A man in New York throws his four year old brother from the roof of their apartment building – killing him. A man pushes another man off a bridge nearly killing him. A man sets a girl on fire, killing her. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 20% of all adult people in the US experience mental illness in any given year… And 1 in 25 adults experiences severe mental illness in any given year. That equates to 10 million people capable of severe mental actionable cause, and 44 million potentially falling victim to their mental aberration in any given year.
And no one seems to find this particular statistic relevant to the cock-eyed craziness that we read about daily from men masturbating on airplane flights, to maga hat eruptions, to the idea that ridiculing someone in a public restaurant is not ‘bullying’.
To the people yet to be victimized, they view it as television, a computer game, something foreign, benign, not of their world. But to the victims, it can be devastatingly traumatic.
I’m not talking a grope, 36 years ago, or a construction worker saying, ‘nice a**’ forty years ago, that no one even gave a second thought to. I’m talking about NOW. Today. The heinous actions by out of control people who might qualify as ‘mentally ill’.
Define Mental Illness. Interestingly, it is actually quite vague:
- any of various disorders in which a person’s thoughts, emotions, or behaviour are so abnormal as to cause suffering to himself, herself, or other people.
This would apply to just about anyone who hurts another due to their own inability to ‘feel’ outside of self.
- a mental condition marked primarily by sufficient disorganization of personality, mind, and emotions to seriously impair the normal psychological and often social functioning of the individual.
This begs the question, ‘what is normal’? Because according to what is now acceptable, a person may harass, slander, libel, lie, cheat, swindle, threaten, and scream obscenely, and no one considers this behavior – abnormal. These people freely employ these behaviors and if we challenge this, we are either racist, judgmental, crossing the line of freedom of speech, or a host of other justifications.
According to psychology definitions, normal can be either what is normal for that particular person, as in Kathy Griffin, or normal for society as in … hmmm?
In other words, normal no longer exists. All ne need do is use Kathy Griffin as evidence of that fact, and attest to her ability to say, do, and walk freely, and in this regard, there is no abnormal. Except that psychologists assert that 20% of us are ‘abnormal’.
But no one goes to jail for being abnormal or mentally ill, instead, they are ignored because the line or boundary of definition is so vague that should we put away one – we would put away the many. Really?
But it gets even more interesting.
In 2012, there were just 35,000 people in state mental institutions, and 356,000 in jails who were considered to have severe mental illness. Roughly 400,000 are incarcerated in some way! WOW! Until you measure that to the statistics. 400,000 out of 44 million – less than 1%. That leaves 43 million 600,000 still on the streets committing their abnormal acts.
Another statistic: Our prison population is roughly 1.6 million. Of those 356,000 are considered mentally insane. 25%! Yet they are not labeled so. They are not wearing a badge. And they are not treated as mentally ill. Why? Because after the hubrub of the 1950’s enormous failures in psychiatric methodologies, it was determined that there was no cure – nothing was successful. Nothing.
Not drugs. Not magic. Not incantations. Not hallucinations. Not talk. Nothing.
And so, they decided to alter the definition of mental illness, ‘what is not normal for the person’, which in reality is so broad that it can encompass – everything is ok! As in Kathy Griffin. It is all normal – for her. If a person has been setting fire to cats all their life, that is ‘their norm’.
While our jail system is undeniably broken, as we are subjected to mass shootings, political propaganda, and devious sexual assault allegations, it is also true that the mentally insane are gaining traction in creating chaos and in instigating division. It just isn’t coming from where we are led to believe when the media opens it’s mouth and the tongue wags a tale of deception. The deceit is a tool of brainwashing, of constantly indoctrinating the mind to believe a statement when in fact it is a blatant lie.
And so we are left wit dissemination, the process of digging and churning up the dirt to find what is real beneath the layers of media dung that we have been subjected to for upwards of 60 years! It takes a strong person to wish to see, and an even stronger person to hold onto the sight. It ain’t easy. But then, no one promised it would be – except – the media.