Crazy Bob: So i ask you, X, if someone had told you in 1976 that you would be living in X place in 30, 40 years would you have greeted the news with wonder and awe?
ETX: I would have said, "You mean I don't lose my mind and live in a cardboard box? Far out!"
So, how many people -- colleagues or former colleagues -- do you know who are in mental institutions, or recently released from mental institutions?
I know three.
Is that a lot?
I don't know.
I'm 47 years old, and have worked with dozens of people, probably hundreds at this point, so maybe it's not that strange that three people on my Facebook feed are institutionalized.
(Not close friends, incidentally, just former colleagues.)
According to statistics, about 1 in 5 people in America experience serious mental illness in their life. The percentage of people who end up institutionalized is harder to figure, because many end up in jail instead.
Of course I know a tremendous number of people who are barely clinging to sanity, but three of 'em, well, they just couldn't fake it anymore.
(Crazy Bob is still pretty crazy but he's having some health problems that have slowed him down a little.)
I have long postulated that crazy people are drawn to the TEFL lifestyle.
But the world being what it is these days, maybe it's no longer a good place for crazy people to hide.
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2 comments:
Yeah, hell is other people. And some people get roasted a little too often or too much; and that's all she wrote. I don't think that it helps to be perpetually single either. It leaves the socially weak more vulnerable than they otherwise would be.
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius
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