Homeless people/addiction.

[ChicagoBlue]

Mental illness can strike any time and to anyone , ending up on the streets is not something you expect when you are in a happy life , trust me and anyone slagging those with mental health issues like depression can get fucked with no fucking lube

Who might that be? Not sure I’ve read anyone doing that, have you?

 

[Marklr]

Who might that be? Not sure I’ve read anyone doing that, have you?

No here, but people do.

 

[stonerblue]

The precipitating “illness” is illusory.

He CREATED one by his own actions. Self harm creates many real, identifiable and treatable illnesses.

Hey, if you want to create mental illness out of thin air, knock yourself out. But, all I see (from the info originally provided) is a bloke drowning his sorrows, letting it get out of hand and affecting his financial health, too.

You guys pay for his upkeep. No skin off my nose if you want to live in and support the Nanny State. Sounds like it’s working out just dandy!

Good post apart from last para

 

[ChicagoBlue]

You know, I actually feel sorry for people like you, who seem to think that shunning empathy at every opportunity makes them more enlightened than everybody else around them. I get it, we're the stupid, naive ones being taken for a ride by the sob stories of the meek. The Reaper's scythe is remorseless and we can either get on board with it or suffer the consequences. You can do it (whatever it is), so why can't everyone else? Yada yada.

You say you've spent time around the mentally ill but clearly you've learnt very little from your experiences.

There's space for nuance here, bud. Mental illness isn't a blanket death sentence and neither is loneliness, no, but you know as well as I do that they significantly decrease a person's chances of survival. Some people are capable of helping themselves, but other people (for whatever reason) really aren't. The mentally unwell either recognise that there's a piece missing and seek to find that piece, or they call off the search before it's begun.

It really is a coin toss.

Alcohol was this poor bloke's vice and it played a part in his death, yes. But like I said, if it wasn't alcohol then it would have been something else. And yet you say he "chose" alcohol as though he'd already seen the end of his own story and still "chose" to go down the same path. Nobody who turns to alcohol to fill the void thinks it's going to kill them - it acts as a temporary reprieve until it's a permanent state.

Have you ever actually studied addiction? Do you know it's an auto-neurological disorder? The brain takes over from our conscience and works against the interests of the rest of the body. It says that long-term damage to the rest of the body is a necessary sacrifice for the brain to seek out constant short-term joy. Some people are capable of realising this and reversing the effects on their own, some people need help, and some people never realise.

If overcoming addiction and loneliness was as simple as you make it sound then it wouldn't happen so often, but it does. And it's not because all of those people are weaklings with "self-inflicted" illnesses. It's because of a range of factors that are circumstantial and neurological in nature, and everybody's factors are completely different from the next person. A person can change their own factors, but others aren't so fortunate.

The best way to think about it is to compare everything to school. 30 kids - they all go to the same school, they all have the same lessons, they all have the same teacher, they all sit in the same classroom, and they all get taught the same syllabus. And yet, they all perform differently, they all go to different colleges and get different jobs, and as they grow up they all become very different people with very different lives.

I expect you'll now come back with some more right-wing libertarian bollocks about how it's every man for himself in this dog-eat-dog world and that the animalistic "survival of the fittest" rule is something we need to apply to every day human beings. But think on.

You act like you know me. You clearly do not, “bud.”

I’m not the one for whom you should feel sorry.

Illuminating thread isn’t it.

Have you noticed how the internet mob IMMEDIATELY started having a pop? Did you notice how quickly it became about me, personally, not the things I said? Did you notice how I prefaced everything by saying I had experienced many of these same issues in my own life but made different choices and had seen different choices being made that did not lead to the death spiral?

It’s hilarious to watch the oh so sensitive mob reach out and try to MF someone they don’t know, going through things of which they could never be aware, on a thread where they purport to be so very supportive about mental health.

“I feel sorry for people like you, who seem to think…” and then YOU were off to the races!

No one on here knows me (save the odd poster or two who are related) or that I have dealt with people, at home and at work, and actually saved lives and careers in this area. Rather, everyone mounted up their white horses and rode off with their posse to find the black hat and eviscerate him…often for things he didn’t say, but just became “facts” the mob was beginning to believe.

Any of you bullies as a kid?

It’s been enlightening to watch this morning, after the few posts I made before bed last night. I knew it would be.

Some of are funny. Others less so.

And, before anyone feels the need, no, I didn’t start out baiting, I meant what I said BASED ON WHAT BILL WROTE, but the speed (and occasional ferocity) of the attacks was surprising, if not the expectation they would come…and soon become about America, too.

Mental health and the internet…it’s almost like there might be something there, eh?!

I hope you ALL live long, healthy, safe lives with the love of friends and family helping pave the path you walk. If you need help, seek it out, even if that help starts with showing vulnerability. Loved ones will take good care of you and help you find the help you need if the struggle is too difficult to bear on your own. But, whatever you do, try your damnedest not to self medicate because not only can it feel good now and worse later, it makes the hole you have to climb out of even deeper.

Take care of yourselves and each other.

 

[ChicagoBlue]

No here, but people do.

Indeed.

