Homeless people/addiction.

[Bill Walker]

I just heard this doco on the radio, absolute true story. Heartbreaking really. Told by a young woman who it happened too.
Her Mum & Dad, when she was around 13 years old split up. The Father left the marital home as agreed and rented himself a small flat. The Father had a decent job in a bank, not a high earner but secure income. Apparently, this break-up was more motivated by the wife.
Anyway, after a few months the husband is really suffering from loneliness and misses his wife and kids a lot. Keeps turning up at his old house and eventually told to stop calling round by the wife.
Then, after a short period, he finds out she has got herself a new bloke who eventually moves in.

This now makes the Father even worse and for consolation he starts going to the pub every night, (who could sit at home every night alone ?) for some company and he finds that the booze relieves a lot of the way he is suffering mentally with depression. He starts drinking at home, result, alcoholism brought on by mental illness.

One day at work his boss is talking to him and can smell alcohol on his breath , this happens more than once and eventually he is told to go home.
A week later he is sacked.
His life spirals with depression and he drinks more. He is drunk most of the time. He stops paying rent, bills, all his savings go on booze and he winds up being evicted, becoming homeless.
His daughter is on a school outing one day and she see's her Dad, asleep on a town centre bench in daytime, with his few meagre belongings. She is too ashamed to tell her friends that he is her Dad.
Six months after that sighting, her Father was beaten up late one night by some drunken youths and died of his injuries. He was found dead in a small park.
This was a very decent family man. The daughter is heartbroken although she could do nothing to help her Dad as she was a school girl with no income.
She is still heartbroken and suffering to this day with her thoughts of her once wonderful and loving Dad. She cries a lot.

Anyway, hearing this story made me realize that it can happen to anyone and that drunk guy sitting in a doorway or under a bridge talking to himself, could be anybody, a bloke who has worked for many years and paid taxes, or an ex-soldier etc etc.
Someone's Dad.

 

[Debaser]

We are all much closer to living on the streets than we are millionaires row, how we treat our most vulnerable is shocking

 

[ChicagoBlue]

This now makes the Father even worse and for consolation he starts going to the pub every night, (who could sit at home every night alone ?)

Every night?

Errrrrr….billions of people who don’t wallow in self-pity?

All of a sudden, it becomes depression brought on by mental illness, so (conveniently) he just can’t help himself?

I’m sure I’ll get the wrath of BM for this, but what a sob story!

Show some backbone, get on with LIFE, and find yourself someone else, somewhere else, and do yourself a favor!

I’m sorry it ended in tragedy, but whodathunkit, eh?! Became a self-fulfilling prophecy once it became “well, who WOULDN’T go to the pub every night to drown their sorrows?” and that became OK!

It’s not!

Get a grip, stand up, be the master of your own ship.

Now, if you’d started with “this fella was a manic depressive and had a drinking problem, so his wife left him for another bloke,” I might have felt like “If only he’d got some help, maybe he could have managed his illness,” but it sounds all so self-absorbed!

 

[idahoblues]

Life is not supposed to be easy

 

[Bill Walker]

We are all much closer to living on the streets than we are millionaires row, how we treat our most vulnerable is shocking

The only help here for addicts in Oz seems to be the Rehab centers operated by The Salvation Army. They have saved many a life and family from despair such as this.
Shocking how much money the Gov wastes yet can't help the mentally ill.

 

[Bill Walker]

Every night?

Errrrrr….billions of people who don’t wallow in self-pity?

All of a sudden, it becomes depression brought on by mental illness, so (conveniently) he just can’t help himself?

I’m sure I’ll get the wrath of BM for this, but what a sob story!

Show some backbone, get on with LIFE, and find yourself someone else, somewhere else, and do yourself a favor!

I’m sorry it ended in tragedy, but whodathunkit, eh?! Became a self-fulfilling prophecy once it became “well, who WOULDN’T go to the pub every night to drown their sorrows?” and that became OK!

It’s not!

Get a grip, stand up, be the master of your own ship.

Now, if you’d started with “this fella was a manic depressive and had a drinking problem, so his wife left him for another bloke,” I might have felt like “If only he’d got some help, maybe he could have managed his illness,” but it sounds all so self-absorbed!

