keep fighting the good fight, folks.

[mopinko]

gonna be much to say on the topic of "dangerous mentally ill" for a while, i fear.

i hope that they are able to do an autopsy on the pilot. specifically his brain.
did you know at the infamous lubie's shooter had a brain tumor? i wonder how many others w traumatic brain injuries are dx'd as "mentally ill", when in fact they have injured brains.

i, for one, would like to bury the term mental illness in a deeeeep dark grave.

[fizzgig]

1. the older i get, the more i dislike that term

[mopinko]

2. it deserves to be buried.

as does the ghost of sigmund freud. 'your mom did it' is a figment of a narrow understanding of the workings of the human mind.

[hunter]

4. Hell, my mom got blamed for my asthma...

... my early speech pathologies and what was much later diagnosed in me as Asperger Syndrome too.

The asthma was probably aggravated by a house cleaned with the latest cleaning products. Modern research is tending toward the view that I'd have been better off sleeping with farm animals and eating dirt. An unchallenged immune system often makes up threats, which is why I require inhaled steroids twice daily if I choose to keep breathing.

The Autistic Spectrum stuff has very clearly been handed down genetically from my dad's side of the family; sometimes useful, sometimes not.

I'm Autistic Spectrum, my dad is AS, his dad was AS, and his dad's dad was AS. That line has everything from eccentric geniuses to dysfunctional hermits. An aunt and an uncle of my dad were dysfunctional hermits, supported by family who were either "normal" or had marketable obsessions. My dad and his dad mostly had marketable obsessions. I haven't entirely been so lucky, but sometimes I get close.

I'm not telling how long it took me to write this. When I speak, except for many "canned" and well practiced responses, I speak slow.

When I write I allow as much time as it takes.

[mopinko]

6. i found the attitude so disturbing when dealing w troubled teens.

therapy that ingrained one kid's distorted perception that she was severely abused, including regular beatings, broke my relationship with her to this day. 14 years later.
and the worst of it is that it was really her very detached dad's attention that she was angling for. he was always receptive to tales of bad mommy.
dealing w these people was a nightmare. here i am, my kid's staunch ally, and they cant see it for the distorted tales.

it was pretty plain that the kid had problems, and so they accepted her tales. such a double edged sword that therapeutic acceptance is.

all i really did was pass on the f'ed up genes from my side of the family.

and for all the early intervention, she is just now starting to come to grips w the fact that she could use some help.

[No Vested Interest]

3. The term "mental illness" is so broad it lacks any real meaning.

Too all-encompassing without giving enough specifics to explain what's really going on.

"Mental illness" also leads to the expectation that a "fix" or "cure" is possible, as in medication, when some psychological problems are immutable, as in personality disorders.

[hunter]

5. Modern meds work well enough for me.

Off my meds I'm a feral homeless human, a harmless guy in the library.

My OCD always overpowers my deep dark black hole depression.

Been there, done that, and built enough of social support systems that I (hopefully!) avoid that state.

Hunter running down the highway with bloody bare feet and one piece of clothing covering my "naughty bits" is not a mental state I ever wish to repeat.

But looking for my clothes on the beach, stark naked, among many piles of washed up kelp, an hour or two past past midnight, with the help of a cop who'd been called because someone had thought I was suicidal and trying to drown myself, that's a priceless story.

I wasn't in any way suicidal. I was body surfing naked. At the time it seemed like the interesting thing to do.

[No Vested Interest]

7. Hunter, we celebrate that you've had great results with meds and have

a support system that is there for you and that has gotten you to the place you want to be.

My point is that some conditions, (ex. autism and /or some Aspergers) are referred to as mental illness and meds and support are not enough to change the condition to what one would hope or wish for.

[hunter]

8. I'm not fixed or cured in any way, nor am in a place I "want to be."

But I muddle through just well enough and I've come to believe that's the normal state of human existence.

Expectations can be hazardous to one's health.

I seen fire and I seen rain.

[No Vested Interest]

11. Well, Hunter, I've read your postings over time and as far as I'm concerned

You're one of us.
I know I'm sure muddling through and expect to be doing so for the balance of my days.

[HereSince1628]

9. "Treatment" is also pretty nebulous

Last edited Mon Mar 30, 2015, 08:35 PM - Edit history (1)

I suppose the same can be said for "recovery" too.

And while I'm at it I might as well say there seems to be no guarantee that immutable refers to a characteristic of a disorder so much as it refers to the short comings of available treatment to facilitate and/or expedite such recovery.

And I'm pretty sure that as providers get to write the narratives in textbooks and journals the literature suggest it's not a short-coming related to their performance of "treating"

[HereSince1628]

10. The copilot could have been acutely mentally ill, but here is what bugs me...

We've got a very strange relationship of information that should be kept within the investigation, and the media. We know Drs notes exist...in torn up form, we know medications that came from the co-pilots apartment, we apparently know what is in private psychiatric records and we know what his ex-girlfriend remembers him saying.

