A friend had a breakdown

[KT2000]

She had a terrifying, paranoid breakdown. I was witness to her illogical stories, delusions, and hallucinations. I just listened and tried to remain neutral until help could be arranged. It took some time but finally those pieces came together and she spent a month in the mental hospital where she was released with meds and no follow-up. (Now I realize there is really not much help for anyone who is seriously mentally ill unless one meets the standard of "harm to self or others."

Upon release, she visited me to make sure I knew she was not really in a mental hospital but a safe house. She told me the doctor I talked with and all the patients there were really actors and the building is now empty. She was in a state better than being terrified as she was before so upon advice from her doctor I insisted that she really was in a hospital and the doctor and patients were real. Her response was very familiar to me - according to her, I just did not know what was really going on but she did. Eventually, I would find out that she was right. She had supreme confidence in knowing "what was really going on."

I relate this story because her post-hospitalization self is the same as the right-wingers and Q people I have come across. I have seen them take over neighborhood websites with their delusions, dissolve family relationships etc, with the same assurance that they are "in the know" and anyone who disagrees is not. My rather intelligent friend now has a mind that has snapped shut due to mental illness and the RW and Q's have minds that have snapped shut as well, I do believe there is mental illness at work for them too.

[TexasLefty29]

1. Thanks for sharing this story.

I do also believe there is some sort of mass hysteria afoot with this Q and RW thing. Quarantine, the minds of some trigger, idle minds the devils playground.

[Hortensis]

2. Mental illness is a dreadful tragedy. We haven't known for years now where

the schizophrenic daughter of my MIL's best friend is. She had a PhD and was a mother of two, married to a husband in the diplomatic service and in their latest posting in Africa when it first appeared. A vital, brilliant person with the world in her hands, destroyed and transformed into a pathetic...other person.

She probably still contacts her grown children now and then because she wants something from them, but last time we saw her she was refusing all efforts to get her to stop the foreclosure of her wonderful midcentury modern home (it looked over a ravine in a charming coastal California community and had a large wall of books in her specialty) -- because, she explained, she was going to need her car more when she had to live in it.

Mental illness, dementia. I hope we live long enough to see them no longer death sentences for people who once were.

[KT2000]

8. It is so freaking sad

A lawyer in her case said that most of the people in her situation are highly intelligent. That works against them too because they figure out how to keep themselves out of treatment rather quickly. I saw my friend do it.

[Hortensis]

20. We did also. She could seem entirely rational and pleasant

to chat with, but at some point it'd become apparent when she was off her medications and that she was insane. My word, but what that person-destroying illness did to her was beyond tragic.

Have a nice evening.

[lagomorph777]

59. I know someone whose husband was a diplomat at an African post. He broke down and...

...committed suicide.

I wonder whether there's some tropical disease that caused it. She speculated that the multiple vaccinations and anti-malarials they took, could have contributed.

[Hortensis]

61. Big frontier. A friend's son became schizophrenic soon

after after a severe head injury. None in the family otherwise. So far it's apparently up in the air, but some studies suggest trauma could trigger its onset but not be the complete cause.

But apparently more established is viral involvement via infection of brain tissue in the onset of a bunch of mental disorders, including schizophrenia, so that seems very possible.

[Lettuce Be]

3. I'm so sorry you have to go through this -- my nephew has similar issues and it's heartbreaking

He'd never agree to treatment, but yes, our country just does not understand mental illness or how to treat it.

[KT2000]

6. thank you

At this time I am really overwhelmed with sympathy for people who have gone through this with their own family members. I realize now that so many people have gone through so much, the person with illness and their families, but it is almost invisible to the society as a whole. We call it the homeless problem, criminal problem and everything but what it is - mental illness.

We just have to do better than checking the boxes, writing the scripts they won't take, and pushing ill people through the revolving door. I just don't know what.

[malaise]

4. I heard one of them saying that Biden is on a movie set and Trump is still president

There are way too many people who are mentally ill with no real care

[KT2000]

28. OMG

Guess I should expect to see this on Nextdoor soon and people fighting that this is true.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

48. Our regional NextDoor banned all non-local political discussion.

Still a bunch of RWers on there spewing their RW ignorance & hate (cities are he'll holes where the theivery, gunshots, & killing go on 24/7, blah, blah, blah), but at least they can't be praising Trump or bashing Biden on there.

They also banned misinformation about COVID.

