Trigger Warning: My Friend's Husband Killed Her and Himself Because of His Severe Tinnitus

[momus]

There seems to be this "belief" that if you throw enough money at something and do enough research, all of a sudden, you have a cure for tinnitus. That's right out of left field, and it has no basis in scientific proof. Until there is some sort of workaround that helps to cancel it out, which may or may not be possible, we just don't know, then we have what's been available for many years.

Watch what you eat, don't get stressed, experiment w/ different drugs or herbs to see if anything affects your tinnitus, stay away from anything that is known to make it worse, keep busy, avoid loud noises, find ways to mask it, etc.

If someone has damaged kidneys, all the money and research in the world cannot fix that. The damage has been done, and is irreversible. Tinnitus seems to be similar. Once the inner ear has been damaged and the neural patterns have been set up in someone's brain, there is no way that I know of that can fix that. That's not a defeatist statement, it's exactly where we are February 24, 2024.

Could tinnitus lead people to suicide? Oh yeah, for sure. At the one and only tinnitus support meetup I attended many years ago in Portland, there were two people in attendance who had attempted suicide and failed. Those failed suicides had left them in much worse shape than before.

Could someone go crazy from tinnitus and kill their spouse? I have no idea what someone else might or might not do, but to my knowledge it's not something tinnitus alone seems to have ever caused. I don't think it's impossible, but I have never heard of it, for what that's worth. Personally, I have had temper tantrums when I was in an area in which I had no control over people making unnecessarily loud noises. Tinnitus flare-ups can really put me on edge, and have in the past made me pretty crazy until I could get away from that noise and calm myself back down.

 

[ZFire]

While tinnitus can break you down, both mentally and physically to the point where suicide starts to become a viable solution, the idea that it could drive someone to commit domestic homicide seems pretty far-fetched, however. I sense there might be more to this story than we're being led to believe.

It's mentioned in the OP, that the murderer was 'too private' about himself. This, in my view, makes me question how reliable the events leading up to the domestic homicide really were.

And if it was indeed tinnitus that drove him to kill his spouse, as the thread title suggests, it's important to recognize that these people are outliers. People with tinnitus, and that includes the severe cases, typically don't commit murder, especially if it's murder in the 1st and 2nd degree.