Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion National Dialogue Hurting Or Helping?

You have to be able to defend yourself from the roaming well-armed war bands or they will forcibly take all of your food, occupy your house, and marry your daughters.

Indeed. She did this because she's a prepper, and the line between "prepper" and "paranoid delusional" is fuzzy at best.

So in this case, another hypothesis could be that access to mental health services was not available to this kid, but not because of money... but because his illness was shared by his mom to some degree, who may not have seen it as an illness at all.

And then there's the other, more common reason why people don't seek mental health services: social stigma.

Our society has been engineered so that if someone doesn't voluntarily seek help, and have the means to pay, the alternative access point is prison.

I have water in the basement, and we're trying to get the house insulated better. There are not a lot of threats where we live, but I was in an ice-storm once, where the difference between having decent insulation a camp stove, and some water on hand, and not having it was the difference between noticing how beautiful the ice was, and how long the power was out for!

But now I think I won't tell anyone about the water

I find the coverage to be incredibly unpleasant in a number of ways, and it scares me

Hi everyone - I know it can be difficult to discuss this issue in a matter related to gifted education, but please keep the topic on education or social/emotional issues. Otherwise, I will have to remove posts or lock the thread.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Mark

Does Public Discourse Help ?
People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. . . 'The source of public opinion?' said Claude Slagenhop in a radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind.' -Atlas Shrugged

will it lead to better mental health policies ?
I think they've been saying this about politics lately, politicians don't create wealth, you can't legislate us off the fiscal cliff. Similarly, You can't legislate better screening and treatment than what there is. You can fund research or research better treatments. I love the Buddhist quote, "may any merit earned by my karma relieve the sufferings of all sentient beings."

huh, related to giftedness. . .
possibly existential depression? Mass murder is suicide.

i guess it's less of a gifted issue than a current events issue
with traumatized feelings, fear, and puzzling

Ths thread started out as a gifted issue - how the misperceptions and sometimes downright irresponsible reporting could possibly affect our gifted children who often appear odd to the rest of the world in which they navigate. I quit posting a while ago when it wandered off into myriad speculations and assumptions.

I'm with ABQMom. Originally I started to read/post because I was so upset about the media betrayal and throwing around terms like "highly gifted" and "socially awkward". Once when my DD was about 5 someone told me very matter-of-factly, like she was trying to help me, that my DD would be more likely to develop mental illness because "brains that work that fast develop problems later on". What a thing for a mom of a bright and active little girl to hear - phew!

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
― Marie Curie

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/opinion/dont-blame-autism-for-newtown.html?_r=0

"This country needs to develop a better understanding of the complexities of various conditions and respect for the profound individuality of its children. We need to emphasize that being introverted doesn’t mean one has a developmental disorder, that a developmental disorder is not the same thing as a mental illness, and that most mental illnesses do not increase a person’s tendency toward outward-directed violence."

I came in tonight to ask whether anybody thought things had just gotten a little easier or a whole lot harder for those of us with AS children, and here was this thread already! Thanks, Lisa.

With all the discussion in the news about Asperger's/Autism and mental health issues, it seems possible that getting help might be easier -- but on the other hand, there just became a lot more stigmatism about it, too. I just don't know.

(Edited to add: LMAO the next morning when I realized I had typed "stigmatism" there. Amazing I didn't combine three words and make it say "stigmatatism". Let's try "stigma", shall we, when not so exhausted?)

I do know that Bill O'Reilly was talking about how he didn't fit into society (shooter, not O'Reilly, though a case could be made either way), and then he called the guy a "weirdo", at which point I changed the channel.

I sympathize with the "I am ...Mom" -- while I've never had anything near as extreme as her experiences, I did say when DS was 4, he's going to grow up to kill us in our sleep someday. I haven't felt that in a long time, but there is still a lot of anger in the kid, and a lot of self-justification, and not enough empathy. It's a long, uphill road.