To recap, you may wish to freshen your memory, so here's the summary block. with links:
Earlier we covered opposition, in-general, to group homes in Aspen Hill, Maryland; later, we opposition to "scattered site housing" for persons with psychiatric disabilities.
We covered, minimally, an abortive effort to close down one such group home. We covered some background on psychiatric disability and "moral incapacity", and we covered the mysterious phenomenon of people with no known official background pretending to be officials and giving newcomers the "welcome wagon walking-tour of weirdos and wackos" in Aspen Hill. We cover PROFIT as a motive for clandestinely organizing neighbors to the cause of evicting these group homes and their residents.
We also covered the basic elements of where to recruit henchmen and minions, and we covered the strategic and tactical niceties of destroying these group homes and their residents so as to acquire the properties on the cheap to turn them into worker-barracks and flophouses for illegal alien workers, and explored the causes and effects of the housing bubble and consequent crash of the economy.
Well, I really wasn't kidding.
Recent economic changes -- generally summarized as "global economic meltdown" -- have pretty much pulled the profit motive out from under the various loose associations of people who found themselves operating more or less as strange bedfellows, as the old saying goes. Let me detail who some of these groups are known to be, and later I will give some theories as to who some of these other groups might reasonably be thought to be. Later in the series, I will also give theories that may seem unreasonable, but then again, the reasoning (and reasons) of criminals and mentally-unbalanced individuals and groups may reasonably be expected to be unreasonable.
First, there is a move afoot in the Maryland Assembly to make it very difficult indeed to evade paying taxes by intentionally misclassifying employees as contractors. This increases the costs of doing construction, as well as assuring that the public coffers get more of what is needed to finance the public sector. But now for some exposition in logic:
With the collapse of the housing bubble and associated financial institutions and methods, we see that there is extreme slowdown in the Construction Industry.
With the slowdown of the Construction Industry, there is almost no need to hire new workers or temporary labor.
With the lack of need to hire either full-time workers or temporary workers, there is almost no hiring of day-laborers.
With almost no hiring of day-laborers, and with "contractors" getting far less work (or none at all), day-laborers and contractors who have crowded together in what amounts to "worker barracks" are finding it impossible to pay the rents. We have been hearing that as many as 12 to 20 workers may be each paying $500.00 per month to live in the basements of any such "worker barracks" house, meaning that the income cash stream to the owner of such facilities could range from $6,000.00 to $10,000.00 per month. That's more than enough to pay the note on the house. That could also pay the note on a shiny new car, or a shiny new truck, or a shiny new set of tools, or a bunch of shady new friends who can make sure that it's your workers who get hired, or a bunch of shady new friends who can make bad things happen to anyone who doesn't like you renting out your basement to 12 to 20 workers.
In summary, with the housing bubble and the Construction Industry in economic collapse, the people who were in the business of buying and maintaining worker-barracks for "contractors" and "day-laborers" are going out of business at a record pace, most commonly falling into foreclosure, and frequently finding their car repossessed as they fall into bankruptcy. And also, sadly, they can no longer afford the services of their hired muscle and bodyguards and errand boys, and goons.
They also can't afford to pay for the services of the people who made sure that there was no work for people with psychiatric disabilities. (Prior to the Invasion the vast majority of day-laborers were people with psychiatric disabilities seeking to supplement their meager Social Security disability incomes, and they represented competition to the foreign day-laborers who paid $500.00/month to live in the crowded basements of profiteering modern slumlords.)
Such people may -- or may not -- have been local-government workers or people associated with "ACT" (or "Assertive Community Treatment"), a special group attached to the Montgomery County "Core Service Agency" that has offices at 751 Twinbrook Parkway in Rockville, Maryland, just across Rock Creek from Aspen Hill, and doubtless has offices elsewhere.
From a County webpage giving some detail on "ACT":
Potential ACT clients have demonstrated a limited ability to comply with recommended medication regimes and office-based mental health treatment.
To address these difficulties, the ACT multidisciplinary staff provides treatment, case management, and support services to clients to assist them in successful community living.
ACT services delivery take place in community locations, including but not limited to the client's residence, neighborhood, place of employment or recreation, a shelter, jail, hospital or other location as deemed appropriate.
Now, this seems reasonable enough. Almost any given member of the general public has encountered someone, frequently homeless, who is clearly not in their right mind. Often you may see such people railing to themselves, not caring who hears them. The general assumption is that the person has failed to take their medication and that the monologue is nothing but the symptom of their disorder.
Yet it's worth pointing out here that if you took the most sane person you know, and robbed them, that sane person would likely be railing as much as any madman. If you took the sanest person you know, and kicked them to the curb for walking into a store, that sane person would likely be railing as much as any madman.
