I am very sympathetic to this young man’s plight. I am also a criminal defense lawyer whose stomach turns at these tactics. I have also worked in the mental health field and I can say, with near certainty, that this kid doesn’t suffer from PTSD as a result of being arrested and charged. No practitioner worth their salt would diagnose someone as having had PTSD with that type of event. You practically need combat to get it…it doesn’t come from an arrest.
Also, his constellation of symptoms (bi-polar! Tourettes! Autism!) is, frankly, not believable. You don’t have ALL of those, together, in most people. He’d be non-functioning. He’s getting some bad mental health counseling.
Because EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE WORLD sees the same things as you? No one should be allowed to find something after you have read it? No one should be able to share something they think is interesting if you have already seen it?
I agree that some government schools are bad, BUT they are a product that most people are compelled to use, therefore people who can not afford to home school are forced upon the penalty of fines and jail to send their children to a government run school. Choice = freedom.
And what about Deputy Dan? Has he already been fired and charged? Surely police are supposed to prevent crime, rather than cause it? Is tempting kids to commit crimes not itself a crime? It definitely should be.
That would actually surprise me: not because private schools are bastions of virtue; but because they tend to take saving face seriously and they have (and like to preserve) broad discretion when it comes to treatment of students.
Public schools are under a legal obligation to meet certain minimum standards for all school-age pupils in their district. This is not to say that they don’t have lots of room for shenanigans of various sorts (and indeed they do); but there are outcomes that they can only achieve by resorting to such. Private schools are subject to virtually no such restrictions (maybe if they have a counselor on staff that person will be a mandated reporter by virtue of their profession or something; but not a whole lot else.) If they want to cull some undesireables, they can Just Do That. No need for an embarrassing incident, police inolvement, lawsuits, etc. Just give the students the choice between ‘voluntarily’ withdrawing, clean record, everything off the books, or being asked to leave, which would be unfortunate for them. They’ll make the right choice.
And, even if the school is, by temperament, in league with the nastiest of the prohibition crew, they probably don’t want cops doing their own investigations on campus. Potentially handing undesireables over for prosecution? Perhaps. But having cops crawling around, where they might identify just anyone, if the evidence leads in that direction? Do you know how upset people would be if any important members of the football team were hauled off?
Are you a criminal defense lawyer or a medical expert? You don’t have to be in combat to get PTSD. People get it from traumatizing situations that they can’t escape from. One data point I’m familiar with is that a lot of asylum seekers tot he Netherlands suffer from PTSD, and not from the situation they fled back home, but from the bureaucracy they ended up in. The situation of little hope, lots of uncertainty, and not being able to control or escape it for a prolonged time is incredibly traumatizing. I can definitely believe that this kind of betrayal by his only friend can be incredibly traumatizing for this kid.
Again, are you a medical expert? Yes, most people don’t have all of these, but most people aren’t “most people”. It is absolutely not uncommon among severe autistics to have several disorders.
You are ridiculously misinformed about PTSD and mental health disorders generally. Whatever work you did in the mental health field, I do hope you weren’t treating anyone.
Surely the point of going into schools undercover should be to learn about what if any drug traffic is going on, and putting a stop to it, rather than courting unsuspecting young people by pretending to sell the drugs yourself?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to go after the people who are already selling, than trying to create new customers? Someone buying drugs from you cannot inform on the dealers already in place.
I have ptsd. I was bashed, several times, and beaten unconscious, among other things. But talking to a friend of mine and helping her recover after she was raped has probably contributed as much to my ptsd as being bashed has. So it doesn’t have to be combat to cause ptsd.
Olga Bogdashina, in “Theory of Mind and the Triad of Perspectives on Autism and Aspeger Syndrome” suggested that Autism could be misdiagnosed with Tourette’s, but also suggested that Autism is fairly commonly associated with Tourette’s too. Not necessarily misdiagnosis.
The school district has a “zero tolerance” policy when it comes to
drugs.
Well they must be pretty damn proud of how that’s working out. Self-righteous sanctimonious fuckers, one and all. My heart goes out to that kid and his family.
I also worked in the mental health field, as a psych nurse. I have no idea how you can say with near certainty anything. You are not the diagnosing doc. You are not the care workers working with him.
As for his “constellation of symptoms”? How is that NOT believable. I’ve seen hundreds of patients, and at least the locked wards I deal with having a “constellation of symptoms” sometimes in random order is pretty damn common. But then again rendering patients with mental illnesses “not believable” is kind of what our culture does.
If you worked in the mental health field, then you’d know that armchair diagnosing folks isn’t really useful across an internet connection. It’s just not done that way.
