philip964 wrote: ↑Wed May 27, 2020 2:48 pm
I think the Doctor pointed out she needed brain medical assistance. There are more people out there than we realize who are just barely functioning. Then there are a lot of enablers who love them, who help them get by, without realizing they need brain medical assistance. In one particularly tragic incidence a mom taught her son to shoot an AR-15, thinking it would help.
I can cite a non-violent but distressing example. I was doing an outsourcing for a Dallas based company. I was working with one particular customer manager who was bi-polar. I arrived early and made coffee in one of their company machines. He came in a few minutes afterward and yelled and screamed at me for almost a half an hour because I had put the coffee pot on the wrong side of a two burner machine. There was absolutely nothing in his prior behavior to warn me that such a tirade was coming. He drew a crowd. Fortunately, I didn't respond. After it was over, one of the company employees apologized to me, saying that the manager sometimes didn't take his medication. For those who are not familiar with them, many of the drugs used to treat mental illness come with side effects that are hard to live with. He was a much larger framed man that I am and I would have had a problem with him if he had turned violent.
I would be willing to wager that a great percentage of the crime in this country is committed by people who are mentally ill. I also suspect that many of the suicide by cop situations are mental illness rather than street drugs. I like your choice of words 'barely functioning" because I do think that is the status for too many. They are the ones about whom the neighbors can say "I never saw him/her act like that before." Most of them are very good at disguising just how close to the edge they really are.