So, how does the sane person differ from the madman? Often, it has to do with records. If someone complains to the police that they've been robbed, the police will investigate it. They may find enough evidence to make a case, or they may not, but generally they will be able to determine whether or not a crime took place. Of course, the more experienced the criminal, the more subtle the crime. Almost nobody ever robs who has learned how to pick pockets. It's exceptionally difficult indeed for police to tell immediately whether or not someone had their pocket picked, or whether or not someone left their wallet somewhere; and pickpockets are most frequently caught because police have reason to believe that a certain area is a hunting-ground for pickpockets, and they catch them with surveillance, generally on film or video. Yet that rarely recovers the previous victim's wallet or money. As far as the law is concerned, someone reported a missing wallet, and all they can do is wait to see if there are a lot of complaints about missing wallets. They can do almost nothing on the basis of the individual complaint; the reasonable belief that there are pickpockets about is based on statistics, on prevalence of reporting.
If one person, and then another -- and then many more -- report missing wallets, the police start looking for pickpockets.
If one person, time after time after time, reports that their wallet is missing, the police start looking at that individual as if they are incompetent, at least as regards remembering where their wallet is.
Looking at the records, repeated instance of one class of event on the part of one individual, more or less, label an individual as mad. Repeated instances of an event spread out over a large number of people labels the event as likely one particular instance in a series of crimes.
But what happens if the pickpocket isn't in it for the money as much as they are in it to harass the individual?
Generally speaking, the police wouldn't consider such a possibility. Pickpockets pick pockets because they want what's in the wallet. Anything else is crazy.
But what if what the pickpocket wants is not so much what is inside the wallet, but what will be up for grabs if their target becomes discredited as insane in the eyes of law-enforcement?
Long long ago, I was talking to a fellow who was just awfully streetwise. I forget the exact topic, but something I said caused him to ask me, "are you sure you're not just being gaslighted". I told him I didn't understand, and he said "you know, like in that movie 'Gaslight'". I told him I'd never seen that movie. He told me I was culturally deprived. Eventually I did see the movie. And I discovered that I was, in fact, culturally deprived. If you haven't seen that movie either, you are culturally deprived.
"Gaslight" is the name of a movie so famous that a plot device from the film has entered the mainstream of the English language as a verb, to Gaslight, or a noun form of the verb, "gaslighting".
The mainstream definition is, more or less, "cutting someone adrift from reality by systematically withholding factual information from, and/or providing false information to, the subject".
In effect, this is systematic deception with an intended result of delusion.
Believe it or not, I've been delusional, but in my case, it was less a case of Gaslighting and more a case of misdiagnosis and mis-medication. Adult-onset hypothyroidism often presents as one or another variety of Depression and often has features of manic. As the thyroid fails, in whole or in part, sometimes it produces more of the hormones that regulate metabolic energy. A person can feel like they've been sedated, and minutes later can feel as if they've been given a strong stimulant. This isn't good for the body or for the brain. Always, some degree of confusion results.
In the modern day this is well-known and thyroid testing is part of the diagnosic tree (differential diagnosis). At the time, it wasn't part of the differential diagnosis in most places. It certainly wasn't part of the diagnosis at a contractor to Montgomery County's public health services.
Without testing, I was placed on dangerous psychiatric medications which did nothing at all about my thyroid problem. Mental deterioration was slow but deeply ongoing for a bit more than a decade.
Eventually, I got around to taking a test of thyroid levels, and my new doctors prescribed increasing doses of thyroid medication. I felt so much better immediately, and my mind became more active. I stopped sleeping all day and most of the night, and my appetite changed as did my choices in food and drink, and when I stopped taking the medication prescribed by Montgomery County's contractors, the improvement was even more marked.
A potentially totally disabling mis-diagnosis and gross mis-medication by contractors to Montgomery County's healthcare agencies was not merely halted before my mind and health were utterly destroyed. Due to neuroplasticity ("plasticity of the brain" I am much recovered.
And if I find out that elements of Montgomery County's healthcare system -- possibly "ACT" or people formerly associated with it -- are pursuing me around the county, gaslighting random people into trying to force me to start taking their misdiagnosed poison again, god damn will there be some litigation.
I am rather fully recovered. As to being delusional due to gross medical malpractice, and as to the degree of my recovery, the US Patent and Trademark Office seems to think that this isn't delusional and in fact I've just pressed out a few stacks of this delusion, and it runs just fine on PCs and Macs.
To reiterate:
"But what if what the pickpocket wants is not so much what is inside the wallet, but what will be up for grabs if their target becomes discredited as insane in the eyes of law-enforcement?"
Now that I feel so much better, and having felt so bad before, I have to concern myself with the wellbeing of other people who might very well have been comparably mistreated or misdiagnosed or victimized by malpractice.
And as for those who were not misdiagnosed and/or who were not victims of medical malpractice? I can and I must feel compassion for them as well.
Letting them get hounded out of their group homes so that unscrupulous people can convert those group homes to cash-generating worker barracks for "contractors" and "day-laborers" doesn't seem, to me, to constitute "compassion".
And so it goes. And here in Montgomery County, I'm sitting here pressing out stacks of a demo disk of my patented delusion that runs just fine on PCs and Macs, and perhaps I'll be re-reading Breakfast of Champions.
