Mod – we know damn well who he meant – kinda like I intuitively know when someone makes an “anti-heeb” remark. Thankfully, they are finding difficulty reproducing and are rapidly dying out. Long live hybrid vigor! (Says the Jew who married a Catholic and produced a historian/linguist, a med student and a nurse practitioner working for the ICRC…top that, racist scum).

[Mod Note; the use of the generic pronoun, “you”, casts a wider net than perhaps you intended. Let’s try to be a little more specific next time]

Anyway – we are trying to get something done, and we sure could use all the help we can get – contact me, please.

My blog is Blue Girl, Red State.

And yes, it’s sad that people rarely understand the help they need, but how much success have you ultimately had in leading them to the path of salvation? All you can do is make the suggestion, and that’s rarely enough. When they hear it enough, maybe. But trying to fulfill the role of therapist to someone you have a personal history with is a bad idea as far as I’m concerned.

Peterr, it is a commonly accepted premise of mental health. People have to want help before they can be helped. Otherwise, you’re just talking passed them. A psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist is a guide. You will always have to do the heavy lifting yourself.

Yes, positive relationships need to occur, but they can not happen until a person obtains some measure of mental health. They have to learn to trust BEFORE they can have a relationship, or that relationship will fail regardless of how trustworthy an individual is. You clearly won’t take my word for it, so go to your library and read some text books. I doubt you’ll accept this from those sources either, though. You want to believe what you want to believe. That doesn’t make you a bad person, it makes you human. It’s extremely rare that people alter their views to accept established facts.

Ah, yes, people have to want to be helped. True, but we also have to be able to recognize when someone is calling out for help. That, too, is what a psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist is trained to do.

For some folks, especially those who have suffered the most severe abuse, they cannot verbalize or even describe their situation. Are they simply to be left to their own devices, even to die, because we could not see that somewhere deep down, they wanted to be helped?

Soullite, I’ve done extensive work in child development, and less extensive work in psychology. I’ve been to the library, read the books, and changed my thinking more than once on countless things. But if you accept that both biology and environment play a role in development, then why not accept that how each of us treats those in need is a part of that environmental influence?

How, pray tell, is a damaged person supposed to obtain “some measure of mental health” if everyone were to take your attitude and write them off?

I met Angela Davis in San Rafael, CA in October, 1968. She had charisma !!

Two years later, San Rafael came back into her life in a very negative way. Supposedly, Timothy Leary’s dentist hid her until she could be smuggled to the east coast.

I was a SF Bay Area Boy until ‘88 . . . Angela was a part of my growing up . . . and the girls and women I knew from ‘68-’88 made sure I knew who she was, and what she fought for.

I was SO fortunate, to hear her speak, with restraint AND conviction, on the CSU Sacramento campus, sometime in ‘91 or so.

The only time I’ve seen her in person.

A force. A pure force. She lived up to everything I had read about her and heard about her. Brillian, articulate, forceful. Compelling. An orator, a change agent.

I bow to her wow.