Why should I support someone else?

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-27-2006
Why should I support someone else?
4426
Sat, 12-30-2006 - 1:24pm

Let me start by saying that I"m new here so this may have already been discussed, but this has come up in my office several times and I wanted to get some other views of this.

I do payroll for a rather small company so I know most of the workers and their wives (most of the workers are men due to the nature of our business). There are two in particular who's wives SAH. These two are up to their eyeballs in debt. I have bill collectors constantly calling for them. That part is really their business, it is annoying but I enjoy being rude back to the bill collectors, lol.

The part that bothers me is that both wives have been in the office wanting copies of X amount of check stubs so that they can go and get public assistance (I know because they told me that is what it is for)! Why should my tax money go so that these women can SAH? I know that not all families that one parent stays at home are like this, but I know lots that are. Heck, growing up we were always broke because my mother refused to work, but we weren't on any public assistance.

So, why should I pay for a woman to SAH? Why can't she go and get a job to support her family just like anyone else?

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iVillage Member
Registered: 09-04-1997
Wed, 02-21-2007 - 12:43pm
I'm having a hard time distinguishing between schizophrenia and students wandering around with Bluetooth devices. Both seem to be shouting at thin air, waving their arms around, and laughing when nothing is funny.
iVillage Member
Registered: 06-30-2006
Wed, 02-21-2007 - 12:45pm
I'm glad I have more faith in the medical profession than that; indeed, in all the various professionals whose services I've used through the years.

Sabina

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Wed, 02-21-2007 - 12:49pm
That may be, but perhaps you have not hung around with actual schizophrenics that much.
iVillage Member
Registered: 09-04-1997
Wed, 02-21-2007 - 12:57pm
Not on a long term basis....but one of my first jobs was being a waitress at a bus station that was open 24 hrs a day...a lot of mentally ill people practically lived in the bus station. Most of them were OK to deal with most of the time as long as you were willing to honor their quirks. Then there was the ten years I spent working for a police department....we had our resident schizophrenics. One woman in particular I will never forget because her particular delusion was that she was from Pluto and had been sent to earth as an advance agent for an imminent colonization movement. On her bad days, she became persuaded that her job was to get earthlings onto Pluto time, and she would go into people's homes and smash their clocks and tear up their calendars in preparation for the big time change....and of course, there's the folks down at the soup kitchen....most of whom are a few degrees off "normal," either mentally ill, actively abusing substances, or brain damaged from many years of doing so or some combination of all three. I don't do diagnoses, but I do know that when I am told by a wild-eyed gentlemen not to put gravy on his potatoes because gravy is where the terrorists hide their poisons, I don't try to talk him into any gravy....
iVillage Member
Registered: 01-15-2006
Wed, 02-21-2007 - 1:01pm

where do you think oprah comes up with her stuff,anyway? the blue sky? barf. while she may pander her majority sah audience,she does not just share therapeutic messages without some reliable source of where it comes from. she has qualified writers who gather reliable,proven information for her.

oh and about ans. are you a qualified doctor with a more expert opinion about her poor background? i am really,really sad for her. she problably was a mental case. what a pathetic mother she had. shame on her.....but what i disagree with was the more *general* report that came from her story - celebrities are getting legal passes for anti-depressent drugs because of *who* they are. heavens,cancer drugs be given to celebrities just because of *who* they are,too?

 

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-04-1997
Wed, 02-21-2007 - 1:08pm
I think if you have been feeling lousy and blue for a month, it might be time to find out why. Maybe it has a physical cause. Maybe it's some external trigger that you need to fix. Maybe it's seasonal -- some people really do get "blue" in the winter months because of light deprivation issues and being cooped up indoors. I would be suspicious of any doctor who just wanted to hand out a prescription for anti-depressants, though. I know some doctors do, but not one I'd ever want to trust myself to. Look, there are all kinds of doctors...some more competent than others, some more honest than others. There are also all kinds of patients. Some would even lie about their symptoms to get their hands on the right kinds of drugs; others would see more than one doctor or lie about what other stuff they are taking. It doesn't mean that mental illness isn't real, and that people who have it would benefit from competent treatment.
iVillage Member
Registered: 01-15-2006
Wed, 02-21-2007 - 1:13pm
i consider a doctor *incompetent* when they tell me the *only* solution to my child's problem is medication. it wasn't.....unfortunately,the few doctors in that field who really cared and listened were ones whose opinions weren't all tied up in statistics,science and the words,chemical imbalance.


Edited 2/21/2007 1:17 pm ET by egd3blessed

 

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Wed, 02-21-2007 - 1:15pm

Which, apropos, shows that there are plenty of mentally ill people who do not receive treatment. Anyway, I simply meant that there are indeed specific, physical signs associated with various mental illnesses. It is something that is being investigated by some neurologists and psychiatrists, especially as a possible tool for early diagnosis.

Physical, but not visible to the naked eye, quite recently a MRI specialist also came up with a set of subtle abnormalities in the brains of people who had schizophrenia: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/uops-pr110705.php

I know you were kidding, but it is pretty serious for those affected, and I confess that it irks me when people (I know you did not) propose that mental illness is imagined, invented or that mentally ill people should just get over it.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Wed, 02-21-2007 - 1:20pm
Whose poor background? Did you get all this from an Oprah show?
iVillage Member
Registered: 06-27-1998
Wed, 02-21-2007 - 1:22pm

Honestly sometimes I think that many of us forget that doctors are just

PumpkinAngel

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