Michelle Carter

[lemontrees]

I've been morbidly fascinated with this story of a 17 yr old girl who convinced her "boyfriend" to kill himself via text. What do you think her socionics type is?

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics...-carter-trial/

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...616-story.html

On June 29, Michelle began to conspire with him. "What about hanging yourself or stabbing yourself?" she said. The next day, she asked: "Why don't you just drink bleach?" Conrad eagerly participated. He found websites that gave you the odds on different methods. "Carbon monoxide or helium gas. I want to deprive myself of oxygen," he said. "I WANT TO DIE." He worried about leaving his family. Michelle said that if her kid sister died, she would be "extremely upset for a week or two" but would get over it. "Are you gonna leave a note for me?" she asked.

On July 3, Conrad told Michelle that he was going to do it. Then he was awake the next morning. She was furious; she thought he was jerking her around. "YOU KEEP PUSHING IT OFF!" She gave him other ideas. A gunshot to the head had a 99 percent chance of working. Hanging, 89 percent. "Carbon monoxide is the best option," she told him, "if you fall asleep in your car while it's running." Conrad worried that rescuers might inhale the CO and get sick. Michelle said it wasn't a problem. Conrad said he was doing circles in his mind about where to go. What if someone found him before he died?

"You better not be bullshitting me and saying you're gonna do this and then purposely get caught," Michelle said. She asked whether, when he died, she could say she was his girlfriend. Conrad said okay.

Between June 29 and July 12, Conrad toed the edge of the cliff and backed away. The night of July 9, he was ready to go with a generator.

Michelle asked: "How long til you die ."

Conrad said he didn't know. "Could be in 5/30 minutes."

Three minutes passed. Michelle wrote: "Wait so this is serious right like the thing is on and you're gonna die soon?" At 5:32 the next morning: "Conrad." At 8:41: "Conrad please answer me right now you're scaring me." Was that a cover-up? It seemed more plausible that the suicide flickered as a possibility without settling into reality.

Michelle compounded this impression by threading her texts to Conrad with fiction. Because nothing like this had ever happened to her, she had to build the framework from the materials at hand, culled from white-teen culture. In July 2013, Cory Monteith, a star of the TV show Glee, had overdosed in a hotel room. His costar and real-life girlfriend, Lea Michele, led the cast in a tribute episode. Michelle texted Conrad word for word from it. On July 7, five days before Conrad's suicide, Michelle went to see The Fault in Our Stars. At the movie's climax, a terminal-cancer patient, dying in his Jeep, calls his girlfriend for help. Afterward, Michelle texted Conrad: "I literally can't stop crying lol what's up with you?"

What makes these allusions uncanny is Conrad's apparent unfamiliarity with the source material. Like many sad young men, he professed to believe that television and social media were turning his generation apathetic. A day after Michelle texted a long unattributed quote from Lea Michele, Conrad wrote: "I think it's getting really out of hand, especially with all these shows and the media is ruining what culture is supposed to be like."

The dissonance caught my attention. It implied not that Michelle was successfully writing some script in which Conrad was a character but that he was incommensurate with the intensity Michelle projected on him. I came to feel that a shape existed in her mind that predated him.

I find her terrifying and extremely unlikable, but I felt a bit bad for her too. Because she sounded so insecure and unwell I guess.

[Hays]

Ridiculous that she should be held so accountable for something he did.

[Adam Strange]

My immediate impression from the first link is Gamma Introvert.

My impression from the second link is ESI e6. She actually looks a lot like a younger version of a woman I know and like a lot. Looks like her, walks like her, holds herself like her, and looks emotionally stressed like her (but much more so). That girl needs a good LIE legal defender and a lot of therapy. She was most likely just trying to be helpful to her friend and thought it was a game.

This is a good reason for not trying kids under 18 as adults. They aren't adults and often don't have great resources to draw on, moderating experiences, or good judgement.

I will say that she displayed pretty bad judgement, even if she thought it was a game. But I myself have gotten blind drunk and driven a car. There, but for the grace of God, go I.


*EDIT*
Whoa, I just got a look at her parents from the Esquire article. Father: Remote, cold, critical and dismissive. Mother: Critical, intrusive and relentless. I'm guessing the father is an Alpha and the mother is a Beta. But that's just a wild guess.

[lemontrees]

Ridiculous that she should be held so accountable for something he did.

If you read the text transcripts they are intense. Apparently he expressed reservations about 40 times and she kept telling him to kill himself. He died by carbon monoxide poisoning in his car. When he felt it "working," he got scared, got out of the car, and called her. She testified that she told him "get back in."

Some of the texts


I am not sure if it warrants legal action but I believe he would not have killed himself without her involvement.

There's a prevailing narrative on the internet that she was only doing it to get attention as the "grieving girlfriend" (although I disagreed):

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimdalrympl...Mq9#.jfP912Q4W


And she lied about plenty of things, such as texting him that he should kill himself then immediately texting another girl how guilty she feels that she might not be able to stop her friend from hurting himself... I think she was / is severely mentally unbalanced.

