Judging by the amount of press "celebrities" receive for their illegal exploits, it's no surprise that they've co-opted t.v. for their publicity purposes, by using their prison mugshots as their latest head shot, and their crimes as the press that nabs producers looking for a "hot" star, as long as they can get insurance for a project that'll cover an abusive alcoholic who sometimes sets random fires. (Thanks for that, Bart). What's the point in reigning it in? They get as much attention for their misdeeds as they do for their phony charities, set up as tax shelters to funnel their money into. What does it matter if it's "good" or "bad"? That's entertainment! It's a twisted kind of logic.
And those are just the psychopaths who know how to channel their inner demons into violent emotions onscreen, as if on cue. You don't want to meet Special Ed/Needs without a drama queen attached to it. Much. Less. Fun. My younger cousin with autism (and a few other serious brain disorders) learned early to fake emotions by spewing crocodile tears that seemed to clear up as soon as your head turned away from him. That was even scarier, because his face fell into a dead mask with nothing behind the eyes, the heart of mental illness itself.
Because he hid his mental disorders behind closed doors (and his family refused to talk about his problems), life itself was acting to him. It was all fake, because he lives in a disassociated state of surreal unreality and, kids, if you think that sounds like some sort of fun party trick, let me assure you, it is not a good ride. Schizophrenic sufferers randomly hallucinate screaming, streaking black shadows right in the middle of a typical day, or because they were stressed out when you asked them a direct question made with appropriate eye contact.
He simply didn't know what to feel, or when to feel it, or why it was happening, and what he should do about it. It was either freak-show fireworks or nothing; temper tantrums or dead numbness. With brain disorders, patients don't understand what's happening, let alone how to process the strong feelings that are a normal part of life. It's the range of experiences that completely throw them into illness. Imagine this: you think about a rather stressful but common event (like paying bills or going to the dentist), and just thinking about it causes you to have excruciating pains throughout your body, starting with your head. Can't imagine it? Neither can I, but that's what a mental illness does. Thinking = pain.
For addictive disorders, it's a deadly combination of personality defects, character flaws, mental instability, physical handicap, learning impairments, and emotional misfiring. I've seen psychosis in people who vacillate between a depressive blankness to a caffeinated, motor-mouthed mania, up close and personal, because we all have. Every single person on this planet knows someone in their family sickened with these illnesses, because we're the healthy ones who take care of them. Or avoid them. Or they avoid us, the next time they "fall off the wagon" (again) because it rained yesterday, and you weren't "nice" to them, or "sensitive" enough to meet their needs that always take precedence over yours, because you're healthy and they're not.
As with the most adept family member, the burden falls onto the healthiest person, who then becomes the crux upon which the balance of the entire family rests, or not, as the case may be, as it is with me. If mama ain't doin' well, ain't nobody doin' well, get it? It's a message that I have to constantly reinforce with my sick family (and there's a lot of them), by reminding them accurately of my timeline and theirs, which seems like a magical parlor trick to the insane, when it's really called "memory", and it's a normal thing to have. On most days, the emotional range I will get back from my sickest family members will be like a game of "Spin The Wheel in Hell!", because they find mature subject matter <spin the wheel> "bad", or "sad", or is it "mad"?
And that's it. That's sometimes all I will get from the people I raised/grew up with (besides avoidance and communication blackouts), which is my direct cue that they have become sick in my absence again, and then it's time for me to perform Anne Sullivan to their Helen Keller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sullivan), except instead of an inner super-genius, I have to get them to react to basic skills like caring and sharing, so I don't starve to death. Weird, right? You should try it sober. Like most heads-of-household, it's only by the grace of G-d and my own hard-working excellence that I avoided their diseases and addictions, because it turns out that you can't actually beat the life out of someone who's healthy. I'm living proof of that.
Yesterday, I watched a chilling episode of an old t.v. show called "American Justice" that highlighted a psychotic man who decided the only way out of his "problems" was to kill his entire family. He calmly ate breakfast, shot his wife, dragged her body to their empty ballroom (he felt "pressure" to provide for his family), then talked to his elderly mother who inquired after the noise. That's when he shot her in the head, too, but he had to leave her where she was, because she was too heavy for him to carry, and that stressed him out more. He also shot his children as they arrived home from school one-by-one, though the soccer-playing boy didn't drop right away like the other two, so he HAD TO shoot him ten times instead.
We know all of this detail about his hideous crimes because he sat down after dinner (killing is tiring, but he was feeling relaxed now that his "problems" were gone), and wrote a five page letter to his pastor, full of bullshit, half-truths, lies, excuses, finger-pointing, and blame. He left his dead family on plastic tarps in the ballroom that he felt "pressured" to buy for them, because his mother supposedly nagged him into becoming successful, then he withdrew thousands of dollars from the family's bank account (he said he was bankrupt and that was the last straw, after being fired again for aberrant behavior at work), and then he disappeared for fifteen years. He was finally free!
After his time on the road, he even married again, happily changing his name to avoid capture, working as an accountant (he blamed his OCD personality disorder for the killing spree, after finally being correctly diagnosed by a court-appointed psychiatrist, because in his arrogant delusion he never thought, "Gee, I should go talk to someone like my doctor"), and then appearing on the show to give his point of view. In between monotone recounts of a story he's told a million times (he loved the show "America's Most Wanted" and bragged to his co-workers about it, which led to his capture, like every other common criminal before him), he finally broke out into the gleeful laughter that played around his mouth the entire time he told his side of the story.
You see, he enjoyed it. He loved the fact that he excellently executed his demented plan, so much so, that he was disappointed by the lack of attention. He loved the artist rendition of him as an old man shown on "his" episode of A.M.W.; he couldn't believe how accurate it was. It looked just like him! He didn't know they had aging technology like that, told with a cagey look to his watery eyes. He knew he couldn't cop an insanity plea because of the calmly meticulous planning behind his sick crimes, but he tried it in court anyway. Worth a shot, right? I mean, as long as the cameras were rolling, why not give it a "go"? Maybe someone in "T.V. Land" would feel bad for him. Heck, he might even get married again! He had the rest of his life to live.
