Posted on 04/02/2010 7:15:12 PM PDT by Chet 99
FORT WORTH, Texas — A Texas man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaving his baby alone with his psychotic wife, who drowned their son in a hot tub.
Michael Maxon appears to be the first husband held criminally responsible in Texas cases involving mentally ill women who have killed their children, said prosecutor Alana Minton.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
You make a really good point. I didn’t think of that. How could he work & watch the child? I think there has to be more to this story....
Don’t sweat it. Some people turn any generalized statement into a personal attack.
I can just imagine putting an ad in the paper.
*Needed: Child care at my home for infant to protect him from crazy, deranged lunatic of a mother who will also be in the house with you*
I wonder how many takers he'd have for that. Do you think they were beating a path to his door?
A physician did stop by to make sure she was breathing and had a pulse. After asking her what the problem was,he declared that she had "communication issues" and walked out with no direction for treatment or referrals. As a matter of fact, not even her next of kin was notified that she was there. She had to borrow their desk phone to call her family to come pick her up.
Although she did the right thing by seeking help in a crisis, that's not what she really got when "help" arrived. Fortunately, her family found an excellent private doctor who admitted her right away and got her the help she needed.
Sadly, people seem to think that the solution is always so simple. Not everyone has a supportive family who is willing to FIND the appropriate care for them. And as we have seen in this case and many others, sometimes the patient simply ignored--sometimes with tragic results.
I am not sweating it. If I turned a stomach for talking about my personal friends too bad. Get over it or don’t . DILLIGAF? The people who know me here will laugh about that bs.
Pandora, one of the biggest problems is the fact that it is easier and cheaper to treat someone with a pill rather than fork out thousands of dollars for psychotherapy. Serious cases aside (psychosis, schizophrenia, etc), psychotherapy can sometimes identify the problem and set a course of treatment that will hopefully reduce or remove the need for the medication treating the anxiety or depression. However, asking a patient to invest thousands of dollars and several months (or years) for psychotherapy isn’t so easy when they can get psych meds much cheaper or covered under insurance. Most insurances have restrictions on the number of psychotherapy sessions allowed and even then, the patient is responsible for a good portion of the cost...40%?
And, I don't either. I have been here for almost three years, and I have known you to pray for almost every touching story you read.
I have never met another prayer warrior like the poster that 'caused a stomach to be so upset', and I applaud that poster's belief in the Power of Prayer.
PYW, I can certainly understand your distaste for the word 'crazy' - just as others detest the word 'retarded'. But, did the poster give you any reason to be so negative other than the use of one word (that is still used btw, by thousands, not realizing it is upsetting to some)?
Sometimes there are many words between the lines of a person's post. If you look closely, Pan_Yans Wife, you will see a very caring, humble person in the poster whom you claimed made you so ill that you chose to be rude. And, you might not be so quick to judgement and name calling.
While I understand your need to support your friend, my opinion has not changed, and I left the discussion.
I rarely post on FR anymore because the level of discussion seems to always devolve. I’m generally annoyed with it and have little patience for simple ignorance, let alone name calling. The term, “crazy” is particularly distasteful for me because of my personal experience with the mentally ill, so I left.
I hope you respect my decision to leave the discussion.
Have a good evening.
Very true. I do wonder about the cocktail of pills that my one friend is on. Her liver must be a mess & I fear one day she is just going to die. Due to my family problems my late sister saw a doctor for about 30 years. I didn’t see where it did anything for her sadly. Just cost her quite a bit of money. I chose to look at our lives with my parents in a different way. Everybody has to do what is best for them I guess.
No, I’m for recognizing hopelessly crazy people for what they are, and not buying into loony-lefty nonsense about how they have a right to choose their “lifestyle”. Severe mental illness involving disconnection from reality has nothing to do with freedom or lifestyle; it’s a prison for the person suffering from it, and if they’re just to left to their own private prison, the result is often tragic for others as well themselves.
I have a half-sister who’s suffering from advanced schizophrenia. She about 60 years old now, and has never had any treatment because she thinks there’s nothing wrong with her. She lives in a makeshift tent on land belonging to God knows who, near the Texas-Mexico border. Most of her teeth are gone from a combination of rotting out and being bashed out when she gets in fights. She’s a revolving door visitor in the jail in the town she usually stays near, drunk and disorderly, marijuana possession, etc. Sometimes she disappears for months at a time, and we never know if she’s dead. So far she’s always turned up, sometimes when a Mexican government official manages to reach my father to tell him she’s being deported. This has been her “life” since her mid-twenties. My father and half brother have tried everything to get her treated, but as long as she says she’s fine she’s allowed to keep declining treatment.
