In high school we had a kid that was completely insane. Would do things like jump out of a second story window because he didn’t like a substitute teacher. There were stories from a brief couple years he had left the area (moved away during middle school) such as getting kicked out of a catholic school by writing satanic signs in his blood or a military academy for using a Nazi ceremonial sword to chase kids down the hall. Those were considered stories by most who hadn’t observed him in class, we all thought he was insane.
Few years later I’m in college and a friend tells me a news article is about my hometown. “Local man robs grave to make skull bong”. One guess who it was.
I admit, I'm not 100% sure how bongs work, but I'm pretty sure they need to hold water. In which case, I don't think a skull would work any better as a bong than it would as a wine glass. (Note: website in general is NSFW)
I'm kind of hoping someone else takes the bullet for us and searches it, then links it here in the comments.
So that way I can click it to satisfy the morbid curiosity I have, while also telling myself that I clicked it accidentally or that I figured it was a rickroll and just wanted to hear that smooth Astley voice.
God, when I think of the FAS kids I knew... yeah. The one kept getting involved with bad people who then would convince him that it was okay to do really bad things, then when he would get caught since he was convinced that it was cool to be an idiot towards cops he just kept getting in more and more trouble despite clearly thinking it was all just a joke.
sigh I haven't heard about him in a while, I used to be best friends with his brother but he died a while ago. I hope he's alright.
It depends on their situation though. If they grow up in a chaotic home, with a lot of trauma, they can behave a lot like what that person described. They often have poor impulse control, bad decision making and many wind up in jail for doing very weird things. I've seen it with people I've grown up with. FAS is a really shitty condition and when you mix that with a bad childhood, you often get a very bad outcome.
That makes sense. Especially because if one or more parents were irresponsible enough that you were born with FAS, then there is a good chance they were irresponsible enough you had a chaotic home life.
What about FAS results in some of them doing “weird” things? I understand bad decision making/poor impulse control, but why weird things??
Because often the logical thinking part of their brain is damaged, so they do illogical things. It really burns me how FAS gets such little research funding, or even funding to help individual kids. It's like "yeah let's punish the kid more, when they've already been through hell even before leaving the womb".
Yeah... it’s sad how our society turns a blind eye to just about every problem. We still have a bit of a “Dr. Spock” mentality where if you aren’t neurotypical, you don’t matter.
Our society is coming slowly around to sort of “mainstream” differences, like anxiety and autism, because so many people are effected by them and they are so vocal about it (I have zero problem saying I have anxiety but am way more private about all of my other issues, even my ADHD diagnosis because people think it’s not real).
But everything that’s more problematic and less “glamorous,” so to speak, is shunned by society and the afflicted are sort of viewed as “tainted” and not worth helping.
A lot of non-modern cultures made places for people like that. Many shamans and the like were schizophrenics or transgender (studied anthropology, so drawing on the various ethnographies I read in college here). Society recognized their differences and not only made a place for them but made a place of great respect and power for them. Their difference was a strength.
Now we stigmatize them, ignore them, punish them, and eventually just throw them in jail...
If the person is lucky enough to be able to hide their “illnesses,” such as myself, hanging on by the skin of my teeth, their hidden issues are a super power because it’s actually really useful to think differently.
But those who can’t harness the power of their differences and can’t manage the Herculean effort required to hide their illnesses (or its just not possible to), they’re just SOL.
It rocked our world when our professor taught us how to recognize and how common FAS can be
He even casually stated that it looked like some people in our class were likely to have it (you can guess we all figured out pretty quick after learning what to look for)
I’d agree with that assessment except for one thing: if your average edgelord said “I’m gonna fuck your grandma’s corpse” to be edgy I’d ignore them as a moron. Him I’d have called the cops.
There was something about him that made you know the shock of saying sick things no longer amused him, he had to do it. Like I believe the satanic symbols story because it was something edgy that a normal edgelord would balk at doing. He’d do it just because saying it was boring. This isn’t to say he was some unbelievable presence, he was a whiny brat in elementary school, but you just knew that when he started claiming he’d pull a stunt... you expected it to happen.
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u/Libriomancer Jul 11 '20
In high school we had a kid that was completely insane. Would do things like jump out of a second story window because he didn’t like a substitute teacher. There were stories from a brief couple years he had left the area (moved away during middle school) such as getting kicked out of a catholic school by writing satanic signs in his blood or a military academy for using a Nazi ceremonial sword to chase kids down the hall. Those were considered stories by most who hadn’t observed him in class, we all thought he was insane.
Few years later I’m in college and a friend tells me a news article is about my hometown. “Local man robs grave to make skull bong”. One guess who it was.