My Notes below this CNN article and its comments -
- cricketdiane
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Pentagon shooter had history of mental health problems
March 5, 2010 11:36 p.m. EST
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/03/05/pentagon.shooting/index.html?hpt=T2
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I have been diagnosed with bipolar and schitzo-affective disorder. I have ranted against the government. I study science and engineering and physics online. I’ve done stupid stuff. I have put up with family members asking me what I ate today, what I’ve bought, what I’ve done, who I’ve talked to, what time I went to bed, how much sleep I have, what I’m working on, why I’m working on it and told that the things I’m doing or working on are bullshit.
I have “issues”. I have been danced through mental hospitals every time I was working on things that I thought were important and others considered to be outside my right to pursue. I have made prototypes and inventions that I took apart and destroyed because there was no way to give them away nor to do anything with them that could support my financial opportunities. I have tried to do a lot of things that didn’t work including a number of business ideas.
And, I do think our government has been undermining the opportunities for many people, including me by the failed applications of policies and legislation they’ve created. So, am I going to do these things that this man did because of these things? Am I a danger to everyone? Will I go off the deep end or is it my choice what I do with my craziness? I spent my money to buy a computer. I’m spending my time to be more educated about different subjects using the internet. I am working to create solutions and to bring together options that are available in ways that maybe people haven’t considered.
I choose to not shoot anything that can’t be replaced at Wal-Mart and to do what my psychiatrist suggested, “stay away from people” and “stop bothering people.” That’s all they want when they drug us anyway. I’m doing that, although I do believe that writing on the internet and talking to people and engaging myself in a level of participation in the society around me is more positive than not doing it. I would hope that if my views are that distorted, they can be recognized and corrected by not keeping them to myself.
But, does that simply give authorities an excuse to say that I rant against the Republicans because I’m bipolar? Would I not have the right to defend myself in my own home when my daughter is tearing up the place on a drunk and endangering me and my grand-daughter because I have a history of mental illness therefore leading everyone to believe it must have been my fault without examining the facts? Is that what I will endure in 13 days when my court case comes up for charges against me despite being listed as the victim in the case?
Thanks a lot. Now, you tell me on the news shows that people are to look askance at me because I am bipolar and probably delusional regardless of how I dress, how I present myself, or how I conduct myself – but, then I’ve dealt with that in my community every day I’ve lived as an adult. It does show me, from these news reports that getting smarter or bringing more information into the picture won’t help, giving context to myself in a bigger world won’t help and that once diagnosed or placed into a mental hospital ever – there is no recovery or restitution for my life after that – obviously.
Do people really think I am that much different than they are in some genuinely negative, life-threatening way? Or do I have a right to that difference and a choice about how I use it to help myself and the world around me? Does the world need me? Does it need me to live as a chemically lobotomized zombie for the rest of my life unable to do any of the things I can do now? Is that what I will have to endure again as a result of this man shooting police at the Pentagon and the news coverage of it?
Is that what I get from all my efforts to better myself and accomplish something with my life in spite of the “mental Illness” and “bipolar disorder” and “schitzo-affective disorder” and “brain injured” diagnoses and “services” I’ve already endured? Does it ever end? When do I get to be me and to be special and important and somebody in my world? Does that ever happen? When will anyone see who I am and what I am doing with it – on its own merits without prejudice and bias?
Can I ever earn the right to participate in our country or in the society around me as an equitable partner and as a participant with a vast number of positive things to bring to the table? Can people even tell there is any difference between me and the man who shot the guards at the Pentagon? Are we the same? Am I no different than the man who shot up Fort Hood or the one who shot up the employment agency up North whenever that was, or the ones who blow their brains out and kill their families because their homes are being foreclosed?
Am I going to continue to suffer being looked at the same way as that based on the choices they made, and judged as that without any other information about me coming into focus? Is that where I will live in America for the next twenty years of my life? Will my freedoms and rights be taken away because people fester and fear and refuse to consider anything else?
Somebody ought to take a broader look at America. In any one given day, there are extreme abuses of choice everywhere anyone might care to look – from people beating their spouses to death because it was cheaper than a divorce, to police engaging in bad and abusive tactics, to stock market analysts that are spouting interpretations of facts that are clearly delusional, to obscenely cruel, vicious crimes without cause or reason, to politicians that are so completely out of touch with the people and isolated from them that their decisions are without merit. This isn’t a sane place to live. It may not take sanity and some idea of normalcy from 1932 or from 1956 in order to survive it all.
Where are the comparisons that fit what we are all experiencing this year, or last year or five years ago? Where is the concept of what is not mentally ill derived? I just don’t get it. 90% of the diagnosis about a person’s state of mind is being taken from reports made by family members to authorities and to mental health professionals. What if those family members are lying or creatively leaving out facts or serving their own agendas or any number of things? What if families that are embarrassed or humiliated about the views or choices of their own family members use the mental health system to control or strong-arm or to steal from or to force servitude upon or whatever else they choose? It is happening. It has been happening. Nothing prevents it from happening.
Women who choose to have relationships without being married are being put into mental hospitals as a way for families to stop them. Elderly people even of sound mind are being stripped of their property and their freedom to live independently by families using the mental health system to do it. Wives who want to leave their husbands are being called crazy and placed into mental institutions to be drugged instead. Teens that won’t agree with anybody as a matter of principle are being placed on drugs to control their choices so their families aren’t humiliated by their actions. It is happening. It is not being stopped from happening. It is prevalent. It is wrong and that doesn’t make any difference at all. It is still that way.
