I was responding in a different thread the other day when I was notified that I misunderstood the question (slightly). So I’m starting my own: Has anybody ever had an interaction with someone about whom it could rightfully be said was at least somewhat mentally impaired (and not through just chemical intake)? My story(ies) below:
I live next to a woman who clearly has mental problems. At the very least, as far as I can tell, she’s paranoid/delusional and bi-polar. I’ve had a couple of run-ins with her and I know that she’s assaulted some of her own family members, as well. She’s a train wreck waiting to happen.
Last year (on the last Sunday in July, it was) another insane woman drove a truck (not hers, as it turned out) around the neighborhood fairly early in the morning wreaking fairly major havoc - ramming the truck into houses and other personal property and attempting to run people (myself included) over. All the while yelling out the window about “Heaven and hell.” I’ve told people where I work that story - “My Brush with Insanity” I call it. I hope to never have as close a brush with insanity ever again. It was TRULY unnerving. I thank only my own quick thinking and relative agility that I was able to elude her attempt to run me over. I’ve been told that she’s since been institutionalized (if that still happens in this country). I can only hope so. She’s a menace.
I saw a seemingly normal woman begin to exhibit obvious signs of schizophrenia. She was diagnosed quickly and there may have been more incidents beforehand, but in a span of two weeks she went from mostly normal to hearing voices frequently, uncontrolled scratching at an imaginary itch, and random undirected behavior (as it would seem to everyone else). She had been a kind person and a dedicated mother before, but even with medication she and her family soon fell apart. Her husband said her father had suffered from schizophrenia and had been worried that it would happen to her.
From what you describe as “crazy,” I would say no. I’ve been close to or worked with people who suffered from things ranging from bipolar disorder to borderline personality disorder to chronic anxiety and depression. It taught me a lot about mental illness, to put it mildly.
I live in a hotel that acts as supportive housing for people with mental heath issues.
One guy, was sure the city was sending fire truck with sirens on pass the hotel to annoy him.
Another guy would scream gibberish at all hours of the day & night.
There is a woman who screams in Chinese. She does this in the street during the day usually.
There was also a guy who had covered his walls from ceiling to floor in tiny handwriting.
I could go on.
Add in the clinic I go to & the neighborhood I live in and I doubt I’ve seen a sane person in years.
I was going to say my sister-in-law was a sane person, but she did married my brother, so that’s points against her.
Yeah, well, I was in the state home for the unbalanced for about 4 months, until the diagnosis-by-medication method determined that the way to stabilize me was with lithium carbonate. I was pretty weird there for a while, but still with enough clarity to recognize that the people around me were in varying states of mental disorder. I have even taken good acid since then without ill effect, so whatever snapped in me at the time must have been largely environmental. Or maybe that batch was bad, though it did not tweak out anyone else, that I knew of.
And it has bothered me for decades since. I was there in the rubber ranch trying to get better, surrounded by a bunch of people who were on varying trajectories from merely depressed to the guy who just paced around and yelled “horseshit!” if you tried to speak to him. How is that a positive environment for anyone, having very limited exposure to or contact with normal people (the staff were the nutpokes who really only kept order over the herd).
Which has shaped my outlook on society. I think rest homes should have frequent visits by young school children, for the benefit of both. Academics should be required to hang out with bubbas. And Ds with Rs, and race stuff, and so forth, I just think our society would be so much healthier if we burned all the walls between us and those one guys.
My neighbor. She has a landscape business, several business vehicles, and a nice appearance and presents nicely (mostly). You don’t really notice the crazy at first. This works well in her business (mostly) because most of her interactions with people are relatively short.
But her family situation is a mess. She has huge, longstanding difficulties with every family member and still calls the police and/or makes CPS reports on her ex even though her kids stopped coming over a couple of years ago. When she found her 16 year old daughter had a boyfriend, that sent her into a cycle of calling her daughter a slut and a whore for a couple of weeks, destroying a couple of phones, and ended when the daughter just quit her scheduled divorce decreed visitations. At one point, years after the divorce, the judge actually ordered her to not sue her ex again for at least 2 years. She chronically forgot to pick up her kids or drop them off while they were in her care except for getting them back to their dad on time- she was very, very good about that because of previous legal problems there. Many times, her kids would call me to come get them because she neglected to or was unable to (or they could not reach her to) come get them from some event like school or church.
