Relating to Truly Mentally Ill People(Aspies vs. NTs)

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Averick
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30 Aug 2008, 11:30 pm

My sister was diagnosed as Paranoid Schizophrenic when she was about twenty. She's a wonderful person, and I always appreciate her company. I've never met someone so giving.



Jellybean
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31 Aug 2008, 3:44 am

I'm mentally disabled AND ill so I suppose I do relate better to myself! not other people though.


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blue_bean
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31 Aug 2008, 4:49 am

My first boyfriend had Paranoid Schizophrenia and Bipolar. He used to fondly tell me stories of his time in hospital in his manic state, jumping on the beds and singing Birthday Party & Nick Cave songs at the top of his voice.
My brothers girlfriend also has Schizophrenia.



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31 Aug 2008, 8:03 am

dunno about empathy, but because i've had extreme despression for a good few years now, and because i've had a few psychotic/sociopathic moments, i tend to sometimes sympathise with serial killers/rapists as they've usually been abused alot by society/parents/etc...sure, the people who got killed lost their lives, but i'm guessing they had a happier time whilst they were alive than the killer did.

i know, it's really messed up...it's kind of an extreme "rooting for the underdog"

i'd rather get this stuff out of my head and have people tell me that it's completely wrong, so i can rethink the entire situation, than to have thoughts like that swimming around in my head.x



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31 Aug 2008, 8:45 am

sinsboldly wrote:
slowmutant wrote:
God loves, Man kills.


God sent the flood and killed everything on the planet but Noah and his family and pairs of animals.
can i join this off topic?:D human is a hunter and very good at it today we build weapons to keep others off our teritory (same reason as animals)


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Sora
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31 Aug 2008, 9:00 am

The following quote is rousing a very general situation. At least I think people say that quite often.

Postperson wrote:
If that post was addressed to me I have no intention of reading anything of such time consuming length. It's an imposition. You need to write more concisely.


Nobody needs to write a certain style, length, time, language for another if that other chooses not to read it.

So whoever wrote and will write long posts as an answer to you or to a topic you are reading, if you choose not to read it, you can demand but not actually expect anyone to better suit your likes about posts.

Even those who cannot read long posts, seeing how I have trouble with that too should not expect other to directly change for them.

Try, sometimes the try can only be expressed by interest. That's ok to my mind because sometimes I can't do more either. Then if you can show that you've tried and are interested and consider it worth your time, then you can rightfully demand a small change from others.


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ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo
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31 Aug 2008, 9:16 am

Okay. I am the first to admit the ones I knew with schizophrenia had families seemed to get along reasonably with them, (that I could tell nothing is ever perfect) and can get along with people they choose to get a long with. From my experience, the people I knew didn't want to get along with me, had their mind made up about me (that I was damaged I guess or an easy target) and just relentlessly bullied me, made up stories about me, got others in the neighborhood to ostracize me, treated me like total s**t and they just happened to have schizophrenia and many family members with schizophrenia. This is one schizophrenic family who went out of their way to make my life a living hell.
I am the first to admit they didn't treat their own family that way. They saw me as "weak" and went after me in such a sadistic way. But they had family that visited them quite often so I guess they, at least treated them with some sort of respect. So those of you who have family members with schizophrenia who are "nice" well YES they can be nice if they choose to be nice. My experience has been some of them lack the rationality though and if so inclined will relentlessly target someone they can get away with targetting.
Other people can be mean but not quite as mean and so relentless, obsessing on a neighbor's downfall in such a way. No one deserves that! Trying over and over again to rally neighbors to gang up on one person they think they can get away with ganging up on? And they did this over and over. Even when I stayed in the house most of the time ignoring EVERYONE who lives around here they still wouldn't let up. I have just had very negative experiences with schizophrenia. And that's not even counting this other family with schizophrenia who I only know about because of these neighbors and these people were even more disturbed than the neighbors. One believed I was a witch because I had a cat and murded the cat and left it in my backyard because they all believed I was a witch. The guy I am talking about who did that is the disturbed son of one extremely disturbed woman who murdered a family member and didn't do ONE day of jail for it. Judge ordered her straight to this mental hospital to be committed where she stayed for something like six months THEN RELEASED AFTER KILLING A CHILD BECAUSE OF HER DELUSIONS!.
Can you believe this? YES they can be extremely dangerous and remember these things when dealing with someone who has a history of schizophrenia. Seems some can get away with murder.
Since the woman had a history of schizophrenia and had been in and out of this hospital since childhood, the judge didn't think she should pay for the crime of killing her child. And remember, these judges can say the same thing if one of them murders you! That they were sick at the time and just need a short stay in a mental hospital where they quickly start talking sane as soon as they get in there so they can get out again THIS IS HOW A SCHIZOPHRENIC CAN GET AWAY WITH MURDERING SOMEONE AND NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR IT! I have seen it with my own eyes and YES it scares me!

