When Do We Have Empathy for the Mentally Ill?
We find medical conditions hard to really solve. Most people just can&#x27;t begin to cope with a medical explanation of mental issues in terms of seeing it as treatable. That&#x27;s a concept not even in its infancy. We&#x27;ve barely conceived it. It is still gestating.<p>Also, with the psychosocial explanations, there is an element of blaming someone or something else. Most people will feel they are the victim of something unjust and that resonates with many people.<p>Mental illness typically has both components. Family is known to compound mental health issues that have a biological component.<p>My sister minored in psychology in college and took some graduate courses in it later. She once told me &quot;We must not have the genes for schizophrenia or someone in the family would surely have it given how the family operates&quot; and then talked about how schizophrenics go do inpatient therapy, get better, go home to the nutso family and get worse again.<p>I think we need better parenting resources for families dealing with neurodivergent offspring. I&#x27;ve seen time and again that parents don&#x27;t know effective means for dealing with such kids and it actively creates problems which then become very intractable.<p>I&#x27;m good at that and did some work for a time with a related organization and spent a few years trying to figure out how to blog about such subjects.  That never really got traction. Articles like this give me a twinge of regret and guilt that I never figured out how to more effectively share what I know. I&#x27;m convinced that better parenting resources for difficult kids would really make a difference in the world.<p>But, I just don&#x27;t have a path forward. You need fertile ground for such seeds to take root and I&#x27;ve never found that, basically. Then I got badly burned by someone who used information in my parenting blog to manipulate me and it&#x27;s a case of... Whatever. Not my problem.