The ultimate SC...Crazy John

[ominousoat]

AND his drug problem has made him what he is. He is NOT bipolar, that is for damn sure. He is just NUTS. Absolutely NUTS.

--

I think he belongs in a rubber room away from the world.

I'm not saying you're wrong, or that he isn't a threat. But terms like "nuts" and "put in a rubber room" are pure and simple prejudice and hate towards the mentally ill, and this continues fueling the ignorance regarding mental illness in our day and age. Locking people away doesn't solve anything, and it just clogs up our institutes. He needs to be put into a facility and treated, and if all goes well he may be at least rehabilitated enough to get back into the world.

[zzapp the witch]

I had a constructive comment, but once I saw that someone thought I was equating bipolar disorder with being a methhead, I was so hurt that my thought just went out the window.

I'm not going to read this thread anymore.

[blas]

I am sorry if my using "nuts" and "rubber room" offended anyone. I don't know where anyone on this thread got the idea of bipolar, because I have friends who are bipolar, and they certaintly don't go around spitting on people or attacking people and getting banned from stores. They are actually quite normal.

He's just a different kind of person. Whether it be Vietnam, the horse kicking him in the head, the brain tumor, whatever it was, AND his drug problem is what made him what he is, so let's please keep bipolar out of this. He had some kind of underlying brain disfunction and a drug habbit to boot......

But don't worry, he'll be back to torture the town again quite soon. While many people breathe a sigh of relief that he's gone......there are many other people who feel for him and will do whatever they can to get him back to prove that he has every right to walk the streets and terrorize businesses and people and children. Just wait until one of those people's children gets attacked by him, or he hops into one of those women's cars; they might change their mind.

[Primer]

fratching.com anybody?

[Freemage]

The real problem here is that no one actually gives a damn about this guy.

He should be institutionalized until he's stable, and even then should be in a half-way house, where his behavior can be monitored while giving him a level of autonomy that he can actually handle.

But that? That's expensive. It's easier and cheaper to let him run around scaring the shit out of people and letting his problems get increasingly worse, until someone actually busts him and files charges, and then he gets locked up and MAYBE put in a state mental health facility for a period of time, whereupon they release him because they need the bed for someone who seems even more dangerous, and he seems calm enough because they've dumped enough medication in his bloodstream to calm a bull elephant.

Of course, since he's simply released with no further monitoring (that would cost taxpayers money, after all), he'll just start to backslide rapidly and end up back at the bottom of the well. (In bad cases like this, it would take one missed day's worth of meds to end up on the downward spiral.) Then he gets bad enough to get arrested again, and things start up all over again.

[Arachne]

In the US (based on what I've heard), she'd be out of luck: she wouldn't get health insurance or it'd be unaffordably-expensive because of the pre-existing condition, and there's no way she could afford the meds with any sort of normal job.

You're dead right on this one.

I have Bipolar II (not the same as Bipolar -- a little heavier on the 'oh god I'm so depressed' and a lot lighter on the 'I have to call the President RIGHT NOW!') and the medications I need to take to keep it in check are really expensive. I've been fighting for months with my insurance trying to get them to cover some of the cost, but no dice. So I fork over almost $200/mo. It sucks, but without the medications, I'm a crazy person, and with them, the highs and lows are really easy to control. (There is a generic, but as with most generics, it doesn't work for me. I can eat it like candy, and it's like I haven't taken anything at all.)

I can't imagine how it is for someone who's got full-on Bipolar, or is schitzophrenic (sp?), or what have you, where holding down a job to pay for the medications and psychiatric care is next to impossible. It's easy to see how someone like that might end up on the street, trying to right the wrongness in their head with any drug they could get their hands on.

Even so, compassion has to stop at the point where someone becomes dangerous. You're not doing anyone any favors by letting them wander the street being crazy -- eventually, they're going to hurt themselves, or someone else, or you.

[Andara Bledin]

Whether or not Crazy John is responsible for his condition or not, and regardless of how much anyone might have pity for his state, his presence is a real and continued threat to everyone he encounters.

My father is a crack addict. He's one of the harmless variety who simply is incapable of dealing with life and prefers to be drugged out of his gourd. Yet, he chooses to be the way he is and unless someone intervenes and forces him to not kill himself with drugs, he will continue to do so.

The person being described in this thread should be taken off the street for the protection of the people he will attack, for his protection against the person who will eventually attack him, and for the protection of the person who will eventually be responsible for his death. I mean how would you feel if you had to defend yourself against this guy and you ended up killing him?

^-.-^

[Pezzle]

If he's actually biochemically or anatomically messed up inside his skull, he didn't make the choice to be that way.

