Mental illness can be hidden in any family, changing lives forever

By David McElroy · August 18, 2020

Mental health issues devastate lives and they destroy families, but a lot of people don’t take them seriously. Those aren’t “real problems,” they say.

I was sad to discover this evening that some kind of mental illness has taken the life of Marilane Carter, a Kansas pastor’s wife who’s been missing for two weeks. She was the mother of two small boys and a little girl, who you’ll see in this family photo, and she had been having unspecified mental issues.

About two weeks ago, she left home in Kansas to drive to Birmingham, where she planned to visit her pregnant sister — and she also planned to seek mental help.

Carter had graduated from divinity school here in Birmingham, so she felt comfortable asking for help here. But she never made it. Her family lost touch with her near Memphis and she completely disappeared. Searchers discovered her car today just west of Memphis and her body was still inside.

No foul play is suspected.

I don’t know why this particular story caught my attention so strongly, but I had feared Carter was dead. Something about her story touched me and made her seem like someone I might have known. Maybe even someone I might have liked.

Her husband is devastated. He broke the news tonight to their children — and those children’s lives are forever changed.

Mental illness can affect anyone, but a lot of its victims are good at hiding it. Even though you can’t see the mental issues going on inside a person, those issues are very real.

With love and proper treatment, many can find happiness and healthy lives. It’s something more people need to take seriously.

And maybe the next Marilane Carter will find the right treatment and return to a happy life. And maybe more children will grow up with their loving mother instead of wondering what really happened.

Let’s take care of each other — and let’s love each other. That’s half the battle with mental health.

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It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

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