And so it goes, indeed. Compassion is getting hard to afford, nowadays, what with the economy in collapse, day-laborers unemployable, despicable landlords being foreclosed upon because the day-laborers can't bring them a cash-flow of $6000 to $10000 per house per month, and perhaps those despicable landlords can't afford to pay goons to hound the crazies our of the neighborhood so they can buy up their group-homes for a song to convert to money-making worker barracks for day-laborers.
I just can't muster any compassion for those despicable landlords, and can't for a second understand how Montgomery County and the State of Maryland and perhaps even the Federal government are thinking about forestalling the richly-deserved foreclosures of those despicable landlords.
And as for the out-of-work goons who are still running around gaslighting the merchants into hounding the crazies because, well, it makes them grin to lie to people and tell them crazy stories?
We'll see.
By the way, there's someone who will probably never read this, and last Thursday I was standing right behind them at the Beiler's Meats stand at the Amish Market in Burtonsville and I listened to everything you had to say. I saw how you flashed some bogus ID at the little gal behind the counter who probably doesn't know whether or not to believe the piece of plastic you showed her, but like I said, I heard everything you had to say. And you have definitely earned a special place in my heart, and your face has a special place in my memory, black as your heart, sharp as your teeth, hideous as your sin.
I wonder how the local "crazies" will feel when I tell them all about you and give them a copy of your photograph. And perhaps their own sad state of affairs will become, for them, a little more clear.
It's all about compassion baybee. You need to have some to get any.
MORE TO COME... whenever.
2 comments:
Hardman confides:
“Believe it or not, I've been delusional …”
Hey, me too. Most notably in January 1996, when I experienced manic psychosis during my freshman year of college. I became nearly incoherent with racing thoughts/ideation, pressured speech, etc. and wrote all kinds of things on the wall flyers in the dormitory hallways, like the beginning verses to “The Game” by Echo & the Bunnymen. And then when I was seeing halos and turning paranoid I took off down a deserted rural road in the middle of the night and found a house with a tiny kitchen illuminated by a spectral television set where I hallucinated God’s presence.
Later, before the Risperidone kicked in and the fun ended, I remember watching Superbowl XXX in the ward day room with this schiz guy named David where we tried to use our “ESP” to get “our” respective teams to win. I also remember believing that I was using my new “powers” to pacify the infants crying through the wall in the neonatal ward.
Not surprisingly I didn’t touch many controlled substances in college; my own brain was twitchy enough with faulty chemistry and loose wiring.
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The thing people don’t realize about going off the deep end and becoming delusional is that once it happens to you, you pretty much know what to look for when/if it starts to happen again. (Kind of like in that schmaltzy movie about the mathematician John Nash where he imagines some grand conspiracy but then uses his powers of reasoning to recognize whenever the psychotic thoughts / hallucinations return.)
I have bipolar disorder, not schizophrenia. Lucky for me, my mania tends to be the euphoric take-over-the-world-via-a-charm-offensive variety, not the rage-a-holic you-will-submit-to-me variety.
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Ah, speaking of sweet giddy psychotropic euphoria, here’s another eighties flashback, one that you can bop around to:
“Fine Time” by New Order (Technique LP, 1989)
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Oh yeah, and Vonnegut rocks.
Don't feel bad about falling into bipolar disorder; a lot of people have done it, including Doug Duncan, former County Executor for our lovely Montgomery County. Variations on depression and related disorders are very common, and one out of five Americans will at some time in their life suffer from debilitating mental illness.
The film "A Beautiful Mind", more or less the story of Professor John Forbes Nash, Jr interestingly departs from the history that Dr Nash himself relates. In the film, his recovery is credited to the new generation of atypical antipsychotics; Professor Nash himself states that it wasn't until he was older and stabilized that he stopped taking medications and was able to fight his way back to normalcy.
My own experience wasn't quite like your own, and basically I was all over the map. Some would say that one of the key indicators that a thyroid malfunction -- one occurring at an age typical of adult-onset schizophrenia -- isn't actually schizophrenia or other disorders that have onset at about the same age, is that the other disorders tend to stick pretty closely to the diagnostic criteria published in the DSM-IV , the disorders resulting from malfunctioning endocrine glands often present as a whole slew of disorders, often presenting as one spectrum of disorder one week, and another spectrum of disorder the next week.
No hallucinations, no voices, nothing like that. I just felt cold all of the time, like all of the energy had been drained out of me, and I got slower and slower in my reflexes.
It felt like the life was being totally drained out of me, like a victim in one of those old horror movies.
And let's just say that the misdiagnosis by the quacks contracted by the County wasn't helping me any; as my brain and other organs started to suffer damage, and they kept offering sedatives to someone who clearly was already suffering from energy loss and slowness.
It only got worse.
Finally someone -- in another part of the country -- tested my thyroid, and
once on support therapy for a glandular disorder, recovery began and has
continued since.
It should be a Federal offense resulting in instant loss of license for
anyone to prescribe and/or administer any psychotropic medication without
first ascertaining whether or not there is a thyroid problem, and treating
that first before anything else is done.
I wouldn't want anyone else to suffer as I have at the hands of the lowest
bidder to a government contract.
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