Horrific
Horrific
That’s where this guy came from :(
https://www.kcra.com/article/butte-county-school-shooting-gunman/63109931
36 comments
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My girlfriend tried to self medicate for years before I met her to deal with her mental health issues. We dated for about a year when I noticed things going off the rails, and she was acting like a bad person, going into fugue like states, and getting in trouble with neighbors and the police.
I had no resources to do anything for her at the time, and I kicked her out to her parents for her own sake, as one of the neighbors she was either intentionally or unintentionally messing with was the kind where I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to use some castle doctrine actions and they also had 2 edgy German Shepard type dogs.
She was one good terms with her family, and I had been discussing her state with them for a few weeks, since I had been noticing her behavior get worse but they hadn't been around her enough to notice I guess. I had no idea she had any actual medical issues at this point, so I was really lost and confused as to what was going on, so I had been secretly calling them a few times trying to figure out why she was acting so different.
Her parents were fairly well-to-do, at least compared to me. They owned a decent sized business the grandfather had started and left to them, and they had the resources to get her voluntarily committed until they could clean her up off street drugs and get a working regimen of real medicine and they got her into therapy and DBT class.
I went to see her almost every day, and now that I had a clear picture of what had been going on, I was relieved to know it was something that could be treated and we could work on. I had mainly been concerned she was an asshole and it had been an act to that point. Her family was able to cover her during that period and until she was able to get on disability.
Fast forward a few years, and we rebuilt her credit through a prepaid credit card, I fronted the money to send her to community college, and I handled everything else so she could focus on her therapy and classes.
Now she has a better relationship with her family than I do with mine, she has a better paying and more satisfying job than I do, and she is really loving life and being the best person she can be. I don't know what it cost her family to have her hospitalized for a month and for the lawyer that helped get some medium severity charges she got while being blackout out, and it required a ton of patience on all our parts and to be supportive while watching her struggle for the first few years afterward, as she had extreme anxiety and self-consciousness problems after falling down so hard.
So many people do not have a support network like that, and she could easily have ended up homeless, jailed, or dead if we weren't all there and able to play our parts. All these people were someone's child, someone's friend at some point in time. My family would not have put in that effort or expense for me. I learned so much from the experience, and I'm forever grateful that she had people she could count on and had the ability to take care of her needs when she couldn't. It's so easy for life to take a different path.
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You are a kind and wonderful person. Thank you for taking care of her when she needed help.
We don't have enough compassion in this world, we need more people like you.
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She was a really great person from the moment we met, and I was just really upset that I thought she wasn't who she had seemed to be. She needed help, and I'm glad between the group of us that we were able to get her what she needed, and she was determined to do things the right way and not get so far off the path she wanted to be on again. It was a real group effort, as I was important as the person to hold her accountable and to see the good in her she couldn't at the time, her family for caring about her health and safety and having the means to get it for her, the team of doctors she got, and her herself for finding a way to believe in herself while she was trying to hold together the broken bits of her life. She was very scared of everything, including herself for a long time, so it was not easy.
I feel a bit bad sharing this stuff, since I'm sure she isn't thrilled to have others know it, but I think it's important to see success stories, and I share details about my own struggles for decades with depression for the same reason. This stuff shouldn't be stigmatized because that does no good for anyone. My inability to admit to what people treat as a weakness helped me screw up my friends' lives for decades and I lost many important relationships and opportunities in life because of how I felt inside all the time and because people made me feel the need to try to fix it all on my own and not got all zombied up by medicine. It was so quick and simple to get my life fixed for essentially almost no time or money, I kick myself every day for not doing it sooner. Even when I had no insurance, a month of my medicine cost no more than $20, and it started working within the first week and my life did a 180. I thought it would be so long a process, involving so many doctors and years of therapy and feeling dead inside, but I was at my yearly physical and said I've been depressed for over 20 years and what can I do about it. Doc sent me out with a scrip and that was the end of feeling a crushing weight every day.
I know it isn't that simple for everyone, but for me it was, but I didn't know until I just accepted it wasn't something I could fix myself and was tired of trashing my whole life every few years and needed to break the cycle. I'm a lot more successful now mentally, and my girlfriend now works in a hospital helping others. She's so much smarter and talented than I ever would have thought when we met. If you feel you need help, go get it by whatever means you can. It isn't shameful, it doesn't make you weak. We all need help to varying degrees and people are social animals and we need each other by design. Every day I kick myself for not learning this sooner and I ache for all the people I loved that I hurt by being stubborn that I'll never see again, but now I try to use that to empathize with others. I can't take back anything I've done out of sadness or anger, but I can learn from it and share my experiences to hopefully try to help someone else out. I don't wish those feelings on anyone; it can be such crushing weight.