I won't argue with you or issue any wrath but I'm sorry you have zero empathy for mental illness and even deny it's existence.

"Get a grip" "show some backbone" is probably the worst thing you could say to a sufferer of clinical depression.

 

[NPBlue]

It's very easy these days to fall into homelessness. All it takes is a split from your partner and you are on the street.

I used to help a pleasant young man who found himself in that situation, and he also had a daughter he loved dearly but would have found embarrassing if she had seen him living on the street.

What he was going through, in terms of absolute cruelty from his fellow humans, was despicable. He wasn't a big lad, but he wasn't a druggie or drinking either. He was clean in that respect, but that didn't stop him from having his front teeth kicked out, having his meagre possessions set on fire by laughing teenagers, being spat on, and generally treated worse than an animal. He also had awful scabs on his legs which he showed me on a number of occasions. He'd been to a medical centre numerous times, but the treatment required, such as regular washing, was out of the question with him living on the street.

I haven't seen him now for 18 months or so. I know Trafford Council found him a place in a hostel, but when he arrived there he walked out because he didn't feel it was a safe environment.

I hope he's OK. He managed to track down his father as he was brought up by his single mother who died when he was in his late teens, but when he met him and his step brother, he was too ashamed to admit his predicament, but he said they got on well.

Maybe he's opened up to them, I don't know. I saw him for 4 or 5 years and when we chatted he was never anything but pleasant, and I was happy to help him when I could.

 

[mancity1]

Every night?

Errrrrr….billions of people who don’t wallow in self-pity?

All of a sudden, it becomes depression brought on by mental illness, so (conveniently) he just can’t help himself?

I’m sure I’ll get the wrath of BM for this, but what a sob story!

Show some backbone, get on with LIFE, and find yourself someone else, somewhere else, and do yourself a favor!

I’m sorry it ended in tragedy, but whodathunkit, eh?! Became a self-fulfilling prophecy once it became “well, who WOULDN’T go to the pub every night to drown their sorrows?” and that became OK!

It’s not!

Get a grip, stand up, be the master of your own ship.

Now, if you’d started with “this fella was a manic depressive and had a drinking problem, so his wife left him for another bloke,” I might have felt like “If only he’d got some help, maybe he could have managed his illness,” but it sounds all so self-absorbed!

You won't get any wrath from me and I have had family members suffer from mental illness and alcohol and drug abuse in a flawed belief it will help them better cope.

Mental illness is a huge issue in society , its disease and it is treatable in many cases but it needs a lot of love , compassion and dollars both from the public , private and individual purse to reduce its level and understand in greater capacity how and why it occurs. The brain is a complex beast and in truth even experts would agree we know very little about but makes it tick and what doesn't. How do we explain and address sociopathy for example.

We always think the answer lies in education and science and research but is that enough.

You are correct in the sense that whoa is me and being absorbed in self -pity can be mistaken for mental disease.

Divorce is a fact of life while marriage or monogamous remains an institution that humans regard as the building block of a nuclear family.

 

[ChicagoBlue]

I won't argue with you or issue any wrath but I'm sorry you have zero empathy for mental illness and even deny it's existence.

"Get a grip" "show some backbone" is probably the worst thing you could say to a sufferer.

Bill,

I respect your posts and you seem like a very decent guy, but in this instance you are far wide of the mark, both in your paraphrasing of what I said and my personal thoughts on mental illness.

“Get a grip” and “show some backbone” were responses to the story that a man split from his wife and turned to the bottom of a pint pot every night. THAT was when his life went downhill!

I explained this in the first post.

As for the entire premise of a 13 yr old child of divorce now retelling her story on the radio, I can’t speak to veracity or accurate medical diagnoses.

Couples break up every day and both of them get on with it, as opposed to heading to the pub to fix their problems. THAT was the precipitating series of events. That CHOICE rightly gets no empathy from me.

Been around alcoholics and mental
Illness my whole life. They’re not the same thing, but one can destroy your life as easily as the other. Conflation of the two is a problem that needs separating and fixing.

Be well and listen to some Midnight Oil next time!

 

[JOGAMIGMOG]

His only mistake was to turn to alcohol as a comforter. There’s only ever one winner there.