Why should I support someone else?
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| 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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Do you really not see the problem here?
Buying a cubic zirconia is not illegal. You are not stealing from anyone if you buy a cubic zirconia.
"Belief" is usually all or nothing. So, by your using the words "I do not believe in it," I was led to understand that you are against drugs generally.
As for the rest, I am not sure what you mean again. You appear to be making two separate statements. One has to do with zoloft being OK if it makes people happy, correct? The other is asking how you define mental illlness so a child can understand it.
As far as the first statement, there is so much more to meds than zoloft and you seem to have little appreciation of how often treating mental illness is a life and death issue.
As far as the second, it is very difficult to define philosophically what it means to be mentally ill. It is a question that has occupied many great minds over the centuries. At the same time, the ancient Greeks had discovered that if you put mad people in certain caves, the people got better. We now know that those caves have lithium in them and the mad people in question were presumably people suffering from bipolar illness. (Lithium is a drug still used for treating bipolar, although we now have other meds as well).
Since my brother has a serious mental illness, I have had to explain to dd since the time she first noticed something wrong, she was around 3, what mental illness is and is not. It was not done in one explanation, but rather in many different conversations over the years. Funny thing is though that little kids usually sense it right away, they just do not judge.
Edited 2/21/2007 5:44 pm ET by sild
You know it's interesting.
PumpkinAngel
It is not a "behavorial illness." It is an illness, period. People who have bipolar and other psychoses KILL themselves quite often, if not treated. Sometimes, they do not kill themselves, but do such crazy things that others, like the police, do the killing for them. I realize that not all mental illness is that severe or dramatic, but much of it really is.
Schizophrenics have a 30% chance of dying before hitting 30.
My older brother has ADHD, he is in his 40's.
PumpkinAngel
But do you not see how you are overreacting to my situation?
Now you do not believe in brain scans either? Why?
Here is one article about brain scans and mental illness, do you think the researchers are imagining things?
http://www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/MEDIA/PNAS/abc.html
"UCLA researchers may have just unraveled part of the mystery. Using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, and a new analysis technique, they have created the first images showing the toll the disease takes on the brain. The results are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
While the healthy teens lost an average of 1 percent of gray matter per year, the schizophrenic patients lost up to 5 percent a year, with loss greatest among individuals with the most severe symptoms."
And another:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/uops-pr110705.php
"The results of the study demonstrate that sophisticated computational analysis methods can find unique structural brain characteristics in schizophrenia patients, with a predictive accuracy of more than 83%. Recently, Davatzikos and his group announced that further analysis of this data with even more sophisticated classification methods achieved a 91% predictive accuracy for diagnosis of schizophrenia via MRI (MICCAI 2005 meeting, Palm Springs, CA)."
Edited 2/21/2007 5:33 pm ET by sild
nah....they just placed alzheimers in it's proper place,it's neurological not psychiatric. homosexuality never belonged there,either.
ok,really through. :)
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