Got an email from Martin’s father thanking me for keeping the site running. I appreciate that, but in all fairness, I must offer my thanks to the community here at Booman Tribune for stepping up. You have all been incredibly supportive, and for those who are posting diaries and sending me your work to my email (stevendbt at yahoo dot com) for publication, I am forever indebted to you.
Now a personal story.
Our family have been trying to help a young man, a friend of ours, get back on his feet. He’s had a very difficult life. He was born into a Jehovah’s Witnesses family that did not believe in education so he never graduated high School. They did not believe in mental illness either. Unfortunately, he showed signs of severe OCD (at its worst he hears voices in his head telling him how bad he is and the OCD ‘tics’ he exhibits are primarily to shut his consciousness off from that) and anxiety disorders from an early age.
He was abused by his parents (no details because I won’t share that publicly, but imagine the worst) leading to what I consider PTSD like symptoms (depression, nightmares, paranoid delusions), and, oh yes, he is gay. When he came out to them at 16 they threw him out of the house and onto the streets to fend for himself. Most of his extended family shunned him with a few exceptions.
With that background, he found it hard to hold and keep a job. Like many with untreated people with mental illness he tried street drugs to self-medicate, in his case, heroin. He’s a recovering addict now.
Not a surprise he fell through the cracks of our health care system. Generally, he was only seen by doctors when he went to the emergency room. We have him signed up for Medicaid, but every psychiatrist refuses to treat him because of his past history of addiction. They do not want to be caught prescribing meds for his mental health conditions, which are often controlled substances.
The only mental health treatment the county offers is group therapy, often a very stressful environment for him. And that treatment is more related to the fact he has a history of addiction, not specifically targeted to his other, more significant underlying issues. His parents did agree to pay airfare to Florida where he sees a friend from his teenage years who became a doctor. She is literally the only M.D. who would agree to prescribe pyschoactive meds for his OCD, ADD, anxiety and other problems, and she’s a general practitioner, not a psychiatrist or psychologist.
This year his grandmother died. He also recently received a week long visit from his parents for the first time in years. Unfortunately, that was very stressful for him. In addition, he’s been going through the process of obtaining disability benefits, and needless to say, that’s been a long, difficult bureaucratic nightmare. He has not been sleeping the last few nights because his nightmares related to past trauma make him so fearful he keeps himself awake, leading to sleep deprivation and an exacerbation of his other disorders.
The last two days, the walls crumbled. He became delusional (thought for a while he was part of a special crimes unit profiling serial killers because of the TV shows he watched to stay awake were all in that vein), paranoid, a little verbally belligerent (not to the point of violence). However he would then quickly become weepy, depressed and talking of his “will” and his plans for his funeral. To the best we can tell, these are signs of a dissociative state, where he literally does not know what he his doing, where his is, and even at times his identity. We are considering getting him a full psych evaluation. Of course, first we would have to take him to the emergency room.
He is representative of all too many people who are poor and have mental health issues. There is no system in place to help people in his condition. We are lucky he gets any treatment at all due to his involvement in the county’s drug addiction program, and his doctor friend in Florida. But it is not enough. More and more of the poor, mentally ill population are left to the police to deal with, and we all know how that’s been working out, don’t we?
And yet, as Martin’s father reminded me our big-hearted Republicans and conservatives want to slash more funding for those in poverty (hat tip to Booman’s father) because they are so “lazy” and of course, no government programs always equals more jobs. Except it doesn’t.
[I]t’s still amazing — and revealing — to hear this line being repeated now. For the blame-the-victim crowd has gotten everything it wanted: Benefits, especially for the long-term unemployed, have been slashed or eliminated. So now we have rants against the bums on welfare when they aren’t bums — they never were — and there’s no welfare. Why?
First things first: I don’t know how many people realize just how successful the campaign against any kind of relief for those who can’t find jobs has been. But it’s a striking picture. The job market has improved lately, but there are still almost three million Americans who have been out of work for more than six months, the usual maximum duration of unemployment insurance. That’s nearly three times the pre-recession total. Yet extended benefits for the long-term unemployed have been eliminated — and in some states the duration of benefits has been slashed even further. […]
Strange to say, this outbreak of anti-compassionate conservatism hasn’t produced a job surge. In fact, the whole proposition that cruelty is the key to prosperity hasn’t been faring too well lately. Last week Nathan Deal, the Republican governor of Georgia, complained that many states with Republican governors have seen a rise in unemployment and suggested that the feds were cooking the books. But maybe the right’s preferred policies don’t work?
Well, I’m off to get coffee. Will have a special guest blogger with a post from his site a little later this morning.