This is insane!! !! Yes this really happened and this is the dark side of schizophrenia. They can be really, really sick!



ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo
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31 Aug 2008, 9:38 am

And, yes, I know people without schizophrenia kill more people than those who have it but do they have access to the insanity excuse? Should you be allowed to murder someone and not have to answer for it even when everyone knows you are guilty? The evidence is right there it is so obvious you did it. Because you have a history of schizophrenia though, your behaviour is automatically excused? That's just crazy!



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31 Aug 2008, 10:06 am

it's a very thin line, i'm not saying we shouldn't punish serial killers, but i'm saying that my attitude is at least slightly sympathetic towards them, i guess it's just an emotional response. punish them but don't hold them up as evil, they're just mentally disturbed probably due to childhood trauma...i think what i'm getting at is "evil" is just a perception.x



0_equals_true
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31 Aug 2008, 10:20 am

Xanderbeanz wrote:
it's a very thin line, i'm not saying we shouldn't punish serial killers, but i'm saying that my attitude is at least slightly sympathetic towards them, i guess it's just an emotional response. punish them but don't hold them up as evil, they're just mentally disturbed probably due to childhood trauma...i think what i'm getting at is "evil" is just a perception.x

That is a generalisation serial killer just means they followed a pattern of killing that was not spree killing, genocide, or standard homicide. A serial killer could be a paranoid schizophrenic or other psychotic/episodic illness, however it is less likely because they killing would be fairly disordered so they are more likely to get caught early on.

I agree with you this word 'evil' doesn’t mean anything in that context. Most serial killers aren’t mad however. A personality isn't considered being mad, even if that personality is way out of the norm. It is a grey area though. There are some scientists that claim to notice defences in the frontal lobe in scans of killers with personality disorders. This is consistent with head trauma, but that doesn't mean they suffered head trauma, they could have been born that way.

One of the myths about serial killers is they kill non stop, when actually serial killers have gone years, even decades without killing.

As for punishment, I don’t think that what jaol should be about, it should be about protecting other people.



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31 Aug 2008, 11:17 am

0_equals_true wrote:
As for punishment, I don’t think that what jaol should be about, it should be about protecting other people.


This is a total tangent but...

Yeah, and another problem is the prison system at least in the United States is totally messed up. I understand very much the part about keeping people who have done harm away from people they could hurt, and think that part is utterly and completely essential. But what we have is a system that doesn't work as far as keeping people from re-offending when they get out, in fact it often encourages people to re-offend in various ways from the whole culture of the place. I don't know what to do about that -- people need to be kept apart from people they could hurt, and that much is certain -- but the prison system is a broken solution in itself.

I know several people who have gone there for non-violent offenses and they have told me that even when it's not outwardly physically abusive or neglectful (which it often is in addition), psychologically it's utterly brutal and dehumanizing in a way that encourages people to deaden their minds in a way making them more likely to become hardened criminals in there. And many mental institutions, including ones people get sent to for crimes, are very similar in that regard. I wish I was imaginative enough to know what the better way is, but there has to be some better way of doing things so that these places didn't encourage people already likely to hurt people, to become the sort of person even more likely to go out and hurt people even more when they leave.

