finger painting, by mother who killed her child & self

WHO TO BLAME FOR YOUR DISTRESS

If you feel terrible enough to consider suicide, you might want to evaluate the role of parental addiction &/or untreated mental illness in them. If identifiable that makes you high risk for your own mental illness or addiction. Both make you much more likely to consider suicide as an option. No I am not blaming parents for this.

What may be even more insidious is that your friends, peers, lovers are also victims of the same process because the straight people are not like you. If none of your friends are straight that maybe another documentation of your own dysfunctions. This means the people you associate with reinforce each others notions; good, bad, or dumb. No I am not blaming your friends.


Who would I blame for your distress? My candidates are every president starting with Reagan. During his watch mental patients in psychiatric hospitals started to be discharged to their local California community with the help of tranquilizers and the pious hope they would get support, psychotherapy and supervision there. Gradually the money saved by emptying the hospitals and transferred to the local counties was cut back. Other states followed. Today there are about 60000 beds nationally for the mentally ill. The mentally ill were left to shift for themselves. They did so by living under bridges, or in their cars. They treated their pain with street drugs.

Along the way many of them had children, who became mentally ill from dysfunctional parents. These second generation mentally ill also began to treat themselves with street drugs. Under the influence, a significant number committed crimes of violence. The prisons and county jails together house about 2 million inmates, about a third are known to be mentally ill, and a large proportion of the balance are addicted to heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine.

The amount of annual federal money spent for mental health services in the US declined over this period, while the annual suicide rates of young people (15-24) kept increasing. The media blamed every thing in society except the absence of treatment resources for the mental disorders so very present in these perpetrators/victims. Our presidents led no moral crusades to restore treatment resources to the very needy.

The war on drugs spends more money on hardware and interdiction than on rehabilitation, while admittedly only reducing the availability of substances by about 5%. The demand side has received only token effort, the latest budgeted amount is about 3%.

Whatever your diagnoses may turn out to be, mental illness is very treatable, with prescriptions and talk therapy; both provided by trained professionals. Your distress is a temporary problem. Suicide is a permanent solution.

The two most likely predictors of suicidal deaths in the US is


age, and substance use, with the very young and the very old being at greatest risk, especially when aggravated by self prescribed street substances.

While you may suffer much pain you are looking for relief rather than death. Their is an assumption that you might feel better or nothing after suicide. The misunderstanding is that it is impossible to imagine a world without us in it. Even while we imagine what will happen after we die, we are still very much alive in the imagining process. Whatever death may turn out to be, whatever we expect will be different, and probably non existent is a product of our imagination.

Imagination always needs testing, by comparison with the past, and feedback from straight friends; or good father figures like a US president should be.


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