Imagine what it’s like to be crazy. (The thought police can put me in one of those beds with a long waiting list for using such a politically incorrect word if they wish.) Perhaps you will chose to pretend you’re afflicted with a substance abuse problem. You’ve drained all your income, your friends and family will give you no more, and so you’ve taken to stealing to feed the fire inside that won’t go away. Your only friends are your partners in crime. You can’t hold down a job.

Or maybe you’ll pretend you lost your will to live after you found your spouse cheating right under your nose. You don’t want to get out of bed, and could care less what people think about the way you smell. More often than not, you forget to eat. You even lose interest in your sentences before completing them. You don’t want to be around people anymore.

Or maybe you had a stroke. You have thoughts, but you can’t communicate them because you stutter and stammer. Your hand shakes too badly to write. You come across as a blithering idiot, but you’re too incapacitated to convince anybody that you’ve not lost your mind. The frustration builds and finally mounts to where you’re lashing back at everyone and everything. Visiting nurses are afraid to come to your house anymore.

Now that we’ve all gone crazy, let’s see what government is doing to help us. Do you find comfort in knowing that awareness is being raised? That the new secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has learned that previous planners and administrators were talking past and not with each other? That he is calling for accountability? That he is going to transfer administrative responsibility for mental health hospitals from one government agency to another? Are you consoled that your senator believes the new chief administrator has arrived at an awareness of the seriousness of the situation?

Broughton lost its Medicare/Medicaid funding after a couple instances of abuse/neglect. There are many stories of healthcare workers who do not have sufficient people skills to handle persons with major mental issues. Even the best of us can miscalculate in crisis situations where every second counts. Legislators, however, would like to use every incident as an opportunity to craft broad-brush legislation to convince voters that they care. This, of course, requires plans and programs. Mental health workers in WNC have complained that they have too much paperwork to do, and the rules keep changing too much for them to ever fill out the same form twice.

The courts, of course, would have healthcare workers stand by and reason with the violently insane, or simply allow them to celebrate their diversity, as opposed to taking measures to restrain them out of consideration for others placed in harm’s way.

Each person is a puzzle that can’t be steamrolled into perfection by swooping, visionary legislation. However, as a step toward making helpful opportunities available, I like the idea of placid monasteries (in spite of Hollywood’s efforts to convince us that all priests are perverts). Monasteries would be funded by the contributions of the devout, and operated by persons committed to a life of charity and capable of giving the afflicted one-on-one attention. I would not refer a friend with a substance abuse problem to a state program where recidivism rates are likely to be reduced only through changes in accounting procedures.