My best friend is biochemically messed up inside the skull. She's normal if she takes a cocktail of expensive medications. (Her pharmacist checked with her psychiatrist that the combination is correct - it's a scary combo that would make someone who is biochemically normal go seriously insane.)

Ok I'm about to ramble but...

Hey, sounds like my boyfriend. He was in a car accident that bruised a lobe or two of his brain in a concussion. He's been manic depressive and had anxiety problems every since, not to mention the hyper insomnia. If he'd hit a different part of his brain, he could be a Crazy John, believe it or not.

When you hit your head or have an injury or use drugs or abuse alcohol you kill brain cells. When those dendrites and axon terminals start to shrivel up it kills the synapses between the neurons, which means that not enough of certain neurotransmitters can be produced and passed through the body. For instance, not enough serotonin or norepinephrine can equate to manic depressive disorder... (one regulates the other, too much can lead to anxiety and I've heard some studies saying that severe imbalances can lead ot onsets of schizophrenia) or in other cases, remove one's ability to pass melatonin, as is my boyfriends case as well. He takes quite the concoction!

There is also a syndrome known as Korsakoff's Syndrome, which is (I guess my best summary) dementia brought on by long term alcohol abuse.

So basically, don't hate John... you don't know what caused him to be that way and you don't know what his life was like. That being said, I think you could do more benefit pressing charges on him than not -- it would get him the help and shelter he truly needed to live comfortably.

/rant
//cuz she loves her bf

[Posture Moll]

Whether or not Crazy John is responsible for his condition or not, and regardless of how much anyone might have pity for his state, his presence is a real and continued threat to everyone he encounters.

Thank you!

Now, I'm among the segment of 'mentally interesting' people in society, but I cannot *believe* the hue and cry raised here (and elsewhere) over "prejudice against the mentally ill" when it comes to dangerous, violent individuals. Fact is, Crazy John can't function in society without frequently turning berserk - he needs to be removed from it.

I would hope that if I ever became a threat to others that I would be locked away. Nor would I care if anyone 'hated' me for my homicidal tendencies.

[Seshat]

He should be institutionalized until he's stable, and even then should be in a half-way house, where his behavior can be monitored while giving him a level of autonomy that he can actually handle.

But that? That's expensive. It's easier and cheaper to let him run around scaring the shit out of people and letting his problems get increasingly worse,

<snip....>

Then he gets bad enough to get arrested again, and things start up all over again.

Except that it only SEEMS cheaper. The cost of his not-being-treated gets spread over a wide area of society, instead of being a set of simple line-items in an institution's charts.

It's my belief that it's actually cheaper to society as a whole to treat these people, and it's sad that that's not recognised.

I've not done the math, but I think that if you counted up the cost of the police effort, the cost to the businesses, the costs of all his abbreviated stays in the police lockups, the costs of cleaning up wherever he's been, miscellaneous other costs I've left out, and the costs of additional stress/fear to the populace, the 'treat the guy' option is waaaay cheaper.


Le sigh.



Editted to add two things:

1. Thank you, Arache, for the confirmation. My best friend's meds come to way more than $200USD/month, and she also requires (not 'wants', but 'has to have') trained support personnel. Even with all that, she couldn't hold down a job that could PAY for all that, much less also feed and shelter herself. So yes, with the current US system, she'd probably be on the streets trying to quiet the voices with whatever she could get.

2. The impression I get is that both the 'support the mentally ill' and the 'he's dangerous and needs to be locked up' people agree on a key point: he needs to be taken off the streets for everyone's sake. I suspect that even the most 'just get him away from me' people would be cool with him getting the treatment he needs, and even the most 'compassion for the mentally ill' people think he needs to be compassionately kept from hurting anyone while he's being treated.

So I think even the most extreme views stated here are in broad agreement: get him someplace where everyone's safe from whatever's wrong with him (sick, drug addicted, or just plain violent), and then figure out what treatments, if any, will make him as okay as possible.

[Plaidman]

While I was reading it, I thought my uncle had moved to where you are, though his name is Bill. The methhead YOU can trust.

Or at least his family. He does a lot of meth. ALOOOOOT of meth. But he hasn't stolen anything, never beaten anyone. (Scratch that, he beat his son once when his son pulled a gun on him and my aunt). I remember seeing it take 12 cops to take down uncle bill. (I was there, and was counting like the count. 1...2.. 3 cops take do.,... no.. 12! 12 Cops!!

It also reminded me the time me and my mom were driving him somewhere, and we got pulled over by detectives who had guns pointed at all three of us. (I was 8ish and didn't really know what they were, I just knew my mom was screaming at me to get my hands up).

He use to be really good with his hands, but all the meth destroyed it. Now he couldn't fix a leaky sink by turnng the water off. Still love him though, in a crazy way.