[KT2000]

49. I wish ours would

but our town mayor is a Q person and he drove out the normal people on the council and brought in other Q people to serve. They are empowered here.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

51. That's horrific! Those people are delusional and dangerous.

Not that you needed me to tell you that.

[alphafemale]

53. Same with our Nextdoor site.

Although the moderators are slower with the ban hammer on RW nonsense until I call them on it.

It makes for a pleasant place when there are no political arguments.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

50. Hmmm, and Trump is where, doing what, and why can't we see him

doing his presidenting?

[malaise]

52. Ha - I'm sure she has an explanation for his absence

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

55. There's always an "explanation." Just as there's always a new date

for the end of the world when, yet again, the world fails to abruptly end on the most recent, previously predicted date.

[malaise]

56. Nailed it

[barbtries]

5. without a doubt.

I would not be surprised to learn that your friend was swallowed by Qanon.

i don't know if you ever go to Reddit, but there is a thread over there that got me to bookmark it for the first time ever recently.

https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/

Your friend sounds basically exactly like the perpetrators of said casualties. i'm sorry for her and all of her loved ones either way.

I don't understand why she was released if the medication was not helping her.

[KT2000]

7. thank goodness she is not a Q person

She is politically left and one of her rants was about the persecution of the Uyghurs in China.

Best I can figure out is that they said she was taking her medications and she said she no longer heard voices. She is definitely not well. I know we will go through this again.

[wnylib]

22. I'm wondering how old your friend is,

what the diagnosis is, and if this was sudden or if there were other symptoms of breaking with reality before.

I worked with a woman who seemed perfectly normal to me. I was surprised when she said she was bipolar. She said that, before she got meds to stabilize her, she had a couple episodes, but the one that got her hospitalized and on her meds was when she had the delusion that she could fly and climbed out a second story window to stand on a first floor porch roof for a flight takeoff. She was persuaded to come down.

I only knew her after she got on her meds and would never have guessed that she had a problem if she had not mentioned it. Incentive to stay on her meds was getting her son back. Her parents took custody of him until she demonstrated that it was safe to leave him in her care.

[KT2000]

29. I don't know her diagnosis

but I have come to realize some of her behavior I thought was quirky was a minor version of her breakdown, that being fearful. She is older, owned and ran a successful business and did well with other employment. At one time she was very wealthy but it is gone now. The doctor and I agreed that she has likely been successfully managing and covering for many years. I am sure my friend will never take the meds so it is not over.

[wnylib]

35. So sad that she won't take the meds.

I'm not a health care professional, physical or mental, but I hope she got a physical exam with bloodwork when she was hospitalized. Sometimes physical problems can affect mental health. If she is an older woman, a TSH blood test wouldn't hurt. It can tell whether she has a thyroid hormone deficiency or excess. It's not common for a thyroid deficiency or excess to cause the serious mental health problems you described, but it can cause mental instability to the point of irrational thoughts and social withdrawal if it exists undiagnosed for a long time. It's a simple, inexpensive blood test.

[KT2000]

36. Yes - she got blood tests

at the ER. I wish they would have done a scan of her brain though.

[wnylib]

39. Costly, but might not be a bad idea.

I once knew a guy who started acting irrationally and a brain scan revealed a benign tumor. He was back to normal after it was removed.

What you described does not sound like the way that guy acted with his tumor, though, but as I said, I am not a professional and even they wouldn't know just from a second hand description. It must be difficult for you to see a friend go through this.

[KT2000]

10. thanks for the link

there are some frightening stories there. They appear to be embracing an amoral world.

[ShazzieB]

13. A patient can't be kept in a mental health facility involuntarily for more than 72 hours, uness

they are judged to be a "danger" themselves or others. I am not sure how they decide who is a danger and who isn't, but the bar seems to be extremely high, making it very, very difficult to keep someone in treatment once THEY decide that they are done.

One of the paradoxes of health care for mental illness is that people whose illnesses literally render them incapable of making rational decisions are "free" to decide whether to accept treatment or not. In principle, letting a patient participate in treatment decisions sounds quite reasonable. In practice, this means that a lot of people who desperately need treatment for severe mental illness will never get it.

[barbtries]

16. it's not a good time in our history.

we have this vicious virus, 4 years of authoritarian cruelty who commands a cult of personality millions strong, wealth inequality of obscene proportions...we are a sick country.

starting with reagan and accelerated with fox news and right wing radio, and probably abetted by a lot of popular culture.

