Accidental Death Among The Mentally Ill And The Tragic Case Of Elisa Lam

When I look back at my journals from around the time I was diagnosed as bipolar, it’s hard to tell whether I was being real or putting on an act. A therapist suggested many years later that I was being “histrionic” — a word that indicates a pathology while also suggesting the symptoms are performative. This is exactly how it felt at the time.

Even at my worst, I worried I was being melodramatic. It’s terrifying to doubt the legitimacy of a suicidal ideation when you’re in the grips of it — it can feel like you’re daring yourself to make it real.

I’m reminded of this when I think about the case of Elisa Lam, the 21-year-old Canadian college student whose body was found rotting in a water supply tank of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles in February 2013. The cheap hotel had a macabre history of strange deaths and suicides, and had housed at least two known serial killers. This, coupled with slow-motion video footage of Lam in an elevator taken shortly before her disappearance, prompted wild speculation among Internet conspiracy theorists.

The fact that no one knew what brought Elisa Lam to a seedy hotel on the fringes of L.A.’s Skid Row — and that officials and the media stayed mostly silent on the case during the investigation — only seemed to fuel the Internet’s imagination…