A friend had a breakdown

[dutch508]

Star Member KT2000 (19,153 posts)
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215207746

A friend had a breakdown

She had a terrifying, paranoid breakdown. I was witness to her illogical stories, delusions, and hallucinations. I just listened and tried to remain neutral until help could be arranged. It took some time but finally those pieces came together and she spent a month in the mental hospital where she was released with meds and no follow-up. (Now I realize there is really not much help for anyone who is seriously mentally ill unless one meets the standard of "harm to self or others."

Upon release, she visited me to make sure I knew she was not really in a mental hospital but a safe house. She told me the doctor I talked with and all the patients there were really actors and the building is now empty. She was in a state better than being terrified as she was before so upon advice from her doctor I insisted that she really was in a hospital and the doctor and patients were real. Her response was very familiar to me - according to her, I just did not know what was really going on but she did. Eventually, I would find out that she was right. She had supreme confidence in knowing "what was really going on."

I relate this story because her post-hospitalization self is the same as the right-wingers and Q people I have come across.

I have seen them take over neighborhood websites with their delusions, dissolve family relationships etc, with the same assurance that they are "in the know" and anyone who disagrees is not. My rather intelligent friend now has a mind that has snapped shut due to mental illness and the RW and Q's have minds that have snapped shut as well, I do believe there is mental illness at work for them too.

 

Star Member malaise (225,769 posts)

4. I heard one of them saying that Biden is on a movie set and Trump is still president

There are way too many people who are mentally ill with no real care

 

Star Member barbtries (24,692 posts)

5. without a doubt.

I would not be surprised to learn that your friend was swallowed by Qanon.

i don't know if you ever go to Reddit, but there is a thread over there that got me to bookmark it for the first time ever recently.

https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/

Your friend sounds basically exactly like the perpetrators of said casualties. i'm sorry for her and all of her loved ones either way.

I don't understand why she was released if the medication was not helping her.

Star Member I_UndergroundPanther  (4,970 posts)

17. Sad what for profit bullshit did to Long term psych care

Than there's the fact some psydocs don't care and are motivated to admit and discharge as many people as they can..

Long term psych care died when reagan let hmos overtake and he eliminated long term psych care.

The day you have a psych admission they talk about discharge plans..on day one.

I have been to psych hospitals many times in my life. At this point I don't **** around if my illness symptoms present themselves.

Took me years of therapy to get to this point.

I also go to a psychiatric rehabilitation program or prp.

There are groups,therapy,emergency therapist and other things there along with a community that helps me tremendously.

Maryland still falls short but they have better care for the mentally ill than other states. If I didn't have years of long term care I dunno if I could have ever reached this point in my recovery.

Also dark triad personalities should be kept away from general population psych be they staff or patients. They need seperate care because they endanger other clients safety and sanity.Psychiatry needs to seperate dark triad because they bring nothing but chaos and suffering to psych hospitals or any program they attend.

 

Star Member MFM008 (18,932 posts)

21. similar situation here

I was stable on meds for 21 years, they took me off them due to a little panic breakthrough instead of shoring it up.
They pulled my safety net and ive been in free fall since last year, yes, Covid made it worse..... they even tried to put me BACK on my old medication but did it to fast and to high. ( Zoloft 200 mg after 3 days back on?) no I got off it again.
i cant remember how many short stay hospital trips i have made.
A lot of mine is panic/anxiety..bipolar supposedly..
I have super sensitivities to medication.....
I dont have much support and feel pretty badly at this point...

 

Star Member mountain grammy (22,747 posts)

12. Thank you for posting this.

Good luck to your friend. I honestly believe the whole trump/Q thing is mental illness, and in America we don't deal with that very well.

I sincerely hope they find the right meds for your friend. It's so frustrating to see this kicked down the road.. I almost voted for Jerry Ford because of Betty Ford speaking out about mental illness and her own addisctions. My god people, we're struggling out here.

Star Member hunter (32,509 posts)

24. Paranoia is horrible.

Worse than hallucinations, speaking from my own personal experiences.

Meds are helpful but don't work if you are too paranoid to take them.

It's been my good fortune that even at my very worst I tend to be fairly mild, even amusing.

In the worst decade of my life, between quitting high school and graduating from college, the cops would drive me home, not kill me.

It probably helped that I was white.

I don't honestly know how I accomplished it but I built my own safety net of family and friends.

