Not helping someone that may suspect mental illness

Post Reply New Topic

How come people don't help the mentally ill? For example, if people may speculate through inference or reasoning ( don't understand what these mean but heard people use these words) that someone shows mental illness, why they don't help the person? I saw a doctor once. It was $100 without insurance. He knew I lived with my family and had no insurance. Also, my face showed I was how you call it, sad and angry. It is hard to describe. Also I looked down with my head low and shoulders down. This facial expression and head low and shoulders down and looking towards the ground since I was young and through college days, if someone or people or teachers in schools knew this, how come they didn't refer to me a specialize doctor.

When I was young, they put me in special workshops where I get help with homework and there were only three of us. Ofcourse I didn't know I had a learning problem and nobody told me so I didn't know. Lets just say that these were signs, they didn't seek treatment for me. My problems became big.

In college, I explain to a teacher that I had trouble expressing. I told him that I didn't know how to put words into sentences. A writing tutor in college said I have trouble articulating and he told me it means expressing and I use wrong words incorrectly.

I did see a disability counselor but I didn't know it was one. My college english teacher told me to see him. He did say that I had a problem. Nothing came to mind and I didn't have it come to mind later on. I didn't know what he meant. Like I mentioned before, my head and shoulders were down for a long time since I was young. As I think of it now, maybe people knew I had a problem.


I did saw on the news once that someone ran around naked and may with underwear. They called the police. They say that they may be mentally ill.

So between these two cases, it seems that if people are afraid, they call somebody or have somebody intervene.


So my question was, how come nobody help if people infer or speculate someone that may have a problem and maybe mental illness?

Or if someone have a problem (not mental, but any problem in general), people continue on with their life like nobody cares. Why is that?

Trying to understand these two questions. Also all this stuff happen on the news, they say if you see something say some something. Some of these things may be inferred but not physically seen.

Sometimes it's not so much that people don't have the desire to help -- it's more the unpredictability of how said person would react to being told they might have a mental illness. Some people take offense to it and take it as some sort of attack, and as such it has kind of become an unwritten rule not to point it out unless they themselves have explicitly stated it. What then ends up happening is an attempt to help while trying not to do anything to offend the person they're trying to help. Sometimes when it involves family, the person(s) trying to help take it to another level where they begin to see it as an attempt to protect their loved one from the disorder. Misguided? Sure, but what would be worse -- a veiled effort or no effort? In a perfect world we would all know what to do in every circumstance, but this is not a perfect world and we're all only human, so it would be unfair to expect someone to automatically know the right way to help.