[BComplex]

54. This is so true, barbtries. Started with Reagan/Gingrich's weaponization of the rightwing, Fox

propaganda and thank-god-deceased rush limbaugh. The Koch brothers and a few others financed the rest of the take-over, and it's been going downhill since then.

[barbtries]

57. that's the timeline as I see it.

when people theorize about deep state and project it onto Democrats, I always remember Hillary's oh-so-true characterization of a "vast right wing conspiracy."

[KT2000]

30. Yes -

I was on standby every Tuesday to testify for involuntary commitment but she always agreed to stay at the last minute. The police and I were witnesses to her behavior that risked her life. That was finally what even got her help. Other encounters with the local mental health and police went nowhere because she was not a danger to herself. They knew she was mentally gone but could do nothing. She had to continue the downward spiral until she was a danger to herself. It all seems so heartless.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

17. Sad what for profit bullshit did to

Long term psych care
Than there's the fact some psydocs don't care and are motivated to admit and discharge as many people as they can..

Long term psych care died when reagan let hmos overtake and he eliminated long term psych care.

The day you have a psych admission they talk about discharge plans..on day one.

I have been to psych hospitals many times in my life. At this point I don't fuck around if my illness symptoms present themselves.

Took me years of therapy to get to this point.

I also go to a psychiatric rehabilitation program or prp.

There are groups,therapy,emergency therapist and other things there along with a community that helps me tremendously.

Maryland still falls short but they have better care for the mentally ill than other states. If I didn't have years of long term care I dunno if I could have ever reached this point in my recovery.

Also dark triad personalities should be kept away from general population psych be they staff or patients. They need seperate care because they endanger other clients safety and sanity.Psychiatry needs to seperate dark triad because they bring nothing but chaos and suffering to psych hospitals or any program they attend.

[MFM008]

21. similar situation here

I was stable on meds for 21 years, they took me off them due to a little panic breakthrough instead of shoring it up.
They pulled my safety net and ive been in free fall since last year, yes, Covid made it worse..... they even tried to put me BACK on my old medication but did it to fast and to high. ( Zoloft 200 mg after 3 days back on?) no I got off it again.
i cant remember how many short stay hospital trips i have made.
A lot of mine is panic/anxiety..bipolar supposedly..
I have super sensitivities to medication.....
I dont have much support and feel pretty badly at this point...

[blue neen]

23. I'm really sorry you're going through this.

I hope they get your medicine cleared up very soon.

[halobeam]

37. I'm sorry you are feeling this way.

You aren't alone. So keep speaking out as you need to!

[Kaleva]

9. I wonder about the mental health of many over at FR.

Some are rational but they are often attacked by those who live in a world of delusion.

[Withywindle]

11. I'm so so sorry about your friend

This is such a horrible illness. I had a friend long ago who had a breakdown like this. She was convinced she was being spied on through her TV, that there was a conspiracy to kill her, and our (tame, harmless) Wiccan coven was doing human sacrifice. She cut off all contact. Her family did intervene after a suicide attempt and she was hospitalized for a while, but never the same when she came out. She won't talk to anyone from that time in her life.

She had that same certainty, that she knew what was really going on and the rest of us were just sheeple who refused to see the truth.

She was such a kind person, and a very promising artist, and all that just...changed.

I hope your friend gets help and is able to accept it - not a given in places with a less fucked up health care system than ours.

[mountain grammy]

12. Thank you for posting this.

Good luck to your friend. I honestly believe the whole trump/Q thing is mental illness, and in America we don't deal with that very well.

I sincerely hope they find the right meds for your friend. It's so frustrating to see this kicked down the road.. I almost voted for Jerry Ford because of Betty Ford speaking out about mental illness and her own addisctions. My god people, we're struggling out here.

[Skittles]

14. the way America treats mental health / addiction issues

it is almost criminal

[halobeam]

38. this.

[Skittles]

40. I watched a Nova documentary on addiction

on Prime, I think

every eye-opening indeed

[Warpy]

15. Extreme paranoia is usually the flip side of grandiose thinking

and you did the right thing in listening without trying to fix her. That's harder to do than you think it is.

Thinking they have some incredibly secret knowledge makes Qbots feel powerful. Then they realize it also makes them a target, that people who are jealous or who want to suppress that secret knowledge are after them. You can't talk them out of this, you'll just become part of the Deep State or worse.

