Mental Illness And The Apocalypse

Interesting stats in this article:

Emergency room visits for people experiencing psychiatric crisis increased by 19 percent between 2009 and 2012…

The total number of nights spent in a shelter statewide increased from 2 million in fiscal year 2011 to 3 million in fiscal 2013. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that approximately 32 percent of the roughly 14,000 homeless people on any given night in Illinois have a serious mental illness…

According to the NAMI-Chicago report, 38.5 percent of adult in Illinois 18 and older reported poor mental health, (… having to limit daily activities because of mental health problems). And it says that more than 16 percent of Illinois adults were living with a mental illness and 3.37 percent with a serious mental illness.

NAMI-Chicago estimates that translates to approximately 5 million Illinois adults with poor mental health, 2.1 million living with mental illness and 434,000 with a serious mental illness.

One out of every six people has a serious mental illness. Think about that as you walk down the street in a major city, and look at all the faces. One out of every six. Think about what is happening to their amygdalae as another million is forced into homeless shelters.

That is a lot of crazy people, and I will bet most major cities are the same. You attract rabbits, establish city services to take care of everything they need which only rabbitizes more, and then you dissuade all forms of Darwinian Selection. Indeed, the bipolar rabbits are probably having more kids than the sane people. It is a Hot Tub Time machine designed to deliver you into the age of insanity.

Now a lot of these people are harmless rabbits who will just have metal breakdowns at the beginning of the apocalypse. You’ll see them wandering around muttering to themselves, maybe hitting themselves on the head and probably without clothes, since they will already have been robbed blind of literally everything they own. Some of the nutjobs however will be evil, and the trigger that will set them off will be the sudden harshness of a society which can’t give them what they need, to survive with minimal stress.

Already we are seeing the husband who suddenly pops and kills his wife and children, the nutjobs like the Uber driver who just start shooting people while still picking up riders and making their stops, the workplace shooters who were never wound too tightly and always harbored grudges against their coworkers, the drivers who plow into crowds because they were stressed, and the rapists whose main goal is simply to hurt happy girls, even if it sends them to prison. Yet as of now the stress we are seeing is nothing compared to what will happen as the Federal Government begins to go bankrupt, and the social net keeping these forces contained frays.

Once Apocalypse begins, it will take some adjusting to realize, not only will you have to watch out for the logical crime, performed by a rational actor who has calculated that hurting you will benefit him. You’ll also have to watch out for the psychotic, whose actions have no logical underpinning, and whose attack will come fast, furious, and entirely at random. An acid attack out of the blue from a guy just walking by, a K-bar in the back as you wait for a train, or a concrete block dropped from a high building into a crowd will all be possibilities the wise K-strategist will at least be aware of.

It is crazy to think, but paranoid strategies like avoiding people, always keeping your back to a wall, and not going out unless you absolutely have to will be valuable survival skills when the apocalypse goes down.