Another mishandled mental health crisis

[Grayfox54]

I'm far from any expert. Hell, I'm probably a bit crazy myself.  

What I'm seeing is a fundamental difference in the way kids are raised today. When I was a kid we were taught that life is hard. Its up to you to make the best of it. We were taught that there ain't no free ride. You gotta work for what you want. We were taught that actions have consequences. You mess up, expect to pay the price. It wasn't so much "get over it" as it was "deal with it". 

Today's young people were raised in a "no child left behind" and "everybody get a trophy" world. They're given unreasonable expectations that life is all peaches and cream. They actually believe that life is supposed to be "fair". Then when they become young adults and suddenly find themselves having to face the real world on their own, they're completely unprepared for it. Life didn't turn out the way they wanted. But they have no clue as to how to fix it. So they become angry, depressed and blame everybody else for their problems. 

Has there ever been a mass shooter/killer that wasn't mentally ill? But instead of dealing with the difficult and complex problems of mental illness, its so much easier to blame an inanimate object, the gun. Gun control is about the appearance of addressing the problem. Not actually dealing with it.  

And that is the gist of the problem. Everybody knows mental illness is running rampant in this country, but nobody is willing to take the time, money or trouble to address it. Its a damned difficult thing to try to deal with. Liberals especially will never admit that their policies have contributed to the problem. Its all about looking like you're doing something rather than actually doing anything. Perception and politics over any real effort. 

Edited March 21, 2023 by Grayfox54

[gregintenn]

14 hours ago, Hozzie said:

I won't speak for Greg, but I don't think he was talking about "gender identity" specifically as a topic, but rather the types of things that trigger people into completely absurd emotional responses.  

Actually, that was what I was referring to. If a person has a penis and thinks he is a female, it is an example of a mental illness. To play along with this is enabling.

 

There are many different forms of mental illness, I just chose one at random. My luck I chose one that would cause a controversy. Some forms of mental illness are relatively benign, so we tend to just ignore those. Others cause problems for both the people who have them, and for others as well.

I believe we all have some type of mental illness. Ever do anything that just wasn’t logical? Ever worry about something that wasn’t going to happen? Since we are all different, I think it would be nearly impossible to correctly label what sane is. 

Edited March 21, 2023 by gregintenn

[TGO David]

25 minutes ago, gregintenn said:

Actually, that was what I was referring to. If a person has a penis and thinks he is a female, it is an example of a mental illness. To play along with this is enabling.

There are numerous studies showing that transgendered people are fourfold (or more!) more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety than those who are content to stay within their biological swim lanes.

Of course, every good statistician knows that you can use statistics to sell a lie, so there are also studies that chalk the aforementioned depression and anxiety up to the way that transgendered people are treated by the rest of society, and not to the fact that those people suffer from other things that caused them to want to put off their natural gender identity and "become someone else" as an escape or coping mechanism.

To me, when we seek to justify aberrant behavior through confirmation bias, we have stopped trying to help someone recover and have become guilty of enabling.  This usually is followed by a patchwork of psychotherapy that seeks to ease the pain rather than heal the wound.  Treating symptoms versus treating causes.

I'm sure these statements will be super unpopular with some people.  The truth is pretty offensive at times.

 

[Erik88]

My dad is 66. His generation was taught to suck it up. Talking about your feelings was considered a sign of weakness. I agree that we may have coddled younger people too much but I think there has to be a balance between that and how we stigmatized this in the past. My dad lived with depression most of his life and didn't go talk to anyone until he was almost 60. That was a mistake. 

 

 

[Chucktshoes]

13 hours ago, Luckyforward said:

It is showing great promise in terms of research.  https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/psilocybin-treatment-for-major-depression-effective-for-up-to-a-year-for-most-patients-study-shows

I believe that in our pursuit of solely allopathic remedies we have forgotten millennia of knowledge about natural medicines of our ancestors. 

[Luckyforward]

Chucktshoes - with this discussion about meds, exactly what kind of black pills are you munching? 

[Alleycat72]

1 hour ago, Chucktshoes said:

I believe that in our pursuit of solely allopathic remedies we have forgotten millennia of knowledge about natural medicines of our ancestors. 

Our ancestors. LOL

 

[gregintenn]

3 hours ago, TGO David said:

There are numerous studies showing that transgendered people are fourfold (or more!) more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety than those who are content to stay within their biological swim lanes.

Of course, every good statistician knows that you can use statistics to sell a lie, so there are also studies that chalk the aforementioned depression and anxiety up to the way that transgendered people are treated by the rest of society, and not to the fact that those people suffer from other things that caused them to want to put off their natural gender identity and "become someone else" as an escape or coping mechanism.

To me, when we seek to justify aberrant behavior through confirmation bias, we have stopped trying to help someone recover and have become guilty of enabling.  This usually is followed by a patchwork of psychotherapy that seeks to ease the pain rather than heal the wound.  Treating symptoms versus treating causes.

I'm sure these statements will be super unpopular with some people.  The truth is pretty offensive at times.

 

Thank you for conveying my thoughts more clearly than I’m able to do. I have probably should have said it was a sign of mental illness instead of just calling it mental illness. I have read that the suicide rate among that community is many times higher than the average. One could make the argument that society not being accepting of this causes the increased suicides. It can also be argued that suicide is another sign of mental illness.

I did not post what I did with the intention of belittling anyone. I was only stating what appears to me to be an obvious thing that everyone seems to want to tiptoe around. I do not feel like that is helpful to anyone in the long run. Not the individual; not society in general.

[Chucktshoes]

19 minutes ago, Alleycat72 said:

Our ancestors. LOL

 

We didn’t lose this knowledge last week. 

[peejman]

21 hours ago, Links2k said:

growing up around gunfire, beatings, robberies, avoidance of authorities and rape can definitely have an effect on the psyche. In some cases it becomes ingrained as normalcy. 

Yes.  Circumstances should not be an excuse for a fundamental lack of moral character, but it has permeated our society. On a much lesser scale, I see it at work.

One of the big dogs is not a nice person. He treats most of his employees quite poorly... fear and intimidation are his primary tools. But after a few years, a lot of people have normalized this poor behavior.  They know and accept that they're going to get cussed out or threatened. They just shrug it off. 

It creates undue stress which gets passed on to others and before long that snowball rolling downhill has become an avalanche. 

[peejman]

7 hours ago, Grayfox54 said:

Everybody knows mental illness is running rampant in this country, but nobody is willing to take the time, money or trouble to address it. Its a damned difficult thing to try to deal with.

People are messy, complicated, difficult, and panicy in groups. 

Why do we have all these fancy (and expensive) electronic nannies in vehicles today? ABS, stability control, auto-brake, etc...  Because it's easier to program a computer than to train a person.