Why Should I Pay for Other People's "Mental Health" Care?

[house_pundit]

Why should my tax dollars and the social security system pay for people with so-called mental health problems to lay on a couch and whine and lay on their fat asses collecting a Social Security Disability check on my dime, drinking beer, and watching Oprah

Comments

[unixronin]

Humanity is not stamped cookies. Humanity is not one-size-fits-all.

Humanity is the engineer and the bricklayer; the physicist and the nurse; the test pilot and the grocery aisle stocker. It is the precise yet abstracted mathematician, and the half-mad poet who creates painful beauty in between drunken binges. It is the running back who doesn't make All-Star, and the structural engineer who figures out how to build a tower half a mile tall that won't fall down. It is the gruff farmer who speaks in measured monosyllables, and the gregarious bartender who has a joke for everyone who walks into the bar, and the demagogue who loves nothing else quite so much as the sound of his own voice. And it is the neurotypical, the bipolar, the aspie, the compulsive, and the paranoid.

Package deal. You get the lot. Take it, or leave it. No refunds.

[wyrdling]

it seems like strong talents require a rewiring of the brain that removes one from the baseline in both positive and negative directions. maybe we are only capable of so much... i'm not sure.
i know i'm lucky in that i've built up a whole lot of coping mechanisms over the years that allow me to "get along" at the least... and to learn to pick social circles where my "quirks" are well tolerated.

[mrmeval]

I'm for letting them die if they can't cope. Too many who should die don't due to government handouts. And I suspect we'd be surprised at how many figure out how to work and stuff food in their face if there is no hand out.

[wyrdling]

or get shot in the street by the cops because they cut themselves up and ran at the cops with the knife still in their hands.
happened last week on my way to work.

[arasirsul]

Mostly from the useless trivia department:

I'm not so sure it's fair to claim that Baroness Lovelace came from a bipolar family-- while her father (who certainly fits into that "arts" category, being the Lord Byron folks have to read about in English class) very likely was bipolar, she never really knew him, since he'd abandoned the family and headed off to the continent to follow his muse (and avoid places where homosexuality was heavily persecuted... his muses weren't solely female) when she was about a month old; the family she grew up with was, as far as we know, fairly stable, as was the family she married into.

Biologically, you're absolutely right, but it does beg an interesting question of what happens if Lord Byron had medical care for his affliction-- with a father figure in her life, does she grow up to be more like what society expects of her, spending less time on mathematics and more time on traditional "girly" things? Does someone else wind up being credited as the first software engineer because of it?