She thinks her ex husband has hired a private detective to spy on her…for years. She thinks the detectives have entered her house, that they have moved things around, left marks on her walls and ceiling, and have tapped her phones. She changes her phone number frequently (to both avoid the private detectives and hide from unhappy customers- she is not a very good landscaper and was recently sued to remove a poorly built gazebo she installed and refund the customer’s money). She thinks the private detectives sometimes mess with her vehicles and disable them.
She thinks she ‘owns’ the street and becomes upset if another landscaper is working here. She may come onto the property/job to threaten them and tell them to not come back.
If you hire her to do a job, she will continue to trespass on your property for a very long time to “check her work.” You may get up to make coffee and find her in your yard. I found her in my house two times at around 4:30 in the morning. She wanted coffee and to use my computer, so came right in, made coffee and checked her email.
Stuff like that. I actually quit contact with her completely after her kids left for good (we have kids of similar ages). The last contacts I had with her were 7 long, ranting phone messages left on my cell phone about what an awful persons I, my husband, and kids are, amongst other things. These calls included things like accusing my husband of stealing her landscape jobs (He’s in IT and hates even mowing the lawn) and telling me to date her new boyfriend because he makes a lot of money. I never met the guy and have no idea what prompted that).
I think this counts. My 41 y.o. stepson has been living with us since last September. He has a right frontoparietal tumor which is no longer treatable.
He has started showing signs of paranoia and has developed a memory of my having assaulted him sometime in the past. My wife gets to be his sole caregiver.
He takes some kind of anti-psychotic meds. (along with all the other stuff)
I used to go out on the street to do homeless outreach. I’ve met my share of truly out of society, not understanding the world around them crazy people. Some were harmless…some were scary.
One of the first that I knew who was actually committed was a housemate of my then-boyfriend (I was 16) who was quite serious when he said that there were little people in the TV set acting everything out. Obviously he said and did other things too, but that’s the one that stands out.
Is this a round-about way of suggesting that the OP is delusional, intended to be a joke?
When I was about 18 there was a woman around our city who was clearly wack. She would harrass people with nonsensical things all over the place. One time she came into the laundrymat where I was doing my laundry and minding my own business. She looked at me and said “Do you have 43 cents…or tomatoes?” Next thing I knew she was waving a hairbrush at my face screaming “YOU KILLED MY DAUGHTER! YOU KILLED MY DAUGHTER!!” I was frozen terrified and a twenty-something guy in the laundrymat chased her away from me and stayed with me until my boyfriend picked me up.
I heard that she was at the beach one day and grabbed a little boy screaming about how he was the devil and the boy’s mother cold-clocked her with one punch.
She disappeared and a while later there was a letter in the newspaper about how a clearly mentally ill woman was receiving treatment and doing well. No names or details were mentioned but I’m positive it was about her. Nobody else around here was that nuts.
Am I sure what happened? True, some of what I think I know about the first person I mentioned is only what I’ve heard but I KNOW that 1) she nearly ran me (and my dogs) over in December 2011 due to exTREME inattentiveness while driving (that’s about the nicest way I can think of to put it), 2) she confronted me a few months ago, accusing me of trying to seduce her 13 (or so) year old daughter and even getting her own mother to tell me TO MY FACE that “the whole neighborhood KNOWS that you skulk around at night peering into people’s windows.” and 3) on SEVERAL occasions police vehicles have come to the house she shares with her (80+ year old) mother. Some of it is hearsay, if you will, and other of it little more than circumstantial evidence, but she is “out there,” trust me on that. Furthermore my wife and I STRONGLY suspect that she has a drinking problem (and not like the guy from “Airplane!” either). The part that kills me? That her mother came by our house last week to ask my wife a question and my wife reported to me that the (crazy) daughter “has an apartment but comes by often to be with her daughters.” What a fine role model their mother is, too…NOT!!
There is a statistic, from a very old text book, because I am very old, that said about 30% of the population has diagnosible by-polar disorder.
In my life, I’ve had close relationships with three. All had been seen and diagnosed by a psychiatrist. All had at least one episode of psychosis. Usually because they refused to take their meds.
