Coldblooded Killer or Piteous Misfit?: The Case of Michelle Carter
A closer look into the mental health struggles of a villainized teen.
On July 13th, 2014, eighteen year old Conrad Roy III pulled into a Kmart parking lot and took his last breaths in the cab of his pickup truck after the carbon monoxide fumes from a gasoline-powered water pump ran their course. Authorities along with Roy’s family could not conjure up a reason as to why the young man would commit suicide, regarding the incident as a terrible tragedy–until they found someone to blame.
7/6/14 11:13 AM, outgoing to Conrad Roy: Hang yourself, jump off a building, stab yourself idk there’s a lot of ways
7/12/14 10:21 AM, outgoing to Conrad Roy: I thought you wanted to do this. The time is right and you’re ready, you just need to do it! You can’t keep living this way. You just need to do it like you did last time and not think about it and just do it babe. You can’t keep doing this everyday.
7/12/14 5:15 PM, outgoing to Conrad Roy: You’re fine, it’s gonna be okay. You just gotta do it babe, you can’t think about it.
Those are the texts Roy’s girlfriend, Michelle Carter, sent to her boyfriend on the night of his death, and the texts that painted her as a villain. Though gruesome and inexcusable, the texts do not tell the whole story. Conrad Roy was not given the support he needed by his community as he struggled immensely with mental health issues. While it is easy to point fingers to try to explain an unexplainable event, most suicide cases are not that simple. The case of Conrad Roy cannot be dismissed by simply identifying a scapegoat. The role of mental health is key and needs to be analyzed if we want to prevent the same thing from happening again. Villainizing a teenager while failing to address the mental health concerns so evident in this case will only exacerbate the problem. We must look deeper in order to truly understand what happened.
“She was really nice”:
Michelle Carter was seventeen when her long-distance boyfriend committed suicide. Born and raised in Plainville, Massachusetts, Carter attended King Philip Regional High School where she had recently received an award titled “Most Likely to Brighten Your Day” voted on by her classmates. One King Philip graduate even described her as “really nice.” The teen played on her school’s softball team and received good grades from her teachers. She was known for being bubbly, athletic, and intelligent. She had a deep obsession with Glee and Lea Michele. Her parents, David and Gail, were a respectable suburban couple hailing from Plainville where they chose to raise their children. Growing up, Carter struggled with her body image and with making friends. She often noted that she was lonely and lacked companionship, upset that she was never invited to any of the cool parties and loathing herself for her lack of popularity. Nonetheless, she managed to find a few people to confide in, namely, Sam Boardman, Olivia Mosolgo, Lexie Eblan, and most notably, Conrad Roy.
11/3/13 6:30 PM, outgoing to Olivia Mosolgo: No stop I’m not. Stop telling me how wonderful and beautiful I am and how I’m such a funny girl because beautiful girls get invited to parties and their friends call and wanna hangout. They don’t spend Friday night’s alone and funny girls don’t lock themselves in their room to cry
11/3/13 6:37 PM, outgoing to Olivia Mosolgo: Livy I have like no friends
A virtual love affair:
In 2012, the Carters took a family vacation to Florida to visit relatives. It was then that she met Conrad Roy for the first time, who also happened to be on a family trip and coincidentally lived in Massachusetts too. The two were introduced by family friends and, according to the HBO documentary I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter, they went on a bike ride together and fell in love. After their trips to Florida, they only met a handful of times in person; the majority of their relationship remained long-distance and virtual. They remained in touch via text messaging, sending hundreds of messages everyday discussing their deepest feelings and struggles.
7/2/14 6:55 PM, incoming from Conrad Roy: like we live in a world where social status comes before anything. if you feel lonely and don’t talk to people. you will become depressed it’s just that simple. If you can’t make friends or feels nobody likes you. it doesn’t matter what you look like, how much money you have, how you’re future is looking.
7/2/14 6:58 PM, outgoing to Conrad Roy: You’re absolutely completely right that’s exactly how society is. I hate it too I really do
Shortly after getting to know her, Roy began sending concerning messages to Carter regarding his desire to commit suicide. He suggests that the two of them “should be like Romeo and Juliet at the end.” Carter responds with “I’d love to be your Juliet,” naively unaware of what Roy really meant. At first, Carter desperately wanted to help the boy she loved, telling him how much everyone in his life cared about him and offering to get him help. However, after months of this back and forth and Roy’s relentless hopelessness, Carter began to encourage Roy to go through with his suicide plan, giving him ideas on how to do it and continuously urging him to get on with it. She promised to take care of his family after he died. Eventually, she became convinced that this was the right thing; Roy should kill himself and she should help him because there was nothing else she could do to save him.