Otherwise I'd be a crazy homeless guy.

Or dead.

I have maybe two years total life experience as a hard core crazy homeless guy but it's not something I put on my résumé.

My last 72 hour visit to the locked psych ward wasn't all that long ago.

That was a damned expensive vacation, insurance paid only a fraction of it.

Thankfully I've always been more a danger to myself than others, although I'm really good at making the people who love me cry.

I get the autistic stuff from my dad's dad.

I get the absolute crazy shit from my mom's mom, who was functional enough to work her entire adult life, but had to removed from her home as a danger to herself and others when she retired. She was still cussing up a storm and trying to bite the paramedics when they hauled her away in the ambulance.

The rest of my dysfunction I attribute to head injuries and random fae ancestors.

paulkienitz (1,049 posts)

27. I would say that ideological fanaticism can function as an equivalent of mental illness

even when no medical dysfunction is present.

The right in general and Trump in particular have been demanding of their followers for a long time that they be willing to put dogma above data, to believe their ears rather than their eyes. After decades of inculcation into this mindset, in parallel with similar efforts by evangelical preachers to breed their own kind of purblind fanaticism, we have a large population of people who are willing to act entirely as if they are mentally ill, when they aren't.

 

[Zathras]

Isn't it ironic that the self proclaimed smartest people on the internet are the ones who talk so much about their mental illnesses at the same place?

[franksolich]

Isn't it ironic that the self proclaimed smartest people on the internet are the ones who talk so much about their mental illnesses at the same place?

You got it.

For those who aren't aware, the subway cat, the undergroundpanther primitive, who's in her mid-50s, is nuts and proud of it, based upon her comments on Skins's island since at least 2005.  She revels in being nuts.

Large, considerably tattooed, with nose-rings, earrings, navel rings, hair fluorescent colors, she's been on welfare since Carter was president.

The subway cat is a female who wants to become a male.  Some years ago, her breasts were removed by the Medicaid docs as a preventative for breast cancer; she interpreted it to mean the overburdened taxpayers of Maryland were finally at long giving her the sex change she wanted.

Well, with her breasts removed, she's halfway there.  Alas for her, that's all the further she's going to go, halfway.

[DLR Pyro]

Isn't it ironic that the self proclaimed smartest people on the internet are the ones who talk so much about their mental illnesses at the same place?

I was thinking the same thing myself.   How many threads have there been on the cave where various cavers were going on and on about how mentally ****ed up they are?

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

Ah yes. The old Soviet trick of treating political dissent as mental illness.

[DumbAss Tanker]

I'm sure the 'Friend' was as big a Leftist dumpster fire as KT2000 itself, but instead of facing the fact that they have a full to overflowing load of loonies, it all gets projected onto the 'Other.'

[67 Rover]

Star Member I_UndergroundPanther  (4,970 posts)

17. Sad what for profit bullshit did to Long term psych care

Than there's the fact some psydocs don't care and are motivated to admit and discharge as many people as they can..

Long term psych care died when reagan let hmos overtake and he eliminated long term psych care.

The day you have a psych admission they talk about discharge plans..on day one.

I have been to psych hospitals many times in my life. At this point I don't **** around if my illness symptoms present themselves.

Obviously lives in a room without a mirror. 

Read coaches description of this thing. Ooophaa.

[SVPete]

Why was Star Moron KT2000 talking about DU members that way?

Star Member malaise (225,769 posts)

4. I heard one of them saying that Biden is on a movie set and Trump is still president

There are way too many people who are mentally ill with no real care

  There are Trump voters in Jamaica? mal needs to remeber where she lives when making up - s, .

[DLR Pyro]

Star Member malaise (225,769 posts)

4. I heard one of them saying that Biden is on a movie set and Trump is still president

ah, shades of the great fake moon shot movie Capricorn One.

so far the count is one conspiracy theory saying that Trump is still President living in a xiden latex body suit, and now we have another theory saying that xiden is being shown on a movie set of the White House while Trump is really calling the shots. 

How, then do they explain the volumes of bullshit EO's that have sent this Country swirling down the bowl to 3rd world status?  Are they saying that undercover President Trump agrees with this wanton destruction of Americia via EO?

[Kc25]

Who REALLY believes that Biden is on a stage and that Trump is really still President.

The only place I have ever heard such things are on DU.

I know they're gullible, but... is there someone trolling the whole left that hard?