Relating to Truly Mentally Ill People(Aspies vs. NTs)

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This is a total tangent but...

Yeah, and another problem is the prison system at least in the United States is totally messed up. I understand very much the part about keeping people who have done harm away from people they could hurt, and think that part is utterly and completely essential. But what we have is a system that doesn't work as far as keeping people from re-offending when they get out, in fact it often encourages people to re-offend in various ways from the whole culture of the place. I don't know what to do about that -- people need to be kept apart from people they could hurt, and that much is certain -- but the prison system is a broken solution in itself.

I know several people who have gone there for non-violent offenses and they have told me that even when it's not outwardly physically abusive or neglectful (which it often is in addition), psychologically it's utterly brutal and dehumanizing in a way that encourages people to deaden their minds in a way making them more likely to become hardened criminals in there. And many mental institutions, including ones people get sent to for crimes, are very similar in that regard. I wish I was imaginative enough to know what the better way is, but there has to be some better way of doing things so that these places didn't encourage people already likely to hurt people, to become the sort of person even more likely to go out and hurt people even more when they leave.

And yeah I utterly agree with someone else, that the insanity defense ought not to be used in such a way as to get someone who's just killed someone thrown back into society. I mean... that's not even what it's for. If someone's killing people, then regardless of their state of mind, someone has to make sure they're not given the opportunity to do it again. The same thing happens oddly enough when the victim of the crime is disabled in some way (and then people only realize the mistake in that, once the person seriously injures or kills someone who is not disabled, which is pretty sickening when you think about it). If someone is killing people or even threatening to kill people you have to find some way to keep them from doing it, or doing it more. Regardless of whether it's because they don't have a conscience, because they are really angry, because they have trouble distinguishing reality from imagination, or because they don't even understand what they did... all those things affect how to keep someone from killing other people, but they ought not to affect the part about keeping them away from people who might be victimized by them. Murder is too serious and irreversible to mess around with that way.

Oh I know so. They gravitate to me because I actually listen to what they say and I can follow their train of thought. I love talking to people that are just absolutely bats*** on the bus and around downtown. They know when people are really listening and they really appreciate it. Even when my grandmother was really sick and was senile from fever, we were all visiting and she would just say things and no one could follow what she was trying to say but me. We were actually having a conversation and the rest of my family is just sitting there scratching their heads.

Oh yeah that same thing happens to me, where people feel free to walk up to me and talk to me about their conspiracy ideas and stuff because they know somehow I'm not going to judge them for it.

I didn't even know that was unusual until I was out walking with a friend, and about five people approached us in the space of two hours. She asked me whether this always happened to me, and I asked her, "Well doesn't it happen to everyone?" and she told me it didn't.

With regard to understanding people... I noticed that I also seem to understand people with many forms of dementia fairly well. One thing that bothers me is when I can see the gears turning in their head, so to speak, and they are getting ready to say something, and nobody ever gives them time to do it. And if I step in I get told in very patient, slow language, by some random non-disabled person, that they have dementia, as if I don't understand what that means. But I have found if I take the time to listen long enough, many of them make a lot more sense than they're given credit for.

There is now also brain research showing that people with Alzheimer's retain memory and such longer than they used to be thought to be -- a lot of it is at times a communication or word-retrieval problem. That might be why I can see the gears turning like that. I can also see it in an autistic friend of mine who has trouble retrieving the right words, and people often talk over her when she's waiting to come up with one, or else they seem to not even notice she is talking. It's the weirdest thing, she can be talking in complete sentences and people talk over her, not maliciously, but as if she's not even there or speaking.

And it seems like a lot of people with dementia are trying quite hard to hang onto both thoughts and words, and often need time to do that more than anything, not to just be rushed through everything because other people want them to operate at a faster speed than they can operate at. I can understand this because I often need that time as well.

I used to have an online friend who was autistic. She worked in an Alzheimer's ward specifically because she could relate socially to the people who lived there, better than she could to non-disabled people. She wrote a book about it called In Their Hearts, you can read about it here.

Also, with regards to delirium, it is good that you did that. I was delirious last year from a physical illness and could not type at all, but really appreciated anyone who treated me like a person regardless. One person during that time actually referred to me as having the mind of an infant, right in front of me. I may have been passing out a lot and really confused (enough that I kept trying to yank my catheter out without realizing what I was doing to myself, and enough that my memories of the whole thing are really weird and patchy), but I was still there and still heard that. When capable of appreciating anything, I very much appreciated people who didn't treat me any different from normal, although I was not always with-it enough to understand what was happening. Apparently there's a lot I don't even remember, but I was still a person and I am sure that if I was conscious at those times I would not have liked being treated as if I was somehow not real.

I think people often forget that just because someone doesn't communicate in a standard way, or even is incredibly confused, it doesn't mean they aren't still there. Too often I have seen people with dementia, delirium, or severe communication problems (whether seeming incoherence, or very slow word-finding, or whatever), treated like furniture rather than people. It seems like often things would be better if people just slowed down enough to both understand and be understood.