7/5/14 4:13 PM, outgoing to Conrad Roy: Do you have heroin? You can overdose on that and drink a lot of alcohol
7/5/14 4:15 PM, outgoing to Conrad Roy: Cyanide?
7/5/14 4:19 PM, outgoing to Conrad Roy: Well maybe you should just od on Tylenol and Nyquil again because that is proven to work
3 words: get back in
9/15/14 8:24 PM, outgoing to Sam Boardman: Sam his death is my fault like honestly I could have stopped him I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car because it was working and he got scared and I [expletive] told him to get back in Sam because I knew he would do it all
In 2017, Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for her involvement in Roy’s suicide through “wanton and reckless” assistance in his death. Bristol County Juvenile Court Judge Lawrence Moniz concluded that Carter’s telling Roy to get back in the car and carry out his suicide was enough evidence to conclude that she caused the death of Conrad Roy. Moniz claimed that Roy “[broke] that chain of self-causation by exiting the vehicle,” so the moment when Carter tells him to get back in is the moment that leads to her downfall. Roy was no longer planning to commit suicide as he stepped out of his truck, but Michelle ordered him to continue. Though Carter’s encouragement of suicide was not explicitly illegal, Moniz determined that her ordering Roy to get back into the car crossed the line. While the hearing has officially come to a close, and Michelle Carter has now completed her sentence, the facts of this case have not all been considered to a full extent by the public. The case sparked much consideration about freedom of speech in America. It left the public wondering if convicting Carter of manslaughter would violate her constitutional right guaranteed by the First Amendment; however, it hardly called attention to the lack of mental health care provided for Roy and Carter.
Eating disorders, self-harm, and Celexa
The public has been very quick to jump on Carter and blame her entirely for Roy’s suicide, dismissing her as “sociopath” and “a vile human being,” deserving “zero pity,” as several Americans took to Twitter to express. Carter was immediately painted into a villain by the masses before anyone really examined her mental state at the time. Had Michelle received the help she herself needed, it’s possible that Conrad’s death could have been prevented; however, authorities and the media have neglected to focus on the mental health issues that this important case has brought to light and how we can help to mitigate the struggles that both Roy and Carter faced. According to Amanda Knox of the Los Angeles Times, “By holding her accountable for Roy’s death, we increase the tally of victims in this case, we ignore the mental health factors that lead to suicide, and we learn nothing about how to prevent it. We also probably encourage further self-harm in Carter.” Carter was a vulnerable teen struggling with several conditions such as an eating disorder, self harm, and depression. Starting at age eight or nine, Carter began to develop an eating disorder that often manifested in binging. As she got older, her self-hatred worsened, and she began cutting herself; she even attempted suicide once and considered it several times throughout her life. She often confided in her friends and boyfriend about her struggles through her hundreds of sent text messages.
3/20/14 5:54 PM, outgoing to Sam Boardman: Like I know you tell me to do other things like draw or write but cutting is the first thing that pops into my head because I’’ve done it for a while and I’m used to it and I know that it brings satisfaction from the guilt I feel to get rid of the pain
6/23/14 12:52 PM, outgoing to Conrad Roy: I’ve been so depressed too the point where whenever I talked I cried and didn’t wanna do anything all day except cut myself in my room and sleep
6/26/14 8:31 PM, outgoing to Conrad Roy: Body image and my eating disorder are just consuming my life. And I can’t handle anything on my own so I rely on friends but it gets took much to handle for them sometimes and I push people away
3/24/14 9:43 PM, outgoing to Sam Boardman: “I tried to hang myself. I got a chair and the rope and everything and researched how to tie the stupid knot and… but I chickened out and got off the chair… I was so angry and frustrated and disgusted with myself for not having the balls to do it.”
Carter had been struggling for a very long time with her own mental health and was most likely not in the right headspace to be caring for the needs of Conrad Roy. As stated by Knox, “Carter was ill-equipped to manage her own social anxiety, self-harm ideation and body dysmorphia, much less Roy’s depression and tortured obsession with ending his own life.” She was a struggling teen herself and could not possibly have rationally coped with the concerning messages Roy had been sending, especially because they most likely struck a chord with her in relation to her personal experiences.