And yeah I utterly agree with someone else, that the insanity defense ought not to be used in such a way as to get someone who's just killed someone thrown back into society. I mean... that's not even what it's for. If someone's killing people, then regardless of their state of mind, someone has to make sure they're not given the opportunity to do it again. The same thing happens oddly enough when the victim of the crime is disabled in some way (and then people only realize the mistake in that, once the person seriously injures or kills someone who is not disabled, which is pretty sickening when you think about it). If someone is killing people or even threatening to kill people you have to find some way to keep them from doing it, or doing it more. Regardless of whether it's because they don't have a conscience, because they are really angry, because they have trouble distinguishing reality from imagination, or because they don't even understand what they did... all those things affect how to keep someone from killing other people, but they ought not to affect the part about keeping them away from people who might be victimized by them. Murder is too serious and irreversible to mess around with that way.


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31 Aug 2008, 11:28 am

Oh I know so. They gravitate to me because I actually listen to what they say and I can follow their train of thought. I love talking to people that are just absolutely bats*** on the bus and around downtown. They know when people are really listening and they really appreciate it. Even when my grandmother was really sick and was senile from fever, we were all visiting and she would just say things and no one could follow what she was trying to say but me. We were actually having a conversation and the rest of my family is just sitting there scratching their heads.


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anbuend
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31 Aug 2008, 12:16 pm

Oh yeah that same thing happens to me, where people feel free to walk up to me and talk to me about their conspiracy ideas and stuff because they know somehow I'm not going to judge them for it.

I didn't even know that was unusual until I was out walking with a friend, and about five people approached us in the space of two hours. She asked me whether this always happened to me, and I asked her, "Well doesn't it happen to everyone?" and she told me it didn't.

With regard to understanding people... I noticed that I also seem to understand people with many forms of dementia fairly well. One thing that bothers me is when I can see the gears turning in their head, so to speak, and they are getting ready to say something, and nobody ever gives them time to do it. And if I step in I get told in very patient, slow language, by some random non-disabled person, that they have dementia, as if I don't understand what that means. But I have found if I take the time to listen long enough, many of them make a lot more sense than they're given credit for.

There is now also brain research showing that people with Alzheimer's retain memory and such longer than they used to be thought to be -- a lot of it is at times a communication or word-retrieval problem. That might be why I can see the gears turning like that. I can also see it in an autistic friend of mine who has trouble retrieving the right words, and people often talk over her when she's waiting to come up with one, or else they seem to not even notice she is talking. It's the weirdest thing, she can be talking in complete sentences and people talk over her, not maliciously, but as if she's not even there or speaking.

And it seems like a lot of people with dementia are trying quite hard to hang onto both thoughts and words, and often need time to do that more than anything, not to just be rushed through everything because other people want them to operate at a faster speed than they can operate at. I can understand this because I often need that time as well.

I used to have an online friend who was autistic. She worked in an Alzheimer's ward specifically because she could relate socially to the people who lived there, better than she could to non-disabled people. She wrote a book about it called In Their Hearts, you can read about it here.

Also, with regards to delirium, it is good that you did that. I was delirious last year from a physical illness and could not type at all, but really appreciated anyone who treated me like a person regardless. One person during that time actually referred to me as having the mind of an infant, right in front of me. I may have been passing out a lot and really confused (enough that I kept trying to yank my catheter out without realizing what I was doing to myself, and enough that my memories of the whole thing are really weird and patchy), but I was still there and still heard that. When capable of appreciating anything, I very much appreciated people who didn't treat me any different from normal, although I was not always with-it enough to understand what was happening. Apparently there's a lot I don't even remember, but I was still a person and I am sure that if I was conscious at those times I would not have liked being treated as if I was somehow not real.

I think people often forget that just because someone doesn't communicate in a standard way, or even is incredibly confused, it doesn't mean they aren't still there. Too often I have seen people with dementia, delirium, or severe communication problems (whether seeming incoherence, or very slow word-finding, or whatever), treated like furniture rather than people. It seems like often things would be better if people just slowed down enough to both understand and be understood.


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