[Adam Strange]

If you read the text transcripts they are intense. Apparently he expressed reservations about 40 times and she kept telling him to kill himself. He died by carbon monoxide poisoning in his car. When he felt it "working," he got scared, got out of the car, and called her. She testified that she told him "get back in."

Some of the texts


I am not sure if it warrants legal action but I believe he would not have killed himself without her involvement.

There's a prevailing narrative on the internet that she was only doing it to get attention as the "grieving girlfriend" (although I disagreed):

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimdalrympl...Mq9#.jfP912Q4W


And she lied about plenty of things, such as texting him that he should kill himself then immediately texting another girl how guilty she feels that she might not be able to stop her friend from hurting himself... I think she was / is severely mentally unbalanced.

I completely agree with everything you said. However, I also think she was doing it partly to help him. Another reason for her actions might have been for her to gain agency in the world where she had none, but that is just speculation. I look at the disbelief she expressed when she realized that he actually might have died, and I also look at the expression in her eyes. In many people who are on trial for committing crimes, I feel that I can glimpse moments of triumph in their eyes when the deceptive mask falls away. I don't see that in her. I only see grief and remorse and resignation.

I have a tendency to assign blame to parents of people who commit crimes when under about age 22. (I think the parents should be punished right alongside their kids. Public whippings, perhaps. It is quick and leaves a painful impression and saves on jail costs.) After age 22 or 24, the influence of the parents should be diminished to the point where a person becomes themselves. This belief probably stems from my own experiences, in which my mother tried to erase me as a person and my father stood by and did nothing to defend me while being perfectly aware of what she was doing. Getting away from them made a huge difference for the better in my life. For the record, I'm sure I was mentally unbalanced at 18. I just hid it very, very well.

In the case of the woman in question, I get the impression that she was not approved of by her parents (I know, I know, I can't know if that's really true or not), which is something that is often experienced by out-of-quadra children, and if she is an ESI, she additionally probably wanted to help and was also driven to make her plans come true. @FDG has said that once an ESI decides on a plan, it is very hard for them to see that plan not completed. She just didn't foresee (low Ni) the consequences of her plan going into the worst-case scenario.

I'm not saying that she didn't exhibit extremely bad judgement. She did. But I'm also pretty sure that five years away from her parents will help her tremendously, and that she's in no danger of repeating what she did.

[Hays]

I think she was / is severely mentally unbalanced.

They both seem mentally and emotionally unbalanced from the little I’ve read.

However I don’t think a teen should be the guinea pig for assisted suicide type trial from text/phone/computer type messaging.
Though maybe someone has been held accountable this way before?
Perhaps communication via these channels can cause more harm than we think in certain individuals or maybe all of us?
Maybe addiction behaviours via these channels came into play.
But still, he is responsible for his actions of taking his life not so much she and jail time seems an overkill in this situation which could potentially send her down the same route as the boyfriend :-(

[Adam Strange]

^ My mother forced me to do many things which I really didn't want to do in her attempts to make me into someone more acceptable to her, and I'm not talking about doing the dishes. She made me jump into the deep end of the pool (so I would learn to swim) when I couldn't swim a stroke. I jumped in knowing I would probably die. I sank to the bottom and would have drowned if a bystander hadn't seen this and pulled me out. So I can understand the possibility of the guy having a weak enough will, or bad enough circumstances, to be talked into his death.

This seems to be an extremely unfortunate case where two very troubled people came together and their troubles meshed in the worst possible way.

[lemontrees]

I completely agree with everything you said. However, I also think she was doing it partly to help him. Another reason for her actions might have been for her to gain agency in the world where she had none, but that is just speculation. I look at the disbelief she expressed when she realized that he actually might have died, and I also look at the expression in her eyes. In many people who are on trial for committing crimes, I feel that I can glimpse moments of triumph in their eyes when the deceptive mask falls away. I don't see that in her. I only see grief and remorse and resignation.

I have a tendency to assign blame to parents of people who commit crimes when under about age 22. (I think the parents should be punished right alongside their kids. Public whippings, perhaps. It is quick and leaves a painful impression and saves on jail costs.) After age 22 or 24, the influence of the parents should be diminished to the point where a person becomes themselves. This belief probably stems from my own experiences, in which my mother tried to erase me as a person and my father stood by and did nothing to defend me while being perfectly aware of what she was doing. Getting away from them made a huge difference for the better in my life. For the record, I'm sure I was mentally unbalanced at 18. I just hid it very, very well.

In the case of the woman in question, I get the impression that she was not approved of by her parents (I know, I know, I can't know if that's really true or not), which is something that is often experienced by out-of-quadra children, and if she is an ESI, she additionally probably wanted to help and was also driven to make her plans come true. @FDG has said that once an ESI decides on a plan, it is very hard for them to see that plan not completed. She just didn't foresee (low Ni) the consequences of her plan going into the worst-case scenario.

I'm not saying that she didn't exhibit extremely bad judgement. She did. But I'm also pretty sure that five years away from her parents will help her tremendously, and that she's in no danger of repeating what she did.