At the age of fourteen, Carter began taking Prozac, also known as fluoxetine, an antidepressant used originally to treat her anorexia according to CNN Health. She had been taking this medication up until about three months before Conrad Roy’s suicide, when she switched to Celexa, another antidepressant with effects similar to those of Prozac. However, according to Dr. Peter Breggin, a renowned psychiatrist, Celexa had an “intoxicating” effect on Carter. In his testimony, Dr. Breggin stated that this medication can cause grandiosity, exactly what he believes occurred in the mind of Michelle Carter. She began to believe, while under this intoxicating spell of Celexa, that she could help Roy achieve his goal. “She was enmeshed in a delusion… she was unable to form intent because she was so grandiose,” Breggin said in his testimony. So, while Carter’s actions originally seemed to lack explanation, it is possible that her medication that she was using to treat her existing problems were causing even more issues that her therapists and loved ones were unaware of. According to Dr. James L. Knoll and Dr. George David Annas of the Psychiatric Times, antidepressants, like Celexa, can act as “criminogenic agents.” The doctors also stated that Dr. Breggin could read through the text messages and “pinpoint the precise day Carter became involuntarily intoxicated by her antidepressant, as well as the day it began ‘wearing off.’” Breggin’s testimony suggests that Carter’s medication history is very closely connected to Roy’s death, and because of this, it is difficult to place all of the blame on Carter because she was not in control of her own mental state. While this argument did not necessarily hold up or convince Judge Moniz, it brought to the table an important issue that the prosecution would probably not have considered otherwise. Michelle Carter’s mental health problems would have been completely swept under the rug if they hadn’t already been neglected enough. Though her use of Celexa cannot excuse her behavior, the bringing to the table of this information can help society to see her case in a new light and work to minimize the negative effects of the medication on future patients.
Craving attention?:
Would Conrad’s death make Michelle more popular? This was a question that the prosecution considered in great detail and used to their full advantage against Carter in court. The claim was that Michelle hoped to gain sympathy from the other girls in school who had not been giving her much attention. As previously mentioned, Carter always struggled with friendships and felt that she was alone most of the time. “No one hangs out with me” and “I’m alone all the time” were two of the many texts she sent to Olivia Mosolgo, Sam Boardman, and Lexie Eblan. Maybe by getting Roy to commit suicide, the girls would finally give Carter the attention and friendship she so desperately craved. If this idea is the truth, it reflects yet another example of the public’s neglect of Carter’s mental instability. The hundreds of texts she sent to these girls were clear warning signs of her self-hatred and insecurities, yet they were used only to take her down rather than being seriously addressed from a mental health standpoint. Throughout the testimonies of the three girls as witnesses, the prosecution emphasized Carter’s lack of companionship and desperation through the specific and pointed questions that they asked. For example, they asked the girls whether they would choose to hang out with Michelle and whether they considered her to be their friend to which they all replied with some variation of “not really.” Carter was also supposedly in a relationship with a girl named Alice whom she often discussed with Boardman, Mosolgo, and Eblan. Alice’s family has since denied any sort of relation between the two girls.
The aftermath:
Carter was released from prison on January 23rd, 2020 for good behavior after being sentenced less than twelve months earlier in February of 2019. During the time of her sentencing, her case finally began to make people reconsider its impact. According to an NBC Boston article from February 6th, 2019, “The Supreme Judicial Court’s decision Wednesday to uphold Carter’s conviction offers an opportunity for an important discussion about mental health at a time when suicide rates across the country are rising.” AnneMarie Matulis, a Massachusetts suicide prevention advocate stated that Bristol County, Carter’s home county, has been hit very hard by suicide cases in recent years, rising 41 percent between 2017 and 2018. Though this realization comes too late for Carter and Roy, hopefully, their experiences can encourage the community to act earlier and provide the support that Carter failed to provide for Roy herself. The adults in their lives failed them because they were either unaware of or neglected both teens’ struggles both before Roy’s suicide and during Carter’s trial. For Roy, this resulted in his death. For Carter, it painted her as a public villain. While her actions cannot be excused by her mental health issues by any means, the consideration of her struggles is worthwhile in understanding the case as a whole and in preventing yet another tragic suicide.
Carter is likely not an evil sociopath. She was a normal teen struggling with severe depression and self-hatred who made a terrible decision. What she did was unacceptable, inexcusable, and can never be reversed; however, we cannot place all of the blame on her for the death of Conrad Roy. We must also remember that the health care system failed both teens, and that Conrad’s suicide and Michelle’s jail sentence could have been prevented had they both received the help they needed. We need to talk about mental health as an integral part of this monumental case, as it has been swept under the rug far too obviously. As Michelle Carter wrote in a school essay in 2014, “One in every four people deal with [mental illness], and many are not seeking the help they desperately need because the stigma prevents them from doing so. Mental illness is not what people need to be ashamed of, but the stigma and bias is what shames us all.” By starting a conversation about mental health, especially in relation to the case of Michelle Carter, we can make a difference for a lot of teens and help them to seek out the help that Michelle and Conrad never received. If we can break the stigma, we can prevent another Michelle Carter case from occurring in the future.
7/2/14 12:47 AM, outgoing to Conrad Roy: You were my first love, and I wanted more than anything for you to be my last. You were the only guy to make me feel special, and important, and visible. And loved. You’ll always be in my heart, always and forever. You’re mine (like our song)
Bibliography
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