Substance Abuse In Jeffrey Dahmer's Life

Jeffrey was not very popular in high school. He played the clarinet, tennis, and wrote for the school paper. He also had a history of alcohol abuse, which will continue for the rest of life. A classmate recalls Jeffrey drinking cups of scotch at his desk. Though unpopular, he was known for a lot of pranks including bleating like a sheep, shouting out things at strange times, and faking epileptic fits. In addition around age fourteen, his compulsions in regard to necrophilia and murder began. Dahmer claims that, “around age fourteen or fifteen, I started to have obsessive thoughts of violence intermingled with sex.” Throughout high school, he continued to collect dead animals. Jeffrey remembers in ninth grade during a biology class, “…we had the usual dissection of a fetal pig. I took that ham and kept the skeleton and I just started branching out to dogs,
This would eventually lead to his parents divorce when he was eighteen which caused a lot of psychological stress. Research has been shown that divorce can cause feelings of abandonment, and when Jeffrey found out that his younger brother and his mother moved away without him, after a huge custody battle over David, this only further his difficulty with the feelings of isolation and abandonment. In an interview with Jeffrey’s stepmother, she claims that Joyce left Dahmer, “..all alone in the house with no money, no food, and a broken refrigerator..” Dahmer later recollects that during his parents divorce he began to have fantasies about murder. He claims it helped him overcome the feelings of emptiness. Dahmer internalized this significant early emotional neglect combined with parental conflict. It has been theorized that this neglect may have evolved into many different type of psychological disorders that will be discussed later in this