The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I am sometimes reminded of how bad life can get.
My dad's cousin has a 14 year old grandson, that he wants to bring on their annual fishing trip.
Turns out the boy is a furry (hearing my dad describe it without the word or understanding of what a furry is was entertaining), but this was the least bad thing. The boy was recently arrested for molesting his younger ten year old brother. His younger brother lives with his mom (who is apparently a prostitute). His dad remarried and has a younger daughter, he has threatened to molest his step sister too if he moves in with his dad. The boy can't be placed in foster care because he is a danger to other children. It's looking like the main option might be juvi.
A few weeks ago I got about 60% of the way through writing an effort post on "some people I have known," and it just got too long and convoluted... but this seems like a place to tell one of those stories.
I have some neighbors with a 12 year old daughter and a couple younger sons. Beginning when the daughter was 4 or 5, she would leave the house and come knock on neighbor's doors (including mine)--when the door was opened, she would walk right in and ask for something to eat, or invite adults to come play with her, or start rummaging through people's belongings. Sometimes she would ask if she could live with them. Refusal was met with pouting, bargaining, and sometimes screaming fits. Some neighbors would call the mother, some would call the police, depending on their level of integration into the neighborhood community; you would not guess from looking at this girl, or speaking with her, that she has any particular mental disability or whatever. Within a couple of months (during which time they made various attempts at education and discipline and other behavior-modification) my neighbors installed deadbolts on all exterior doors that had to be unlocked with a key from either side. Apparently nothing short of literally locking their daughter into the house could prevent this behavior.
This became particularly apparent when they sent her to school, as she would simply leave school any time something happened to upset her--and then resume knocking on the doors of houses that appealed to her. She was placed into one of those "special" classrooms for discipline cases and slow learners. Within a few years she had received an official diagnosis of "oppositional defiant disorder" with a side of "level one autism spectrum disorder." She made some friends and things seemed to be progressing in a good direction.
When the girl was 9 or 10, inspired in part by the girl's progress and by the growth of their younger sons (who were also generally "locked in" as collateral damage, and who wanted the freedom to play outside without being let outside, or let back in), the family removed the key-only deadbolts. Within a year or so (by now the girl was 11), early one morning, the girl let herself out and took a walk. She left our neighborhood; I don't know how far she walked, but she knocked on a stranger's door and asked to live with them, because her parents were sexually abusing her.
Naturally, these people called the cops. What happened next my neighbor would relate to me later--would relate to most of our neighbors, later, as he canvassed the neighborhood sharing information in hopes of preventing another such incident. From his perspective, the story went like this: after realizing his daughter was gone (maybe half an hour after the daughter had slipped away), he called the parents of a couple of her friends. When none of them knew of her location, he took a short walk around the block, looking for her. Finally, he called the police, who informed him that they had his daughter in custody and would be by the house shortly.
When the police arrived, they left his daughter in the cruiser. They arrived with a social worker. They separated him from his wife and interviewed each of them individually, during which time they asked a series of increasingly upsetting questions. Eventually it was revealed to them that their daughter had given an exceedingly graphic description of violent sexual abuse, which she reported she had suffered at the (joint!) hands of her parents. His wife produced documentation from the girl's psychologist, emails from school administrators and teachers, and contact information for neighbors who could corroborate certain events. The authorities glanced over all of this without much comment.
My neighbor said he couldn't imagine how his daughter had even learned about some of the things she'd accused him of (their internet is pretty locked down, and his daughter does not have a cell phone), but he's pretty sure it was just information gleaned from her "friends" (and their smartphones) in the discipline-case classroom. Despite grilling him to a distressing degree, he says the cops didn't find his daughter's story very credible--but as a matter of policy, child abuse allegations are of course taken very seriously even when they are clearly fantastical. When the grilling was done, they brought the daughter into the house--screaming all the while that she hated her family and was in mortal danger--told the parents "good luck" and beat a hasty retreat.
As soon as the cops were gone, the daughter stopped screaming, assumed a totally flat affect, and asked for something to eat. Her parents explained to her that she had put them and her brothers in quite serious danger, and the daughter responded that she didn't intend for anyone to get hurt, but she wished she had a family that was more "fun," and that was all she was trying to accomplish.
That is in broad strokes the story my neighbor told me, stoically, as he provided me with a color printout of his daughter's face on a list of contact information--not just his and his wife's, but also her psychologist, her school resource officer, some nearby family members. He apologized for the imposition but asked me to please call whoever I felt most comfortable calling, if his daughter ever showed up at my door or even if I just saw her wandering around unattended.
I've known children prone to fits and outbursts, prone to theft and prevarication, prone even to inexplicable physical violence. But this particular girl strikes me as exactly the kind of straight-up "psychopath" that academic psychologists have been reluctant to recognize as such. If her parents hadn't been meticulously documenting this girl's behavior for years, would they still have custody of their children? Might one or both of them be in prison, right now? And looking forward to her teenage years, assuming she continues to harbor this peculiar impulse to get away from her family, what actions might she take? At the extreme end, maybe she just kills her parents, but in lesser tragedies she might run further away than the next neighborhood over; she might very easily be lured into running away with a predator; at best I suspect she will continue to internalize the negative influences of her discipline-case peers and fall into drug use or theft or other anti-social behaviors. She's not mentally disabled; with daily supervision she could probably live a normal-ish life, but only if she could be persuaded to accept such supervision in the long term, and only if someone is willing and able to provide that supervision. Today, that's her parents, but even if she remains with them well into adulthood, she should outlive them by decades.
Cases like this are not common, I think, but similar situations ("on the same spectrum" we might say) are common enough that they capture something really challenging about living in a society. Low information, low intellect, low agency people exist in dizzying array. Their lives would generally be better if they were supervised. Some of the worst off do get such supervision; if they aren't born into attentive families, group homes and halfway houses and the like also exist. But in our relentless pursuit of dignity and autonomy and equality for all, we have made it all but politically impossible to act on the idea that a meaningful percentage of our population would genuinely be much better off if their lives were managed by someone else. Because the difficult question is always--who?
Frankly if you don't know a couple different animals wearing human skin that should be put down, you probably don't know enough about people.
Who can really solve this problem? Many of these psychopaths figure out ways to fit in the crevices of society where the state can't or won't get to them. Ticking time bombs.
I'm all for giving kids a fair shake, but once you get into the double digits IMO I haven't seen a freak like this change their stripes.
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