 

[stonerblue]

You know, I actually feel sorry for people like you, who seem to think that shunning empathy at every opportunity makes them more enlightened than everybody else around them. I get it, we're the stupid, naive ones being taken for a ride by the sob stories of the meek. The Reaper's scythe is remorseless and we can either get on board with it or suffer the consequences. You can do it (whatever it is), so why can't everyone else? Yada yada.

You say you've spent time around the mentally ill but clearly you've learnt very little from your experiences.

There's space for nuance here, bud. Mental illness isn't a blanket death sentence and neither is loneliness, no, but you know as well as I do that they significantly decrease a person's chances of survival. Some people are capable of helping themselves, but other people (for whatever reason) really aren't. The mentally unwell either recognise that there's a piece missing and seek to find that piece, or they call off the search before it's begun.

It really is a coin toss.

Alcohol was this poor bloke's vice and it played a part in his death, yes. But like I said, if it wasn't alcohol then it would have been something else. And yet you say he "chose" alcohol as though he'd already seen the end of his own story and still "chose" to go down the same path. Nobody who turns to alcohol to fill the void thinks it's going to kill them - it acts as a temporary reprieve until it's a permanent state.

Have you ever actually studied addiction? Do you know it's an auto-neurological disorder? The brain takes over from our conscience and works against the interests of the rest of the body. It says that long-term damage to the rest of the body is a necessary sacrifice for the brain to seek out constant short-term joy. Some people are capable of realising this and reversing the effects on their own, some people need help, and some people never realise.

If overcoming addiction and loneliness was as simple as you make it sound then it wouldn't happen so often, but it does. And it's not because all of those people are weaklings with "self-inflicted" illnesses. It's because of a range of factors that are circumstantial and neurological in nature, and everybody's factors are completely different from the next person. A person can change their own factors, but others aren't so fortunate.

The best way to think about it is to compare everything to school. 30 kids - they all go to the same school, they all have the same lessons, they all have the same teacher, they all sit in the same classroom, and they all get taught the same syllabus. And yet, they all perform differently, they all go to different colleges and get different jobs, and as they grow up they all become very different people with very different lives.

I expect you'll now come back with some more right-wing libertarian bollocks about how it's every man for himself in this dog-eat-dog world and that the animalistic "survival of the fittest" rule is something we need to apply to every day human beings. But think on.

Great post that sums up the moral dilemma of empathy. I see people every day that are fucked due to their poor choices in life, and I wonder why they've fucked up their lives so much.
Then I think they can't just be left to rot.

 

[ChicagoBlue]

Good post apart from last para

That was a pointed retort to the responses starting to veer off towards me being a Yank and denigrating America, which was the usual sideshow.

I never actually thought of the initial post bring about someone in England, given I thought Bill was in Oz, but the “patriotic” knives were out in a hurry!

I never saw it as an NHS or Manc issue, but it quickly became that on here.

It’s like a game of Telegraph or Telephone, where kids whisper a slightly complicated message to each other and pass it around the circle!

 

[ChicagoBlue]

Great post that sums up the moral dilemma of empathy. I see people every day that are fucked due to their poor choices in life, and I wonder why they've fucked up their lives so much.
Then I think they can't just be left to rot.

That’s why we have to drill down to root causes, not just treat the many and varied problems that manifest themselves, which then become increasingly more difficult and expensive to address, let alone solve.

 

[metalblue]

So, which part was wrong?

Loneliness is the hole. Got it. You ever been lonely? Clearly not, because you’re still alive.

Loneliness is NOT a mental illness or a death sentence, it’s an integral, surmountable, usually temporary fact of life. It is the British disease to soak pain in alcohol and hope for the best. THAT is the identifiable disease that spiraled for him and was totally self inflicted and avoidable. He CHOSE IT!

I’m done.

Choosing alcohol as an escape route was not the right choice for him, but once it became an addiction he lost choice of behaviour/ action. Furthermore it was only once it was an addiction his problems really set in, lost his job etc.

Nobody knows they’ve slipped into addiction until it’s too late. If you’ve ever lived with an alcoholic or other addict you’ll know that.

 

[ZenHalfTimeCrock]

From a practical point of view, it is probably impossible to relinquish the notions of free-will and personal responsibility. After all, our criminal justice system is predicated on them, as are our personal relationships and what passes for order in our societies.

From both a scientific and philosophical perspective free will doesn’t make much sense, though. All our behaviour can probably be explained away as a product of our brains, our bodies, our genes or our environment.

The philosopher Mary Warnock once argued that if we lived under laboratory conditions where all the chance elements of our lives from birth could be forensically clocked and recorded, the decisions we made as our story unfolded would appear to be foregone conclusions. She claims that we only feel free because we are ignorant of our own genetic system and all the circumstances that programmed the computer that is our brain. Or as Spinoza apparently said, what we call ‘freedom’ is ignorance of necessity.

Just in case anyone is starting to recoil from this line of thinking let me reassure readers of this post that I do believe in free will. After all, I have no other choice.*

But when it comes to the OP, I also have compassion for the person it describes.

Maybe holding both ideas in your head simultaneously is the only way to go with this.

*Actually, that’s something Isaac Bashevis Singer once said.