Failing the vulnerable
Not What I Expected My First Post To Be
I have not been blogging for the last couple of years. New projects have kept me busy and I grew tired of documenting repetitive trends. I wanted to code for a while, I needed my box.
It’s been nice. Lately though I have been more involved in various ‘get more women into STEM’ initiatives and have thought about starting to blog more on the subject of women in tech. But I desire collaboration and am interested in how this platform progresses. I’ve been waiting for inspiration to hit and always assumed it would be related to women in tech or coding, as I imagine the majority of my posts will be. The fates have something else in store — something political.
Another school shooting, well ‘almost school shooting’, is filling the USA news cycle. Another kid gone bad, another chance for us to shake our heads and wonder what caused this guy to snap. A quick read of the latest news indicates that he was diagnosed with bipolar and ADD. He had been on medication but his Medicaid expired and he could not afford the prescription.
As someone who has the same diagnosis (bipolar with co-morbid ADD), I can honestly say I’m not surprised. I can’t say that I completely understand because I’m not the angry or violent bipolar type. I’m the 10 feet tall and bulletproof, party like a rock star type. Not that there are only two types, but this post is not about that.
What I can understand, what I have personal experience with, is what it feels like to lose my mind. Not in an ‘oh I went a little crazy from stress’ way. No. I’m talking about proper, balls out, memory erasing mental breakdowns during which I have engaged in behavior so antithetical to who I am and what I believe that you would think I had a split personality. I’m talking about hearing voices, seeing things that don’t exist, debilitating paranoia. There’s a reason bipolar has, by far, the highest suicide rate of all mental illness. Bipolar. does. not. play.
This poor kid. I can’t begin to tell you what was going on in his head. If he was having a severe episode then his thoughts would be unimaginable to you (unless you are bipolar). There’s no way to describe what it is like. There are no words. Even if there were, there’s not enough in memory to build a coherent narrative.
I’m intelligent, I have plenty of financial resources and I’m not ashamed of my disease. I am high functioning. Very few people who know me would ever guess that I am bipolar/ADD. But don’t let that fool you. This is not a disease that goes into remission.
I mentor newly diagnosed people. I’m active in the community. I’ve seen what happens when people stop therapy (medication or otherwise) and it is never, never pretty. This will surprise roughly zero people who know anything about bipolar.
And for all those reasons — the State of Georgia Medicaid team (or whoever was responsible for this guys Medicaid) should be ashamed for failing this clearly mentally ill young man and for putting all those innocent kids in harms way.They failed in their duty to protect him and those around him. What a colossal cock-up.
Not only that, but they have saddled the bipolar community with yet another ‘violent’ case to overcome. Very, very few of us are violent, yet a majority of people think we are. So thanks for making it that much harder to educate. Is it too much to ask that people with major illnesses get the therapy they need? And if we, as a society, fail to care for them who gets the blame when the inevitable happens?
We do. You and I and all the other politically apathetic people. We, who do not speak out against the anti-poverty, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, far right manifesto which denies medical care to the most vulnerable. I need to be less apathetic, a lot of us do. This is our fault.