Gradiosity/paranoia has got to be painful and exhausting. Some of these people will numb out with drugs and alcohol. Some will need a lot of help from people around them. And some are lost causes.

Telling them something you know to be horseshit is horseshit doesn't work, any more than telling your friend she's in the hospital and talking to doctors because she's bonkers will. Grandiosity makes them feel great. Paranoia makes them terrified. They just won't let go of the grandiosity without a lot of help.

[KT2000]

31. that makes sense

I think you hit on something. This may sound nutty but I just feel the RW machine is focusing on something in human psychology that hooks people to follow. This discipline has been used successfully in advertising and why not for politics. I saw my friend switch from paranoia to euphoric grandiosity when she quit the idea of people planning to kill her and others putting a hit out on her which in itself is grandiose. She was now working undercover for the FBI and they told her she was the best they had ever seen. Like you say, the paranoia must be exhausting and the grandiosity a high by comparison.

[Warpy]

43. Not only have I worked a lot of psych

my extended family is a hot mess, lots of bipolars on my dad's side and my mother's family was just plain bonkers, even by Irish standards. I've seen this over and over, grandiosity and paranoia, and now I see it with Qbots.

I've always tried to work with the mentally ill instead of against them, enlisting them in solving whatever physical problem put them into the hospital without making them defensive by confronting their delusions head on. It cut way down on the thrown containers of bodily fluids and allowed me to give them some real help.

I'm retired now, so dealing with Qbots will fall to other poor slobs who are still in the trenches.

I hope your friend is stabilized on medication and realizes she needs it if she's to have a reasonable life.

[KT2000]

46. By Irish standards!!!

I am Irish too! We have one bonafide but she calls it bad blood. I call it not being able to manage her money.

[ARPad95]

18. 4 police officers from 3 different jurisdictions opened fire on a 17-year-old BOY who was having a

mental health crisis (the mobile mental health crisis team was at his home prior to the 911 call). The 911 dispatcher described the teen as having access to a gun (turned out to be a BB gun) and threatening suicide-by-cop. Yup, 4 police officers opened fire when the teen ran and allegedly pointed the weapon at them. Teen dead.

https://apnews.com/article/shootings-police-syracuse-9d9814d7606f0571db5df60056fa70b2

[KT2000]

32. Horrible, just horrible

[TygrBright]

19. Sadly, what comes next is her wondering if YOU are "part of it" now. Be careful, please. n/t

[Warpy]

44. Unlikely

OP is listening actively but not passing judgment, keeping the friend from feeling defensive. That's important.

Friend is probably using OP as a sounding board for what she tells the doctors and that's OK, too.

[hunter]

24. Paranoia is horrible.

Worse than hallucinations, speaking from my own personal experiences.

Meds are helpful but don't work if you are too paranoid to take them.

It's been my good fortune that even at my very worst I tend to be fairly mild, even amusing.

In the worst decade of my life, between quitting high school and graduating from college, the cops would drive me home, not kill me.

It probably helped that I was white.

I don't honestly know how I accomplished it but I built my own safety net of family and friends.

Otherwise I'd be a crazy homeless guy.

Or dead.

I have maybe two years total life experience as a hard core crazy homeless guy but it's not something I put on my résumé.

My last 72 hour visit to the locked psych ward wasn't all that long ago.

That was a damned expensive vacation, insurance paid only a fraction of it.

Thankfully I've always been more a danger to myself than others, although I'm really good at making the people who love me cry.

I get the autistic stuff from my dad's dad.

I get the absolute crazy shit from my mom's mom, who was functional enough to work her entire adult life, but had to removed from her home as a danger to herself and others when she retired. She was still cussing up a storm and trying to bite the paramedics when they hauled her away in the ambulance.

The rest of my dysfunction I attribute to head injuries and random fae ancestors.

[KT2000]

34. I feel for you

and now more than when I was ignorant of how things really work. I think you really said something when you talk about supportive people around you and police who wanted to help not harm. Thank you for sharing this because I am trying to learn more.

[Warpy]

45. Most people with that severe, familial stuff need to bounce back into the hospital

from time to time for a drug tuneup when they start running into more trouble. Good for you for either having the insight to know when it's time or having people you trust enough to tell you you're due.

It's a chronic illness like any other, the only difference is the organ/body system that is involved. You still have to take care of it.

