The Panty Man

Posted on November 13, 2005 in Depression Justice Sexuality

UPDATED.

Sung Koo Kim has a problem: he faces four years in prison because of his love for stealing women’s underwear. The judge also sentenced him to eighteen months of psychiatric care after he gets out of prison.

Kim states that he is sorry for what he has done:

In a statement, Kim called his actions shortsighted, selfish, abnormal and blamed them on loneliness and depression.

“It was never my intention to scare or instill a sense of insecurity in them. I want to reassure them that I pose absolutely no threat or danger to them or the community,” he said.

A prosecutor read statements from two of the victims saying that they were too scared to come into the courtroom.

Here we have cases of mental illness in direct collision with one another. Or rather, as the ball of Kim’s brain disorder rolled along, it collided with those of the women he stole from. Even if Kim never intended to harm them — to only steal their underwear — they could not have possibly have known this. Their fear is rational and I hope that they are given psychiatric help to overcome the effects of generalized anxiety disorder.

Is Kim all that different from Andrea Yates? The answer must be an unequivocal yes and no. Aside from their sex, Kim committed burglaries while Yates committed murder. Oddly, however, Yates will probably be less of a future problem — even if she is released — than Kim. Yates has already hit her peak: she’s seen the worst her mood disorder can propel her to do. Kim, on the other hand, may escalate from panty stealing to acts of violence. This pattern holds true both for both the mentally ill and the unafflicted.

The hope is that Kim appears to be coming out of his mood disorder and realizing that what he did was not the action of a well person. I believe he is truly sorry for what he did. When medicated, many of us look back at things we did and feel shock. I did that. The advice I give to people with such traumatic memories of their own behavior is detachment, realizing that this was the disease acting. “Stand sentinel against the diease,” I say. “Use this when you contemplate going off your meds. But do not think you have less right to live on this earth because of it.”

I’d give that advice to Kim, Yates, the Antichrist Killer, and Harris. None of these can afford to go unmedicated.

The last thing I’d tell them was to accept the fact that many people won’t trust them. These women Kim stole from will not want to see his picture in the newspaper, much less be around him. He is just going to have to live with that and respect their emotions on the matter. They have the right. I hope, however, that Kim’s victims will forgive him enough to not attack him when he comes out of prison and become advocates for sufferers of mood disorders.

The disease afflicts each person in different ways. We know how a combination of Fundamentalist demonology, stigma, folk psychiatry, and an overenthusiastic sexually energetic zealot of a spouse combined to lead to Yates’ tragedy. Of Kim’s background we know little. I suspect that lingerie ads plus the locker room attitude of men’s dorms were part of the picture. I believe that this young man felt lonely and depressed: so he broke out of his cell inappropriately. Early diagnosis would have helped. Abolition of stigma and education would have made it easier for Kim to come forward earlier.

The Kim of the past is dead. What should concern us is the man he will be in five years. If we do not teach him self-awareness of his symptoms, I fear we might see his name again.

UPDATE: Most of the radio stations and internet newspaper feeds for this story include a picture of frilly women’s underwear hanging on a wall. Many look at Kim with horror and deny that our culture had anything to do with the course of his delusion. Yeah, right.