benoit was evil, nor is he burning in hell. I don't consider even him to be a murderer. Not in the way Bobby Cutts Jr. allegedly is. Not in the way Scott Peterson is. Not even in the way OJ Simpson is. What these men did was out of selfishness and profit. What Chris Benoit did stems from sickness.
It doesn't make Nancy and Daniel any less dead. Chris Benoit deserves the bulk of the blame in this for being negligent and not getting real help from professionals when he needed it. But there is a difference between not getting your brakes checked when you think there's a problem with your car and intentionally severing the brake line. In both cases, you may have killed your family, but believe me, when sitting in judgment of the morality of someone's actions, you have to take things like intent into consideration. You just have to.
Anyway, I hope I gave you something to think about. I know some of you out there will absolutely refuse to believe that this could be anything more than an evil act by a selfish man, but I've given you the facts about addiction and depression and where I think they fit in. What you do with them is up to you.
Ah, to hell with it. Let's just blame Vince. It's easier that way, and we don't have to do a lot of thinking.
The following sources were extremely helpful in researching this column. I hope you don't take my word for it, and do a little of your own research instead.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov)
The National Institutes of Health (www.nih.gov)
The Department of Health and Human Services (www.hhs.gov)
The American Psychological Association (www.apa.org)
The American Medical Association (www.ama-assn.org)
Marijuana Anonymous (www.marijuana-anonymous.org)
"Cracked: Putting Broken Lives Back Together Again" by Dr. Drew Pinsky, Addiction-Medicine Specialist
