Anti-Group-Home Opposition Rises Again in Aspen Hill? (Part IV)

Earlier we covered the general movement in opposition to any increase in the number of rental properties in Aspen Hill, and then we covered the opposition to "scattered site housing" -- on the taxpayer's tab -- in Aspen Hill for disabled persons. Finally we covered, minimally, an abortive effort by some members of the local civic association to close down one of those group houses.

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There are many kinds of mental illness, and all are increasingly prevalent in modern societies. Part of this is due to fairly obvious causes, ranging from destitution or overcrowding to drug-abuse or even inbreeding. Some causes are less obvious, indeed arguable, as in the case of the increasing prevalence of autistic disorders. Some forms of mental illness can be temporarily incapacitating or permanently disabling.

Yet there is an entire spectrum of mental illness -- personality disorders -- which are very unlikely indeed to disable or incapacitate, though they may indeed result in incarceration. Such disorders as borderline personality disorder, or narcissistic personality disorder are less incapacitating than schizophrenia, but are far more common. For example, borderline personality disorder affects as many as 2 percent of all Americans, and is one of the most common mental disorders of young women. The truly worrisome personality disorder, of course, is that of the sociopath (antisocial personality disorder), but fortunately for most of us, they do not long remain unimprisoned.

This may be an unfortunate truth. Perhaps the majority of serious criminals are mentally ill, but theirs is a disorder generally not controllable by medication. As a rule, the tendency to attempt to dominate or to victimize is countered by society's willingness to jail offenders. Yet society often has an expectation that for the poor, their formative environment in some way excuses their personality disorder. The poor prey on each other, or so goes this school of thought, and the middle class therefor -- to say nothing of the rich -- are thus inherently immune to this taint of criminality. One need only look at the $50-billion Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff, or at the management of Enron, to see that wealth is no guarantee of saintliness. One need only look at the careers of Mother Theresa or Mohatma Ghandi to see that poverty is no guarantee of criminality.

Yet sensationalistic media have associated mental illness with vicious criminality in the mind of the general public, and nobody is more likely to try to exploit that than the people with Borderline, or Antisocial Personality Disorders.

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Sociopaths are almost always looking for victims; they see it as their right. Frequently glib and charming, at least superficially, the more successful ones are very manipulative and they know what they want, and frequently know how to get others to get it for them. Few things annoy them more than someone else who has more than they have and got it for less, in the perceptions of the sociopath. That other people fairly quickly come to see them as they are, and thereafter don't do anything other than ignore or thwart them, doesn't sit well with them. Yet many mental illnesses are most devastating to the afflicted through their reduction of capacity to understand the thought processes of others. Severely mentally ill persons are often no less devoid of insight into the deficiencies of others than they are devoid of insight into their own affliction; they may lack Social Cognition. Such persons are the natural victims of sociopaths, and people with histrionic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder are the natural cheerleaders and enablers of the sociopaths, until the sociopaths turn on them as well.

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There is no law that a sociopath won't break, if they are reasonably certain that they won't personally suffer when caught. Most who have managed to remain unconvicted of felony by the time they are adults have learned very well how to get away with quite a lot of dirty tricks. Part of getting away with dirty tricks is picking your victim, and avoiding potential allies or defenders of your victims. But how to make it profitable? Sociopaths that develop a clientele for their dirty tricks are those who succeed in life, at any scale from the heights of Wall Street investment firms -- tranches of mortgage-backed securities, anyone? -- to the depths of the guy you call when you want someone's tires flattened.

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In modern life, sociopaths are frequently successful in business, for some definitions of "success". They're the sort of people who get rich undercutting everyone else because they are so unscrupulous as to totally ignore the laws against hiring cut-rate illegal alien workers. That's okay, many of those cut-rate workers got where they are because there's no law they won't break so long as it profits them; they too are sociopaths. That the approximately four percent of the population that fit the diagnostic criteria are apparently concentrated geographically in Aspen Hill should come as no surprise. The cost-of-living here is all that's affordable for both the worker and employer sociopaths operating in the generally-acceptable industry most profitable to them.