And, worse still – people that are different from a norm that was not derived this year, nor last year, nor the year before – nor even five years ago, are being stripped of their rights and opportunities to participate in our society. They are being excluded just as I am and for the same reasons. People are designed to take in a lot of information on the fly right now as it presents itself just as it is, but that is being precluded by an absolute refusal to take in any information beyond what they think they know and what they think they know about things, including people and types of people and about people’s situations. And, in many cases they’ve never thought through those ideas and attitudes for themselves but have taken them from the way someone or something else has told them to think about it. That isn’t fair and it isn’t right.
I may not be good at business, despite having studied it and studied it and I may not be good at making money, despite every effort I’ve made – but that does not mean I have nothing to contribute to the society around me and it does not mean that I have no value. Regardless of the commonly held belief that I have nothing to offer because I own nothing and have “issues” or that the value of my contribution is somehow diminished because I’ve been in mental hospitals and diagnosed with every mental health diagnosis in the DSMIV by psychiatrists who made C-grades on every neurological class they took – I do have some things positive to contribute.
I have survived post traumatic stress syndrome from domestic violence. I have survived stupidity of my own and others. I have survived the mental health system’s chemical lobotomies of me that stole twelve years of my life and opportunities. I have survived alcoholism and the efforts of my family to keep me in an institution for the course of my life rather than allowing me to live and to thrive in the community independently. I have survived husbands that were abusive to the point that I went to the emergency room for physical harm from them and I have survived a community that has absolutely no use for me whatsoever. I have dealt with my children being taken from me and watching them be abused at the hands of other people rather than treated well. I have dealt with being arrested and taken to a mental hospital for walking down the street without my shoes on the last half mile home because they were making blisters on my feet and I have dealt with having a social worker check me and my home every month for the last eight years to make a written report when she went back to the office. I have had police come into my home while I was taking a bath on four or five different occasions over the years because my parents or a roommate called them since I was refusing to talk to them. And, I have put up with having the police and fire department near where I live stop and check to see what I’m doing and why I am walking somewhere, demand identification and ask where I am going when there was absolutely no reason to do so – I wasn’t talking to myself or doing anything out of the ordinary except for not having a car to go somewhere. I have had it with it and yet it never ends.
And, all that said, I can tell you some things – I know what it is like to not have money and live anyway. I know what it is like to endure wrong and get up from it. I know what can be done to survive. I know what it takes to make a choice of free will and stand by it to, day in and day out, do something beyond the immediate things that seem insurmountable and to make positive changes despite it. I know what it takes to get an education despite being turned away by vocational rehab to learn about using a computer. I know how to ask for help to learn something I need to know. And, I know that to have friends is costly and I know that I have many friends which I am choosing to keep out of my life because a psychiatrist told me to do it – but, I also know that the friends I have had may not have been the best people to have as friends. I do know how to tell the difference better now.
And, I do know that despite what the world may tell me about personal value, identity and the basis of value being money, that it is not the truth. I have many things I have learned experiencing real life in the United States, and in the state of Georgia particularly, over the last thirty years, that most people wouldn’t want to experience in order to learn about them and to derive wisdom from those experiences. There are people who need to know these things that don’t and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone learning them the way that I did. But, the information, the knowledge, the skill sets from it, the innovative and inventive thinking, the creativity, the ability to perceive integrated bigger pictures, the solution oriented thinking, and the wisdom that has come from it is valuable. The value I have as a person and as a citizen, is greater than my financial situation, my poverty, my personal financial ineptitude or my diagnosed “mental illness,” bipolar disorder, alcoholism of my past, anorexia and bulemia of my past, domestic violence, schitzo-affective bipolar disorder, histrionic disorder, post traumatic syndrome, personality disorders, emotional disorders, or brain injuries.
Do I really have to endure more denigration as a human being and citizen of the United States because people want to look at me with prejudice, bias and bigotry and hatred and fear and misunderstanding? Do I really have to stand before a Cobb County judge in a few days to defend myself against charges of domestic violence and cruelty to children even though I was the victim of the domestic violence and did everything I could to protect my granddaughter from my daughter’s alcoholic rage and have no standing to defend myself because the judge believes everyone with bipolar disorder is about to shoot up the place? Is that going to be one more day of being sent to a mental hospital for observation and forced chemical lobotomy? Is that going to result once more in losing everything I have as I watch my home and my belongings being turned out into the street the same way it has happened nine times in my life already? Do I really have to endure that again?
- cricketdiane, 03-06-10
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It may not make any difference – but I feel better now, writing it down and putting these thoughts somewhere. Maybe they will help somebody some day.
I can accept that in society’s judgment, I am a defective human being. I cannot accept society’s, my community’s, nor my family’s judgment concerning what I can accomplish or do as that.
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Just for the record, my house is in disarray too. The event that transpired with my daughter happened two days before Thanksgiving. I went with my granddaughter to my parents’ house and then she went to stay with my oldest daughter and her husband. When I came back home a few days ago, I’ve cleaned up some – but I can’t bring myself to take down the Christmas tree or put away the boxes of ornaments that were waiting to go on it. There they sit. I’ve been putting my granddaughters’ toys in a group near the tree that had been scattered around the “house” – apartment actually – because I can’t bring myself to put them away in boxes or in a closet somewhere even though she probably won’t be brought back to get them . . . Who knows? But sooner or later, somebody is going to judge that I have no touch with reality because my Christmas tree still sits there with lights on it and nothing else, my house is a cluttered mess and it certainly doesn’t resemble a magazine picture even when everything is in place.
Why can’t it just be okay for me to be who I am? I really don’t understand anymore.
- (additional note, cricketdiane)
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