There are five billion people on this planet. At least one percent have bipolar disorder (the major mental illness I know most about because I have it), more have major depressive disorder, and less have schizophrenia. Many others have personality disorders that make them even more dysfunctional than a major mental illness would because people with one of the personality disorders usually either don't seek treatment at all or resist it if pushed into it.
Out of the millions and millions of people who are nucking futz out there, relatively few are (like me) stable on medication and very, very diligent about staying that way.
Insanity does nothing to reduce your ability to breed. I was going to say nothing to interfere with your gonads, but some mental illnesses make people hypersexual, so if anything you're more likely to breed with those.
So yeah, you have a lot of untreated, under-medicated whacktards out there whose friends and neighbors are allowing them to be in charge of children.
What's the sane people's excuse?
Not wanting to get involved or make a fuss--gross irresponsibility.
Personally, I think Russell Yates should have gotten the needle. He was sane, he knew damned well Andrea Yates wasn't, and he still kept having more kids than a sane woman could handle and making her not only raise them but homeschool all of them. The hell with something as easy as the needle, the bastard should've fried. I don't even believe in hell and I think he's gonna burn somewhere, someday.
Sure, okay, it's not her being mentally ill that was the problem. It was her being actively, round-the-bend, unstable, fucking nuts.
Yes, the "mother" who had her kid "rebirthed" to death was both nuts and criminal---whatever society's excuse is/was for leaving kids in the hands of that flake?
Parents with untreated mental illnesses or active personality disorders---that's not just a problem with the parents, it's a societal problem. Greedy people preying on those parents is where the Programs come from. Without screwed up parents, the whole Program industry would dry up and wither away.
Stable mentally ill people aren't the problem. We don't send our kids away to a cross between Miss Minchin's and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest. Stable mentally ill people are a whole lot like sane people. Duh. That's what the expensive meds and all the time and money spent on pdoc visits are for. Stable mentally ill people work damned hard to stay that way--and in that, we're paragons of adult responsibility. If we want to actually have lives, we've got no choice.
Are all Program Parents unstable? Do they all have mental illnesses or personality disorders? No, undoubtedly some are just fucktards. But without the unstable parents, there wouldn't be enough of the rest to keep the Program industry running.
We don't have sufficient legal and social safeguards to protect children, and then the resulting teenagers, from unstable parents.
That woman's continuation as a "pediatric nurse" is a case in point. Even if someone doesn't agree she should be in jail, letting her work with kids is damned irresponsible.
But nobody wants to be the big old meanie that tells her she can't have her "chosen career" and will have to work at McDonalds or something while she figures out what to do instead.
How we Americans deal--or don't deal---with unstable parents is the source of all the problems we end up chattering about here on Fornits.
Tragic.
Julie
