Madness Cries Wolf?

Remember my last blog post about how the ownership and possession of firearms by a mentally ill person is a bad idea? Uh huh, well, yesterday, my mother’s husband wrote on his Facebook wall.

One word.

No caps. No punctuation. Just a terrifying word floating on his otherwise ignored Facebook.

This man never speaks in shorthand. He writes rambling interminable e-mails, corners you for an hour while he complains about his taxes and compares the rotation of a bullet to that of a football and then follows up that conversation with a thirty minute phone call just to make sure you did not miss anything he had said earlier.

One word. That's all he wrote.

sorry

As soon as I saw it, I knew.

This one word was a suicide note.

Not wanting to panic or over-react and scare everyone, I thought the most rational course of action was to run around the house screaming “Oh my God, he’s gonna kill himself!”  But, apparently, that does not accomplish anything so I also called his daughter and went to the police.

Long story short. He’s fine. Maybe he was not planning suicide and that one word was a cry for attention or a warning that he was about to go shoot up a shopping mall but whatever it was, three squad cars full of men in blue let him know IT WAS NOT COOL.

You see, for two days, his bail bondsman had been calling me looking for him. He had not checked in. And, he had not answered phone calls from his daughter and a multitude of other people either.

First of all, I’m like wait - whu - huh?  He gave MY NAME to his bail bondsman as a reference?

I tried to play it cool when they called but for real, my mother’s husband hates me! This is not just any ol’ hate either. This is a deep-rooted “she’s some kind of voodoo witch” mixture of fear and hate. AND, I am part of the reason he even HAS a bond in the first place since he assaulted my brother-in-law after he was ordered out of the house for griping at my sister for twenty minutes about what? Taxes and ME. I’m evil. I’m the worst person he’s ever met. He’s going to make me pay one way or another and he has a gazillion guns so if this was 150 years ago, he could solve this another way.

But yeah, dude, go ahead and use me as a reference on that bond even though a protective order prevents you from coming near my house.

Weird. But that is how illogical this guy is.

Anyway, even though the panic is over, I’m still shaking. I was certain this man had done something foolish or was about to and even though he physically abused my mother and assaulted my brother-in-law and causes the rest of us more grief than I care to share, he’s still a human being. No doubt, he is dangerous. But what hell must go on inside his head that he would remind us so often that suicide is a way to escape it?

There has to be something more we can do besides fear this guy, blog about him, and pray that he does not hurt himself or somebody else. His daughter is trying to get some help from his psychiatrist, my sister had a chat with his neurologist, and I called our attorney today. I asked if there is anything we can do. What if he was trying to kill himself yesterday? Isn't that enough to force him to get help? A judge cannot rule on "what if"s, she said. And, I have said before, it is not against the law to be mad. Crazy is not a crime. Mental illness is not illegal and nobody can force you to get treatment.

BOTTOM LINE: If you are mentally ill you have the right to refuse to get un-mentally ill even though you are not un-mentally ill enough to make that decision.

Until my mother’s husband hurts himself or somebody else OR somebody in a position of authority gets legal documents declaring that he is a danger to himself or others, he has every right in the world to be mad as hatter.

When our mother was refusing mental health treatment and her husband was blocking us on top of that, we kept hearing over and over that we needed to get a mental heath order. Her condition was deteriorating at an alarming rate and a mental heath order was quickly becoming our last and best hope. But, we did not want our mother taken away in handcuffs. We could not put her through that. Then someone said something that changed the way we think. She said, “if it was my mother, I’d much rather see her leave in handcuffs than in a body bag.”

We found the courage to make tough decisions after that.

And, I stopped watching Forensic Files.