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Thanks so much for sharing this story and with such detail, what a sobering look into exactly the turning point in her life and how things could've gone instead. It shows how things fall apart for so many. That was a lot of support she needed to recover, and I think you made it pretty clear that most folks are not going to be getting that. You also made it clear that with enough support she was able to bounce back and seriously recover, which is fantastic.
These are the kinds of outcomes our society should be striving towards! Not vacations and luxuries for executives and investors.
I don't want to give the kind of detail you did, but my upbringing could probably be described as a near miss along these lines. Grew up as my family's finances were going from bad to hopeless and dangerous (no heat or AC sometimes, certainly no healthcare outside of broken bones, etc. etc.). Parents split, mother died slowly to terminal cancer, younger sister from another father lived alone with her and had to watch her unravel as a kid.
I was just old enough to realize "oh shit, there's no one ever coming to help us, I have to get my life and future path together now, this is an emergency". My sister wasn't so lucky, she didn't get any urgent realizations, she just got deep immovable trauma. She's struggled since.
I was able to adopt her and raise her through teenage-hood as best I could, I wound up "adopting" my own father for some years to get him back on his feet too, later on (he'd long ceased parenting by then, though to his credit he helped my sister a lot, not even his kid).
I think if the timeline of all that shifted even just maybe two years in the wrong direction, I wouldn't have been likely to make the realization when I did and build us the shield we needed. I think we all woulda just been fucked.
Neither my dad or sister are doing great, but they're alive, housed (by their own efforts), somewhat healthy - able to continue the struggle for now. I'm doing pretty well, but the circumstances were different and I lucked into natural talent with tech, so. That's the only reason any of my efforts were fruitful, anyway.
Edit: slightly more detail on outcomes
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I'm glad I was able to really help someone and that you were able to make the best of your situation. The fact anyone has to worry in this day and age about affording medical care, heating/cooling, drinking water, clean air, etc drives me insane. I don't know how someone can look at their neighbor suffer and either not care or think it's actually a net positive. We could all be hurt, we could all end up lost, homeless, or stuck someplace unsafe.
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Most people in her situation die or go to prison.
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I was really worried the one neighbor (not sure if he was actually a cop or just wished he was, he always seemed very pissed off so I avoided him and his dogs) was going to hurt her. We live in a cookie cutter neighborhood so all the houses look the same and she was either trying to get into his or one next to his.
She would leave after I went to bed too and was picked up by the police, once pretty violently. She got into trouble with the store in town also, and that one was very close to sending her to jail, and the person she did stuff to was super pissed leaving court after we got her off, and I don't blame him for feeling like he didn't get justice.
She got a deferred sentence or whatever the call it, and since she stayed good for however many years now, her record got expunged. Again, only because I helped her write a very good statement to the court when she could barely string words together, and her mom paid for a pretty good lawyer and the care to show she was getting professional help.
I knew the whole time most won't get so many chances or breaks, so I still don't take it for granted. I just remember we never know what others are going through in their lives and that almost no one deserves being my written off, as anyone who met her then vs now would hardly recognize her.
I still wish this all never would have happened, but it's what got her to really become the best her, so I'm thankful for it in the end. I just wish more people could have the same story. Her therapy group was online during Covid, so I got to overhear a lot of stories, and it made it easy to see how it can go with less helpful people involved.
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Why did they refuse?
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If you never moved back to your parents, you also don't have any business judging homeless people. Mind your own shit
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Yup. I moved back for a year in my twenties. I was fortunate enough to make some money over the years, so now I can support my mom so she’s not homeless. It’s a non-stop balancing act.
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I have family up there in that area. There's a HUGE homeless problem with large camps being assembled in various areas. I've seen a few where they're tucked back in State land off of the freeways, but a couple camps have been set up in park areas that are left wooded and more natural.
To extrapolate this further, having a fallback is how most everyone gets ahead. It's virtually impossible to be a self-made (man, success, whatever we want to call it). If you have a fallback, by default, you have more than a lot of people. Everyone stands on the work of those that came before. Rich families are the fallback for their kids, so the kids grow up and are in a position to take risky business chances because they'll still be rich if they fail. Middle class kids that maybe bomb out of college have a home to go back to (maybe not happily, but it's often there nonetheless). Poor people on the other hand really avoid any risks because they can't afford to lose any ground at all. If they fail, they're living in their car.
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Even if you never had to to move back in with your parents, you still have no business judging homeless people. Everybody is an individual with their own history. Don't think in memes like an idiot. When cops do that we call it profiling and it's bad m'kay? So be better than that.
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Group homes in foster care are hell holes. Understaffed. Incompetent therapists. Children bounce from home to home without any continuity of care with their mental health treatment. There are children in state custody who will be sleeping in their case workers office tonight, or a homeless shelter, or a hospital bed while they wait for placement.
