Screaming to Deaf Ears

I was going home from work the other day, in that stagnant movement you get when car volume meets traffic lights and everybody just sort of oozes down the small city street, when I saw an entire troubling scenario play out in a matter of seconds.  There was a wild-eyed, middle-aged man wearing a back pack literally screaming and pointing at a woman waiting to pull out from a grocery store parking lot.  It made no sense at first, but then I saw her slowly back up a few feet with him still screaming and pointing wildly in her direction.  She had evidently pulled onto the area where the sidewalk crosses the entrance to the parking lot as she waited for an opening to pull out just as the now raging man was coming along.  Whether she came to close to him physically, or was impeding his walk I have no clue, but his rage was intense enough for me to feel it all the way out on the street in a line behind a red light!  The woman did what I would have instinctively done, pretend he wasn’t there then try to appease him by backing up and hope he went away.  It’s a technique I was reminded of in one of my training classes with my dog, ignore the bad behavior and it will eventually extinguish.  It actually will work….with your pooch.

I have some history with trying to appease enraged people, got some personal history with dealing with various levels of mental illness too; of course there’s absolutely no proof that a mental health problem had anything to do with this situation, but I have a clue besides the raging and the wild eyes; the back pack.

Mental illness is the elephant in our society’s living room.  Various social services seem to me to randomly throw help at it hoping something sticks, well, anything but reality.  Mostly the goal seems to be to pass the person along and make it look good.  There just aren’t real resources out there, and even if you have insurance, In a lot of places it seems hard to find Psychiatrists that do more than just shuffle you in and out of their office with the prescription that is supposed to work on the diagnosis they made by assessing what is most likely your problem, considering your age, social class, treatment history, and drug/alcohol history.  Do they diagnose you the human?  Maybe not, they look at what is supposed to be going on, that I know from personal experience with a close family member with good insurance. 

I have a bit of a prejudice here, but the plight of the mentally ill is looked at through the lens of reality, we aren’t showing people in need any kind of love or compassion. 

What about that back-pack?  What in the hell do I mean about that?  School.  That store is within walking distance of a good sized university and a community college.  Going back to school seems to be the go to advice for people with problems.  Go back to school and better your lot.  Doing a lot of drugs to self-medicate something going wrong in your brain!  Quit that!  Go to some meetings where the untrained can fix you up for free, take out a bunch of loans and go to school.  Those nasty drugs or booze must have really been your problem.  No addiction problem?  Sure?  Well, in that case our Psychologist with prescribe the most likely medication and send you on your way.  Go to school, get some massive loans and a profession that will help you pay them off by the time you’re around 80 and it’s all good!  You will be occupied!

I’m a rotten person aren’t I?  Thinking everyone shouldn’t have the opportunity to get an education.  No, that’s not what I think at all.  I think we, as a society, gets fixes in our collective system-oriented heads that just aren’t the best for everyone.  Then we proceed to apply those fixes in an assembly-line fashion that would make Henry Ford proud!  As a society we don’t really want to put out any money for people to go to school, and we sure don’t want to put anything into mental health care.  We don’t want to help those nasty mentally ill, maybe we can dress them up and not feel so bad about ‘em?

I knew a lady that worked at a university, one of the students she had contact with told her he was a recovering drug addict and trying to stay clean (not very successfully), and he was back in school.  He never had to pay back any of his loans, he died of an overdose before he finished.  Too much pressure on a fragile person?  Perhaps.  I realize the going trend is to always blame the sick guy for not falling in line, but there’s more to it.

I’ve got no proof, to right to make assumptions about the situation I witnessed, but I’ve seen help gone wrong in the past and the grocery store incident jogged my memory.  People just aren’t Model T’s, assembly line, cheap, get it done fast fixes don’t help society or honor them as equal individuals in our society.