Another post about my hospital stay.

When I first conceived of what you are about to read, I thought I was going to write a post about the music that I listened to whilst I was being treated in an acute-care mental health facility. However, without a context to hang it all on, I find that writing articles about music tends to get boring. And if I get really bored with writing something, I usually take that as a sign that what I am working on is probably not worth the effort.

Pets are cuter when they are little (or more about my involuntary holiday).

Again, the names, locations, and quotes relating to where I spent the latter half of February are fudged in order to protect identities. Since they have a policy of there being no photographic equipment being allowed on the ward to protect the privacy of the patients, I have to respect that.

During X-Men: First Class, one of the many accusing-sounding things that Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) says to Professor X (James McAvoy) is that she guesses pets are always cuter when they are little. That, in a nutshell, sums up the reality for autistic or mentally ill adults in today’s “enlightened” society. They spend literally billions of dollars advertising initiatives to “help” the children or adolescents. Sometimes they even throw a dollar or two in the direction of those services or initiatives. And when the initiatives that were too ignorant or cash-strapped to use the right approach inevitably fail, it is the children and adolescents they were supposed to serve, who end up bearing the real cost. As the failure progresses and those children or adolescents become adults, the costs mount. And in cases of severe failure, such as the failure to properly diagnose an individual before their twenty-fifth birthday, the costs borne by the patient become so high that it makes the value of life very difficult to see.