Well, I don’t think the timing for my previous blog post could have been any worse. Or perhaps it couldn’t have been any better. That remains to be seen.

In my previous blog post, I had talked about mental illness in the workplace, with an especially passionate blurb on how we shouldn’t label employees with mental health issues as violent just because they’re discontent.

This morning, a Virginia cable station’s news anchor Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were shot to death during a live TV interview. Virginia’s governor labeled the shooter as “a disgruntled employee.” Cops are currently looking for the suspect, who is rumored to be 41-year-old Vester Lee Flanagan.

For those who have been reading my tweets, I talked yesterday with Healthy Place and another Twitter user about how crimes are often mislabeled as being related to mental illness. True, there are several incidences (such as the Sandy Hook massacre) where the shooter was severely mentally ill, but I would wager that half of all crimes that have been chalked up to mental illness didn’t really have anything to do with it.

In my opinion, things like depression don’t make you hop up from your couch and carefully plan a shooting. Depression makes you listless and tired. Crimes such as the Colorado theater shooting require energy and focus to plan them out and implement that plan. As we saw with the Colorado verdict, James Holmes was deemed perfectly sane (or at least sane enough to know what he was doing).

The Virginia news station shooting hasn’t been labeled yet, as they haven’t captured the suspect. I don’t know whether this person was mentally ill or if they were just incredibly angry and disgruntled, but I do know that people will speculate on whether he had a mental illness or not, as I’m doing now.

In the meantime, all we can really do is pray for the families of the victims and hope the police can catch this monster. And yes, he is a monster. If he has a mental illness, that’s not the part of him that makes him a monster. People with a mental illness aren’t monsters. What does make him a monster is the part of him that decided to soothe his rage by killing two people. He made a conscious decision. I hope that he will get to face the consequences.

UPDATE: Suspect fatally shot himself when confronted by the police. He was a former employee of WDBJ7 news station.

UPDATE #2: Police are now saying the suspect is still alive after shooting himself.

UPDATE #3: Police report that suspect has died from a self-inflicted gunshot.