What's fascinating is that, if you read the Esquire article and others, she seems obsessed with being popular. She often lied about the extent to which she was close to someone, and apparently a week before Conrad actually died she showed little interest in him in her other texts - she was, instead, obsessed about a girl named "Alice."

I agree that she felt she was helping him. I don't know how much she cared about him and how much she needed to feel important. I don't feel she loved him as much as she thought she did.


And I suppose the reason I feel so insistent is that the article describes her as being "nice," even disconcertingly so, and I feel that so often the most damaging people are nice but when you try to point it out they turn it back on you because they are good at getting people to like them. They can abuse you and attack you physically one instant and then afterwards look tearful and meek and say that they didn't mean to. And then do it again.

It's like no, being "nice" does not exculpate you when you do something reprehensible.

Other than that, yes, I can have sympathy for her.

[Kill4Me]

SEE-Fi 3w4 so/sx



She treats the whole endeavor as a game with no consequences. I read through the texts...she was never not tactical and constantly kept pressure on him. she could not have planned on what her ESI bf would say exactly in the texts as he was constantly throwing curveballs. she was coming up with that stuff on the spot....improvising tactics from one moment to the next that would move him towards the suicide. this is Se/Fi cognition par excellence and kept her tuned right into his emotional responses in order to understand how to best move him like a piece on a chess board.

I notice that her persona never changed throughout the texts and overall coverage of events. Her image was too consistent, with no reactivity. The 3w4's over-consistency of image/persona actually indicates a problem of them being out of touch with the authentic self. She was also rather skilled in deception and prone towards what Tom Condon calls the 3's "amoral strategizing."

"Their once healthy flexibility degenerates into arrogant calculation and amoral strategizing."

http://www.thechangeworks.com/ennpri...l#anchor172482

[ashlesha]

Wow, I hadn't read much about her and I was under the impression that it was a thing where she was fed up with him talking about it and just said "do it, then" a couple times. I had no idea she was so relentless about it! I'm kind of angry...
I know all about regretting bad teenage choices and how different the mindset is from an adult though, and I'm also opposed to trying teens as adults.

This has nothing to do with her type. Im just.!!

In courtoom pictures she looks about how I would feel. Goddamn

[Chae]

SEE would fit. The dangers of strong F + E. The story's hard to believe.

[Kill4Me]

"Students invariably described her as chatty, excitable, and outgoing; she was even chosen as the “class clown” and the person “most likely to brighten your day” in the senior-class superlatives, which were voted on after Roy’s death but before the charges hit the news.

“She was always very bubbly,” said one friend...“...Michelle made everyone laugh all the time — even her laugh made people smile because it was this booming, genuine sound.'"

https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/conra...ter-c-v-r.html

[darya]

Typical gamma SF face

[Exodus]

ESE.

"If Michelle had a defining characteristic, it was a cheery relentlessness. If you were kind to her, she would thank you so much it was confusing. If she upset you, she would apologize fifty times, then apologize for apologizing. Not quite part of any group, she sometimes overcompensated, lavishing attention in sudden intense waves."

"Students invariably described her as chatty, excitable, and outgoing; she was even chosen as the “class clown” and the person “most likely to brighten your day” in the senior-class superlatives, which were voted on after Roy’s death but before the charges hit the news.

“She was always very bubbly,” said one friend...“...Michelle made everyone laugh all the time — even her laugh made people smile because it was this booming, genuine sound.'"

https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/conra...ter-c-v-r.html

^

"She compared her to Eddie Haskell from Leave It to Beaver. "Super nice. No kid is that nice.""

"Kelly thought Michelle was aggressive, the way she "latched on.""

"Conrad please answer me right now you're scaring me."

"At 7:59, she called Conrad. The phone rang for twenty-one seconds and went to voicemail. She called at 8:02. Voicemail. At 8:04, 8:06. 9:15. 9:17. 9:40. 9:49. Voicemail. ... In total, Michelle called Conrad's number twenty-eight times after 7:58. " <--- desperate need for communication (obviously impossible at the time, but still notable)

This is an example of "Fe gone wrong", the kind of manipulation which is sometimes attributed to Fe. More specifically the power of persuasion, to convince someone that they feel a certain way.

EIE might work too, but any other type is out of the question as far as I'm concerned.

[falsehope]

To me she looks like extroverted gamma type. So I'd guess SEE, because she also looks SF. She also looks similar to quasi-identical ESE, but has face more like gamma type.

[Exodus]

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/loc...rter_wants_out

[golden]

If she has a psychopath brain profile (testable with equipment) it would be hard to attribute her ability to convince someone to kill himself to Fe or Se or any other IE in a cause-and-effect way.

Psychopaths can cast a spell on people, even the ones who know what’s happening, like law enforcement agents and psychiatrists and psychologists. They will behave however is expedient, and much of that behavior is synthesized.

Someone like this I would rather not type at all.

[Kill4Me]

SEE-Fi 3w4 so/sx