My father used to send her a little cash and some McDonald’s coupons to a P.O. he’d set up for her, but about 20 years ago she stopped picking up mail at the post office. He was afraid she’d died, but eventually got hold of her and learned that she “can’t go into the post office anymore, because they put in metal detectors and they set off the things that are implanted in my head”. She also “can’t” move from the makeshift tent to real housing my father keeps offering to buy her — reasons vary, but have included “because I have to stay and guard the border” (presumably a notion put into her head by someone she bumped into and tried to latch onto for a while). Eventually she’ll either turn up dead in a ditch, or she’ll flip out and try to kill someone and finally get locked up (she was the first suspect in her mother’s violent murder about 10 years ago, until it was firmly established that she’d been in Texas at the time, hundreds of miles away). Not only is this a tragic waste of her life, but it’s living hell for my father and half brother (I barely ever knew her).
By contrast, I have friend whose mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when my friend was just a year old. My friend visits her in her institution, where medication is keeping her relatively lucid, and my friend says she seems happy there. I have another friend who ended up being raised by a schizophrenic mother under really hellish circumstances, and will suffer severe lifelong psychiatric problems of her own as a result (including PTSD, anxiety, and bouts of severe depression). It really is important, both for the sake of the severely mentally ill, and the rest of society, to separate them from society if their illness can’t be gotten under solid control. They are no more exercising their “freedom” when they go off on crazy rants and actions, than a person having a heart attack is exercising their “freedom” to turn blue and go unconscious from lack of oxygen. A major vital organ is severely malfunctioning, and outside intervention is very much needed.
I pray because I believe in the Power of Prayer & I will continue to do so for the rest of my life. Hugs & Prayers, Pandy
Good point..
Personally I think it’s absolutely appropriate to use the word “crazy” or “insane”. The business of clinical labelling of mental illnesses has gotten to the point where it obscures important distinctions under an avalanche of political correctness. The biggest one is ability to perceive reality with reasonable accuracy. Lots of people with mental illness are just as clear on reality as people with no mental illness (e.g. depression and most forms of anxiety don’t involve lack of ability to perceive reality).
But there’s a another big category of mental illness, such as schizophrenia and psychosis, which involve being “crazy” — severe misperceptions of reality, irrational perceptions of cause and effect relationships, etc. These people are inherently dangerous to themselves and others. Lumping them into the umbrella category of “mental illness” while the leftists and psychoists lecture us that “mental illness is just like any other illness”, does them and society a grave disservice.
Yes it does. Political correctness is a big issue with me. I think it is ruining this country. As for using the word crazy, well some people are & I don't see another way to say it. Sure we can can dress it up with another name...but it still is the same IMHO.
I can recall my grandmother talking about an sister I never saw. (My Great Aunt) I never saw her because she was kept in the attic with her nurse. She wasn't chained to a bed or anything like that but she was kept at home until she died. The attic was kept locked & my father didn't ever speak of his Aunt nor did I have the nerve to find out the whole story. It was unheard of back then to put her away. I wish I knew the details now but everyone is long gone.
Especially since as I understand it there is remarkably little scientific evidence that psychotherapy ever does any good.
The meds at least have a well-documented, though not infallible, ability to help control symptoms even if not "curing" the disease.
Example: The term "retarded" is presently considered offensive and insensitive by many. Few remember it was highly PC at one time, developed to replace such insulting labels as moron, imbecile, stupid, dumb, etc.
The problem is that over a few decades it acquired all the conntations associated with the reality it references and had to be dumped itself.
IOW the "polite" euphemisms quickly change their meaning to incorporate all the negatives and a new euphemism has to invented so we can pretend the negative associations don't actually exist. Rinse and repeat.
Ok, where are all the “the state took the children’ crowd.?ha.
You obviously know nothing about how the medical system, the mental health system nor the legalities surrounding that. Your rant makes no sense.
There IS a reason why people who are “flat-out insane” aren’t kept in an institution permanently....
Its the Public National Law Enacted and passed in 1963 that CLOSED ALL THE STATE MENTAL INSTITUTIONS AND CREATED COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH OUTPATIENT CENTERS.
THE LAW ALSO says you have TO determine the person is a clear danger to self or others at that time...you can keep them for up to 72hours, they are re-evaluated to keep them longer, evry 72 hrs...Once that situation has passed they are released.
LOOK FOLKS! We closed the state mental institutions CAUSE IT WAS COSTING TO MUCH MONEY—not only cause they were awful places. WE put people in the community ( ie “home “ or homeless) and then don’t fund those programs..CAUSE IT COSTS TOO MUCH IN TAXES!.
That’s the reality.
DEAL WITH IT,
QUIT WHINING OR CHANGE THE LAWS AND FUND THE TREATMENT OF SICK PEOPLE!
CHECK OUT MY RANTING POST # 59...
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