July 4, 2015
Another person has written to me at my YouTube blog, saying "I've been monitoring your channel for a while and please get help." That's a quote.
It's not the first time that I have heard the word "monitor" used about me by someone who feels qualified to judge my mental state. It speaks to the belief that people with psychiatric histories aren't people, that they are inferior beings or even just situations to be "monitored."
When used to address my present situation, it also exemplifies the ignorance that most people have about what it's like to be homeless. Most people don't know and have never troubled themselves to find out what homelessness demands of a person. You have to be organized every day. You have to know how to access help from a system which is full of abuse and neglect. You have to deal with screaming that happens all of the time; loud is not loud on the homeless decibel scale. You have to try to explain to people to whom you apply for work and housing why you are homeless. Every day, you are interacting with people who have drug problems, serious criminal records, mental illness that incapacitates them from being able to do anything except follow the directions and schedule of the shelter enough to be fed every day and have a place to sleep at night. You have to deal with most of society's scorn and ridicule, and its automatic assumption that you are homeless because you did something that you shouldn't have done or didn't do something that you should have done.
How do all of the people who are publicly expressing their learned opinions about me and contacting me to beg me to get "help" think that I get through each day, suffering from paranoid delusions? How do they think that I balance my checkbook without their help, pay my bills, do my laundry, put together sentences that make sense about all sorts of things and that sometimes just happen to be about things that my "monitors" don't believe are happening?
They have no proof that the things that I write and talk about aren't happening, do they? There's nothing else about me that suggests psychosis to them except for that they don't believe my interpretations of various occurrences, is there? What's their thought process about me, is it that they just know that what I write and say is inaccurate? How do they just know that?
Why do they think that the things that they think should happen to me haven't happened yet? Do they really think that the Boston police are so negligent that they would ignore, for years, all of the people who are griping about what a public nuisance I am and what a danger I am to innocent people? Do they really think that negligence is also the reason that the Department of Mental Health hasn't yet scooped me up off the street, taken me to court, gotten me court-ordered to take a long list of antipsychotics, stuck me in an assisted-living facility, taken my phone and restricted my Internet access to half-hour, weekly, professionally monitored sessions of watching medication education podcasts?
Unlike the people who write to and about me online exhorting people to rape and kill me, the crazy b----, the people who write to and about me saying that they hope I get help are probably trying to be nice, so I'm try to be nice to them and ask them please to mind their own business.
Copyright L. Kochman, July 4, 2015 @ 6:01 p.m.