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:( i wish there was something I could do. As a parent this breaks my heart
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If you want a small and easy thing, you could call up local public psych wards and ask if they would take donations of clothing (think sweatpants without strings, or comfy grippy socks). A child I mentor has frequently end up in the hospital lacking socks, sweatpants, etc, because DHS isn’t always the greatest at making sure things get moved around. (This is why suitcases are usually so in demand - stuff gets moved from placement to placement in trash bags)
They don’t need superheroes - they need to learn that the world has people in it who are kind. I have teenagers that adore me because I gave them quarters to get stickers from a vending machine - it can really be as small as that.
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Someone should show this to the pro-life movement. I have a feeling they won't care.
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Honestly? This is kinda BS for the simple reason that you could easily have had a "move back in with your parents" stage but for this to be a Very Bad Thing. Or for you to have technically had that "opportunity" but rejected it in order to save your sanity, sense of self, etc.
How about instead we don't judge homeless people for ANY REASON they might be homeless? Among them, that they did not have a GOOD support network, good mental health, opportunities, generational wealth, and all the other privileges that help people lead happy and moderately comfortable lives.
There are just so many reasons people end up homeless. People should take the time to understand a few of them.
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I don't think you should get hung up on the "move back in with your parents" part.
The point of the post is not to suggest that some homeless people are better than others because the reason they are homeless is somehow more forgivable.
I think they were using that statistic to make the point that society should stop seeing homelessness as something someone does or experiences, but rather something we allow to happen, and it is never deserved.
I have never been homeless in a large part because my parents wouldn't allow that to happen. My children have never been homeless because I wouldn't allow that to happen.
It's not a tremendous leap to go from that to suggesting that no one should be homeless because we, as a society, shouldn't allow that to happen.
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I was reacting to "Zola in Recovery"'s gatekeeping.
I don’t think you should get hung up on the “move back in with your parents” part.
I'm pretty sure that "you have no business" is a phrase meaning "you should not" or "do not" or something similar. Sounds pretty absolute and definitive to me. You are reading nuance into a post that doesn't have it.
The reply does have it and aligns with your interpretation. And this...
I think they were using that statistic to make the point that society should stop seeing homelessness as something someone does or experiences, but rather something we allow to happen, and it is never deserved.
... is the point of the reply. Obviously yes, absolutely, 100% agree.
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36 comments
It's so horrifying to considering "having parents with a home to go back to" an idea we're going to call a privilege.
Really has "society owes you nothing, you're lucky we didn't strangle you in the cradle" vibes.
That's how it is for an awful lot of people, I'm sure. I turned 18 and my dad said, "Get out." So I did.
I managed. I imagine others don't.
How come? Did you have bad relationships with your parents?
unfortunately yes. people in your community who care for you in our current society is a privilege, not something that can be assumed. but all of us can pick up some of the slack. even if you can't give anything substantial to the homeless, you can give them a conversation. sitting and talking to a homeless person can do a lot to change their day, as well as helping you find perspective on how fragile all of the systems of care we have are
The point of calling it privilege is simply to point out that your worldview is shaped by your upbringing. The fact that you have family and friends to rely on is inherently shaping the way you view the world in a way that may blind you to the struggles of those who don’t have the same support network.
It’s essentially “let them eat cake” in a new wrapper. If you’ve never struggled to put food on the table, being too poor to eat is an entirely foreign concept. So foreign, in fact, that you’ll potentially fail to even consider it as a factor if you hear someone doesn’t have food. You’ll default to assuming they must not have food due to some other reason. Likely a reason that lays the blame largely on the person in question. You’ll assume they spent all their money frivolously, because you can’t comprehend the fact that some people don’t have money to spend at all. Or you’ll assume that they’re lazy, because you can’t comprehend someone trying and still failing to eat. Or any other number of reasons. Regardless of the reason you think up, it will inherently be coming from a place of privilege.
Privilege was always supposed to mean "things you have that not everyone does". That includes everything from titles to housing to eyes
If everything is a privilege, the term loses it's meaning. It just becomes a source of guilt rather than a recognition of social deficiency.
When I see the term used effectively, it is describing social conditions not biological conditions.
You're privileged to have an access to low interest credit that lets you buy a house, not the house itself. A country like South Africa or Cuba or France with universal credit (or better yet, universal housing) doesn't have this special privilege afforded to a subset of homeowners.
You're privileged to live in a neighborhood that caters to people with good vision (car culture, lots of signage for navigation, etc). A country like Japan or Russia, with urban infrastructure dedicated to alternative navigation, isn't specially privileged for the sightless.
Privilege is what we actually have (or don't have) instead of actually having "rights" or "freedoms."