[NHvet]

25. The lack of places for people to get adequate help

and long term housing for those unable to be helped, is at the feet of the GOP and Ronnie Raygun

[Alice Kramden]

41. Very true

Reagan dismantled the mental health system in large part and sabotaged it for decades to come, in my opinion

[MoonRiver]

26. She's clearly not taking her meds. I wish her the best.

[paulkienitz]

27. I would say that ideological fanaticism can function as an equivalent of mental illness

even when no medical dysfunction is present.

The right in general and Trump in particular have been demanding of their followers for a long time that they be willing to put dogma above data, to believe their ears rather than their eyes. After decades of inculcation into this mindset, in parallel with similar efforts by evangelical preachers to breed their own kind of purblind fanaticism, we have a large population of people who are willing to act entirely as if they are mentally ill, when they aren't.

[KT2000]

33. what surprises me

is the willingness people have to give up their autonomy. The insurrectionists on 1/6 followed their delusions to the dangerous end - following trump. The rugged individual is nothing more than a meme to cover the fact that so many in the US are followers, even at the expense of their own morals. That goes for religious fanatics too.

[Alice Kramden]

42. Well said

And that's what I call BRAINWASHING - so many people acting irrationally and against the good of all.

[Lucinda]

47. ❤️ ✿❧🌿❧✿ ❤️

[lagomorph777]

58. I wonder whether some QAnuts are actually caused by "asymptomatic" COVID.

COVID can have some pretty bad effects on the brain.

Perhaps the same applies to your friend; I don't know the timing of her problems.

[Tom Rinaldo]

60. Ask everyone you know for referrals to excellent caring therapists and psychiatrists for your frined

Most mental health professionals will be helpful to a limited extent at least, with the stress on limited. But a truly exceptional practitioner can make a huge difference over time. Yes I know that professionals like that, who are not economically out of reach, are few and far between, and they always seem to already have full case loads. But every once in a while a slot does open up with one of them.

It takes persistence and determination to sift through available mental health options to find that rare nugget, someone with really special skills who is not worried about maximizing their income who has time to see your friend. If you keep asking around you may get many false leads, but one might eventually be the one. I know from my experience with a very close friend that the right help can make a major difference in the life of someone undergoing a mental health crisis.

[KT2000]

64. Thank you

that is a good idea and better than just waiting for the next shoe to fall.

[jaxexpat]

62. The "in the know" concept of alternate an reality has always fascinated me.

I must consider reality, the heavy one; a dose of which may knock one to the floor, to be largely consensus based. A selection of sensed data held together by mutual interpretation, acceptance and custom. How curious, after all, the definition of madness boils down to a refusal to accept the facts of one's environment as dictated by the senses. For as we compare information about our environment gathered by any number of the 5 senses we may concur that it makes good sense and if a concept has no logical place, we concur it is senseless. This mixing of the physical and the intellectual, the material and the spiritual takes place in a world where we sense each other's emotions. If it's confusing, it's no wonder, nor is it nonsense. It's a discussion about a species that spends a third of it's time sleeping and dreaming in order to survive.

[BobTheSubgenius]

63. That is a terrible thing to witness, and have happen to a friend.

I watched a friend dissolve into paranoid delusions. He singled out another friend who had "fake picture of him having homosexual sex" and was going to "get him."

Fortunately, he got considerable professional help, including a residential/custodial institution for some months. He's 'better' now, but not the same person as he was, "back in the good old days."

[Laha]

65. My Mom called me a few days ago

Because she had just come to the conclusion that I had quite some time ago that my brother is not well. There were parts of it very similar to your story, with his belief that he was the one who knew everything, and oh just wait until we find out what's coming. She described him as very manic.

As I said, I came to that conclusion a while ago. She came to me for advice. It should be the other way around. It always had been up until that moment.

The best I could give her was let him be insane, but do not indulge in his fantasies. Even limit your attempts to dissuade him from them because he will take it as an attack against his view of self worth. Just try to change the conversation.

I wish I had better advice. I know I can't fix my brother. I have to avoid him now.

[Ilsa]

66. There is an ingrained evolutionary response to

having beliefs challenged. The brain reacts as if the body is threatened. An attack on our strongly held beliefs is an attack on the self, and the brain is built to protect the self. I bet she needs cognitive therapy and drugs to lead her out of her irrational, fictional world and back to reality.