Thursday, September 10, 2015

Mental Health Is the Excuse Du Jour

I remember when there was no excuse for drunkenness.
I remember when there was no excuse for morbid obesity.
I remember when there was no excuse for infidelity.

Now, alcoholism is a disease.  Overeating is a disease.  And sexual addiction has been known to disrupt a person’s normal way of life.

I’m no psychologist, so I’m not here to disprove that one not being able to control one’s excessive use of alcohol, food or sex might not be linked to some kind of psychological disorder.  But on the other hand, and let’s face it, the sheer enjoyment of alcohol, food and sex can simply lead us to never getting enough.  Which comes first?  The chicken or the egg.  I don’t know.

What I do know is that if one is prone to excessive behavior, one must find help before, and not after the lack of control sets in.  For instance, if every time I go on my computer to work, and I end up playing Candy Crush for hours, hours that could be used to clean and cook, chores that I don’t look forward to, then it behooves me to not touch that Candy Crush button if I don’t have the time to spare.

The only time no one excuses a drunkard for his actions is if he kills someone in his drunken state.  People will say, “He got drunk and then knowingly got behind the wheel of a car.”  As someone who has never been drunk, I don’t know what it feels like; but if I were to imagine, I’d say that if someone was that drunk and drove, then he possibly could not have been in his right frame of mind to decipher if he was capable to drive in the first place.  I mean, doesn’t drunkenness distort our rationality?

So much sympathy is now given to the morbidly obese, that people who are proud of their fit bodies are accused of fat-shaming others, if they happen to share photos of themselves.

I’m not sure why only the rich and famous get away with having a sexual addiction, while the average Joe is just a womanizer.  But moving right along.

So now that people are able to drink as much alcohol as they want, eat as much food as they want, have as much sex as they want, and those are deemed as medical conditions, the next step seems to be for them to senselessly kill others and are declared as being mentally unstable.

Nowadays, when someone commits the most heinous of acts, no one wants to label him as evil – instead, he has mental health issues.  I am aware that there are various levels on the mental health spectrum; however, if someone sits down and plans an act of violence so terrible, it’s only fair that he gets booted out of the mental health circle and gets dumped into the EVIL brigade.

Vester Lee Flanagan, aka Bryce Williams, on live TV killed two of his former coworkers, a reporter and a cameraman.  As he sprayed bullets, he accidentally shot the innocent bystander who was being interviewed by the reporter.  As he fled police, he eventually turned the gun on himself and later died.  Apparently he had a manifesto which I guess spoke to the discrimination that he endured on the job from his victims.  I did not read nor will I read said manifesto.  And by the way, writing a lengthy suicide note doesn’t constitute a manifesto or get you into the mental health circle – YOU ARE STILL EVIL!!!

From what I picked up, Vester/Bryce did not have a good experience on the job and was fired two years ago, and not on good terms either.  Let’s just say he was discriminated against based on his race and/or sexual preference, is it still okay to hold a grudge for two years against at least two people and let it fester so much that his only alternative was to end their lives in such a violent and public way?

Every time people cannot explain why a monstrous act was committed, they chalk it up to mental health issues.  They are just giving people with genuine mental health problems a bad name.  And because he cried bigotry, doesn’t get him any sympathy from me.  Then I hear people saying that we don’t know the full story, that there’s more to it.  Look, I’ve been prejudiced against because of my race and ethnicity, and after I was no longer at that job, any revenge I had for anyone did not last for more than a week or two J.  But in my defense, it wasn’t anything as wicked as killing anyone.  Well, not so blatant that it doesn’t look like an accident. J J

When police officer, Darren Wilson shot and killed 18 year old Michael Brown, he had numerous supporters.  Sympathizers raised money for his legal defense and presumably for his livelihood, since he no longer had a job.  It bothered me because at the end of the day, he senselessly took someone else’s life.  I don’t care what Alison Parker and Adam Ward did to Vester.  I don’t care what he thinks they did to him.  I don’t care how hurt he felt.  Nothing they did or could have ever done deserved being executed while innocently doing their jobs.  Therefore, I cannot in good conscience give this murderer a pass just because we have similar pigmentation.

Several weeks ago, a Boston police chief reported his own son, who was found with an arsenal and the desire to kill for ISIS.  I waited for it, and I was eventually rewarded with news that he had a history of mental illness.  Did he?  I don’t know.  But how else can that chief or the rest of the country explain how this white, privileged young man is now a jihadist?

The mental health crisis that this nation faces is extremely serious.  There are college kids committing suicide at a vast rate.  There are heads of households killing their entire families and then themselves.  These are trying times, but perspectively speaking, not because people with a ‘normal’ state of mind cannot comprehend the evil mind, doesn’t make every murderer crazy.