A 73-year-old Detroit man is behind bars for allegedly attacking a 7-year-old girl with a knife in a city park full of children, slashing her throat in an incident that ended with the child racing home to her mother for help, and the suspect in handcuffs.
“He just like came out of nowhere and just like (pulled) the knife on me,” the girl told Fox 2 News as she sat on a porch step this week with gauze around her neck, explaining how a day at the park with her grandmother turned into a day of horror.
According to the article the man has been having mental health problems. That’s ok though because it seems the wife has been addressing it with the power of Facebook prayer requests. Clearly it’s been working well.
Sarcasm aside, what are people with mental illness but no access to adequate healthcare expected to do? I’m assuming they couldn’t afford medical care but, given that they are in their seventies, living in America, and asking for prayers on Facebook, I think my assumption is correct.
Well, not stab children.
If you haven’t been in a disassociative state, it’s fucking wild. Nothing feels “real” and everything is foggy. It’s like you’re walking through a foggy liminal space and the walls are glass, on the other side is reality, and you can’t get to the other side. You’re lonely, nothing feels right, and you are detached from the world, loved ones, and any positive emotion/connection.
I’m not defending the dude, but I do want to explain that actions get weird/crazy and sometimes you don’t remember if things actually happened or not. You start to feel like a rat in a cage, or slowly give up.
Why can’t mentally unwell people just behave mentally well?
Have you ever tried just not being mentally ill? Someone told me to just not be depressed, which I hadn’t ever thought of!
I get it that it comes off as “just feel better bro” but if society can’t draw the line at “don’t stab children, it’s literally never acceptable, regardless of circumstances” then what’s even the point?
Edit to be clear I took issue with the “what else are they supposed to do?” As if there’s ever a set of mental or external circumstances that normalize what happened. There isn’t.
Society does draw that line. That’s why he was arrested.
Indeed, and there’s no need for excusatory language like “what else could they possibly have done?”
I think you misunderstood. They were literally asking what people in those circumstances can do. I don’t think they’re justifying the actions.
Nobody is saying it’s acceptable just that it’s avoidable, and someone can be apprehended for security and later treated and found not criminally responsible for their actions.
They’re expected to do nothing that bothers or burdens anyone else and then die, as far as I can tell. They can just skip to the last part if they want, as long as it still fulfills the requirements of the first part.