We’ve taken up a fair few pages in this edition putting shit all over psychologists and the people who go to them. Deservedly so in many cases. However, while we are not very good at taking things seriously, we would just like to say one more thing about psychology.
It’s not actually a joke.
Or, to use an analogy, getting a wicked case of the clap is a joke, having terminal cancer is not.
To illustrate: a few years ago I used to work in town. Every morning on my way to work I would stop at the local café for a take away coffee. Often while I was there I would see a man standing next to the shop rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself. After I’d been going there for a few months he started saying hello to me and, very occasionally would make disjointed conversation. Sometimes the conversations were with me, other times he’d be shouting at phantoms standing next to me. Often he didn’t smell too good and occasionally I would see him sit down to have a nap on the sidewalk.
One day, after a fairly large night, I didn’t make it to work, but I dragged myself down to the café in search of coffee and breakfast I didn’t have to cook myself. After my third cup I struck up a conversation with the owner and asked him about the man outside. He told me the man’s name was David. He had found David in tears outside the cafe one morning because he had lost his medication and, while he didn’t always like the side effects, he knew that without it he would lose himself in nightmares and confusion. He was terrified and helpless and had nowhere to go for help.
My café owner drove David to the doctor to get another prescription, then took him to the chemist to get it filled and he took over managing David’s medication from that day. Every morning David would come in, take his pill and get a coffee and a muffin. Then he would stand outside the cafe, his only place of refuge, and wait for the end of the day and the next pill he had to take. I don’t know if it had any effect on the business, having crazy homeless David standing outside the front door, but if it did, the café owner never seemed to worry about it and as long as that café remained in business and the owner didn’t go on holidays or get sick, David was going to be ok.
There are plenty of people like David out there, but let me tell you, there are not many people out there like that café owner.
Any copper can tell you about the number of people like David that they’ve met on night shift. They’re wandering the streets with voices in their heads and knives in their hands and usually the only people who are able or willing to help them wear a uniform and carry a gun. Not the most reassuring sight for someone with paranoid delusions I would guess, but still, the police talk them down off buildings and freeways, take them to hospitals that have no room for them and doctors who can’t help them and then, a few hours later, pick them up off the edge of a building again. This doesn’t just happen yearly it happens daily, and every five years or so, when some poor fucker has to shoot the guy with a knife in his hand, all we hear about is how the police are all gun toting lunatics, always thinking with their holsters.
A while back we watched a documentary about Lester Ellis, who was once a very successful professional boxer. He talked about the time he broke down and begged the police, in tears, to take him back to prison became it was the only place he would be safe, the only place he could go where someone would help him manage his medication, give him a bed to sleep in, food to eat and a therapist to talk to. The cops couldn’t help him because he hadn’t actually done anything wrong.
I don’t know how crazy you have to be to work out that the safest thing you can do is commit a crime in order to be taken care of, but I’m guessing that a fair few nutters have worked it out.
It’s not a joke at all.
The so-called integration of mentally and intellectually disabled people into the community has simply moved them out of safe havens like Kew Cottages and into prisons. The Health Department finds ways of classifying people into the too-hard basket, DHS is too busy putting at-risk kids back with their junkie parents, and the Mental Health system is no longer a system, it’s a series of band-aids. There’s only one department that doesn’t have the option of saying “No, sorry, no resources, not our problem”, and it’s the least appropriate; police and lawyers and magistrates and privatised prisons are so so very much the wrong system to be dealing with or attempting to help these people, but that’s all that’s left.
So next time you see a homeless person (because 80% of the homeless are suffering mental illness) rummaging through a bin, give them a smile or a couple of bucks, or, better, take their photo, and send it to your local MP with a letter attached. There are a hundred thousand of the poor bastards (homeless people, not MPs thankfully) out there, and if enough photos of them land on politician’s doorsteps, maybe somebody will start to give a shit..
!joomlacomment 4.0 Copyright (C) 2009 Compojoom.com . All rights reserved."
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