Doing the Math: Even without concentration effects, if four percent of the population at-large is antisocial/sociopathic, about two percent each are histrionic or borderline disordered personalities, the roughly one-half to one percent of schizophrenics are outnumbered by 8 to 1 by people who can think better than them and have little or no remorse, compassion, or other high-level human social emotion.

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Schizophrenia is believed to be caused by spontaneously occurring mutations which are unfortunately heritable, acting in concert with unknown environmental or developmental factors. There's nobody to blame, really, "it just happens". Autism also "just happens", as far as anyone can prove, though that spectrum of disorders also seems to have genetic origins.

According to the US Census Bureau's 2005-2007 Community Survey of Aspen Hill, Maryland, although the US average percentage of population over age 5 that is disabled is 15.1%, Aspen Hill has about one-third less disabled persons, with only 10.4% of the population classified as disabled. For all of Montgomery County, Maryland the figure is only 9.8 percent. Potomac, Maryland has a rather lower percentage of disabled at 8.2%, but on examining the percentage of persons 16-64 who were disabled, it's only 4.6%, compared to Aspen Hill's 7.4%. Aspen Hill, of course, is far more "affordable" than is Potomac.

Out of the Census's estimated 17,520 households (2005), the 1999 MNCPPC study on Affordable Housing in Montgomery, there were 980 units of housing classified as "family assisted housing". Also according to Census that 10.4% of the population considered "disabled" amounts to some 4,879 persons.

Even assuming, thus, that the County has added an additional 1020 units to the 980 units extant in 1999 -- hardly a reasonable assumption -- to total 2000 units, and further unreasonably assuming that 1000 units are scattered-site units converted from single-family detached residential zoned freestanding homes, that's still 4 disabled persons per unit. That would amount to 1000 houses with disabled persons. By altering the numbers to cover only those disabled persons between 16 and 64 years of age (2492 of them), you'd only need 500 homes to have a density of 4 disabled persons per house. Of course, using the figure of 10 percent of all disabled persons are mentally disabled (which I just made up), you'd only need 50 homes with a density of 4 per house.

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You'd think that there would be enough housing to go around, for the mentally disabled, wouldn't you? But there's not.

Most people who have been homeless for any extended length of time can qualify as mentally-ill by most reasonable standards. Depression is almost guaranteed, but it's actually a functional depression in most cases. Remove the cause of the depression and the depression itself goes away. Yet living on the streets is almost certain to induce paranoia, and paranoia isn't an emotional response; it's a way of looking at things. A certain amount of unscrupulousness tends to emerge as well, after enough time on the streets; having to fight for every last scrap of food or for a fairly secure campsite will tend to promote that outlook as much as it promotes paranoia. Yet most of these will go away -- mostly -- when the person is taken off of the streets and placed into housing.

One thing that does not much go away, in all too many cases, is vindictiveness... but here we're discussing the psychological responses to homelessness in otherwise mentally non-disabled people.

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The vindictiveness of sociopaths is endless, and in people who have made a career of not getting caught at dirty tricks while honing their repertoire of said dirty tricks, vindictiveness can take frightful -- or relentlessly petty -- turns. Sociopaths, you will recall, regard anything they want as theirs by right; they just have to figure out how to evade or remove any obstacles such as police, credit checks, employment histories, or people who are breathing their air or taking up space that they covet.

If the best way to obtain a space that they covet is by seeking out people with Histrionic Personality Disorder and enlisting them to help trumpet their cause, that's what they'll do. If the best way to get people to stop breathing their air is to rile up all of the Borderline disorder personalities they can find, to act as the cats-paw to pull their chestnuts out of the fire (as the classic fable tells), that will work fine and they themselves don't get burnt.

If they can set it up so that they get paid for doing this, so much the better.

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TO BE CONTINUED

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