Except for the notes and medications taken from the apartment much of this is many YEARS old

No crash investigation makes this stuff available in this sort of stream-of-discovery time-line. Something is weird.

Call me mentally disordered, but it's a French prosecutor who is releasing this information about the crash of an AIRBUS passenger jet. Airbus is a French Company. Is something strange????? Hey I'm just paranoid, you'll have to rely on some sane person media expert to question the character of this reporting.

However it has come to be, the information being fed into the media is following a post hoc proctor hoc sort of reasoning. Early on the assumption was a white guy with a possibly Jewish surname couldn't be a terrorist. SOoooo, a second assumption goes into play...'no sane person would crash a passenger jet'.

With the final result of the investigation in hand right at the start what is needed is to go back toward the beginning to find whatever can be found to substantiate the foregone conclusion. So we've got the ex-girlfriend telling about how the Lubitz had 'grandiose' ideations about doing something to change the system and be remembered. She didn't understand what that meant then...but NOW that the plane is crashed SHE UNDERSTANDS! He was going to commit mass murder-suicide....and we've got statements about treatment for depression and anxiety (years ago?) and now we've got he was SUICIDAL!!! (but perhaps 6 years ago or more).

And if the convoluted logic isn't bad...there is the leap to mythology that stigmatizes people with mental disorders

People never recover from a mental illness
no one treated for depression can be a safe pilot
having a depression medication in your bathroom drawer makes you dangerous

and then there is the dreadful reality revealed that pushes the mentally ill into shame and hiding

People think mental illness is always dangerous

An 80% unemployment rate among mentally ill gives them reason to fear sharing...probably justifies fear of sharing
but the world will think you immoral if not criminally negligent if you don't mention that years ago you had treatment. Look it's just better to be in denial and never seek treatment! Just like 60% of America's mentally ill...

If you say anything to a lover, friend, co-worker etc. it will come out years later and they will assume you were crazy all those years ago.

[hunter]

12. I never got my picture taken for the high school or college yearbooks.

This was years before high school photo ID. I'd ditch school for picture day, for make-up picture day, and for Double-Plus-Mandatory-They-Send-a-Note-to-Your-Third-Period-Teacher-Excusing-You-From-Class picture day. Not Pictured: Hunter and all the other misfits and weirdos.

I'd already learned it was best to be invisible. I didn't want THAT picture to be the one in the newspapers or on television if I went off the rails.

I was already hiding.

I was "asked" to leave college twice. It was all very gentlemanly, nothing on paper, just take some time off, Hunter, until you get your shit back together.

The "or else..." threats were largely unspoken.

I quit high school but I graduated from college eventually (many events...) for the simple mundane reason meds were improving. I sometimes imagine what it must be like not to take meds with unpleasant side effects every day. When I was young and stupid I'd try to power through life by sheer force of will, without meds, and end up in the E.R.. I've avoided that sort of silliness since the mid 'eighties.

I was also lucky not to have any disturbing (to employers anyways) gaps in my employment or academic history. Out of school I was capable of heavy semi-skilled labor -- warehouse work, furniture moving, loading and unloading trucks, that sort of thing. All I had to claim to any potential employer was that I was taking a break from school because I needed the money. It was like a secret handshake that elevated my status. Nobody had to know about my feral human, dumpster diving, occasionally homeless self.

Thinking back on it all, I often see my grandma. She was bat-shit insane by any modern measure but intensely proud that she'd never missed a day of work. Her life outside of work was a never-ending soap opera and bloody catastrophe. When she retired with a comfortable pension, enough for any reasonable person to travel and enjoy life perhaps, she instead lost whatever sanity she had left and eventually had to removed from the home she owned outright as a danger to herself and others. It's somewhat amazing the cops didn't simply shoot her. It's a miracle she hadn't remembered her guns. My mom thought she'd removed all the guns from grandma's house, but we found some more later.

After that my grandma bounced back and forth between "assisted" living places and my parent's house whenever an assisted living place would have no more of her.

My grandma directly set in motion the worst long weekend of my life, culminating with a friend of my girlfriend trying to kill herself in my bathtub. My grandma also played a staring roll in my brother's first marriage and divorce. Fortunately for me, by the time I met my wife my grandma was much less a Holy Terror and was near enough charming and gracious at our wedding. She passed away about a year later.

[HereSince1628]

13. And now video from the plane as it crashes? WTF??

Someone REALLY needs to get the most painful horror to the surface. To what end other than to bias opinion against the co-pilot???????

This is the strangest reporting on an aircrash in my memory. And I can't believe it is an accident.

[HereSince1628]

14. Apparently released by unknown sources to a FRENCH magazine. Bias? Perhaps

This NEVER happens

1) it's cruel to the families of the dead

2) it's salaciousness can not help but prejudice the investigation.