Public Comment

The U.S. has fully implemented the new 988 national suicide prevention phone line. It works for talk and text. It can be called by anyone experiencing an emotional crisis in which there is a perceived or possible suicide risk. A family member can also call when worried about the wellness of a loved one. Rather than me trying to answer all questions related to this resource, I'm going to give you this link:

https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/988/faqs



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Writing this column has been an especially stabilizing influence for me. In 2012, after my first year of writing it, I was honored with an award for the column by the Alameda County Mental Health Commission. This was especially gratifying. A week later, my father passed away. Within 72 hours of that, I was in a substantial car accident with minor injuries that totaled my Toyota Matrix that family had paid for. 

These were some dark times for me. Not very long before the abovementioned, my special companion cat, Boris, a Russian Blue mix, needed to be put down due to kidney failure. Writing this column helped me endure the hard times. I don't know whether the column was any good at the time, but I wasn't fired from it, so that says something. 

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Paranoid symptoms are more than a headache. If you are paranoid, you might not be able to focus on the genuine threats to life and limb that you must heed. Instead, you're focusing on imaginary threats. How to distinguish? Sometimes this can be accomplished by speaking with people who are not paranoid but who are also not naive. Naivete is not a virtue. But paranoia, its opposite, can be worse. 

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Doing something that you really want to do in life may be a higher priority than doing what you think you "need" to do. Sometimes, real happiness takes precedence over security and/or propriety. On the other hand, if you completely disregard basic needs, basic necessities, and social norms, you won't last long enough to do something fun or meaningful. 

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Medication isn't salvation. It is the unhappy task of ingesting pharmaceuticals that often have adverse effects, and you may need to take them to function and to do basic tasks. Remaining medicated may prevent brain deterioration. And going a long time without medication may have lasting adverse effects. That's what many experts seem to theorize. Theory has it that unchecked schizophrenia has a burnout phase after time, in which the brain barely works and has sustained a lot of structural damage. 

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I'm impressed by the bravery and fortitude of ordinary Americans. Those with whom I've spoken are facing challenging times that seem unprecedented. Yet, people are hanging tough--those that can. And what choice do we have? I find that many people have it a lot harder than I do in their lives. But I'm holding up my end of things as well as I can. Sometimes, things slip by me. But I'm not accepting the concept of being a rodent on a wheel. If something is too hard, I don't try to do it. 

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In a few more months, we are headed for the next holiday season and a midterm election that could determine the fate of humanity. We must be persistent and insistent in the dissemination of real facts and in the rejection of idiocy, stupidity, and hatred. Lies must be extinguished with simple fact. We face the nature of human beings in which the mind works to prove its assumptions, and you can't convince anyone of anything they don't want to believe. Good luck to us all, the fools and the wise people alike. We can't be in a swordfight for dominance of a sinking ship.