THIS & THAT IV

In my travels through Target and elsewhere, I often see “service animals” that are not assisting blind people. There are more and more of these doggies wearing their distinctive orange banners. Sometimes they are so small they are carried around in shopping bags or ride in shopping carts and are indistinguishable (aside from the banner) from pets. There are organizations that will train dogs for various purposes and certify them, but there is apparently no standardized or required process. In other words, you can just buy a service dog banner, wrap it around Fido, and take him anywhere. And that's what people do. Many of them accompany their owners for unspecified psychological reasons.

Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, service animals cannot be denied admittance to areas of public accommodation, including airplanes, hotels and restaurants. A landlord may not refuse to rent to a person with a service animal even if the housing complex completely bans animals. Also, it is a violation of the Act to demand any sort of proof that the animal has been certified or trained.

I've never seen a man with one of these animals.

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We have now learned that Aaron Alexis, the madman who killed twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard, was being treated by the VA for PTSD, which almost certainly means he was taking an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) drug. This SSRI group of pharmaceuticals is now the most-common form of antidepressant drug prescribed.

James Holmes, the shooter in Aurora, Colorado, was on sertraline, a generic version of Zoloft. Eric Harris (Columbine) was taking Luvox. (Medical records for Dylan Klebold remain sealed.) Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech murderer, was also taking prescription medicines for psychological problems, though the name of the drug has never been released.

In fact, over the last twenty years, there have been dozens of cases involving crazed, motiveless homicide in which the killer was taking, or had just stopped taking, antidepressants. See:

http://www.cchrint.org/2012/07/20/the-aurora-colorado-tragedy-another-senseless-shooting-another-psychotropic-drug/

This link between murder and antidepressants has gotten little publicity, for a number of reasons. First, the information may be released weeks or months after the killings, or may not be released at all. We still do not know whether Adam Lanza was on any medication when he murdered twenty-six at Sandy Hook Elementary. Second, lunatic shootings always raise new cries for gun control measures, and this dominates political discussion and leftist media coverage in the immediate aftermath, leaving little room for other issues to break through the din.

About fifteen years ago, my doctor put me on the antidepressant Wellbutrin because it is reputed to reduce nicotine craving in those who are trying to stop smoking. It didn't seem to work that way for me, but I took it for a couple of months while I was trying to quit.

At the time, I lived in South Philly and I spoke to my sister on the phone almost every day, often about our parents and other family matters. I should mention that my relations with my sister have always been good. There may have been the odd brother-sister disagreement once or twice, but never any major fights or feuds. We like each other.

After six weeks of Wellbutrin, however, I began to detect a sinister turn in her. It was never anything I could put my finger on, but after our conversations, there was always something that stuck in my head. What did she mean by that remark, I wondered. I would brood about these calls for hours, and sometimes burst into tears. I became convinced she hated me and was mocking me. But why? Why did she hate me so? What had I done to deserve this?

Then one night, my wife found me crying and demanded to know what was wrong. Blubbering, I tried to explain how my sister had turned against me, though I was aware even as I was telling the story how ridiculous it must have sounded. She cut me off.

“It's that drug,” she said. “Stop taking it---now.” Two days later, my brain was working normally again. And I had learned something about psychotropic drugs.

If you start taking a new drug and it has some physical side-effect like insomnia or constipation or an upset stomach, you know it. It's obvious what is happening to you and you either learn to live with the side-effect or you stop taking the drug. Antidepressants may take a month or more to kick in, however, and when they do, the effects (good or bad) are all in your head, in your private thought processes. Most people have no way of examining, in some objective way, what is happening in their minds. I certainly didn't. There was no mechanism by which I could analyze my thinking and conclude: “Hey, Mike---you're insane.” Yet I was.

I was lucky. I had Sandy to tell me I was out of my mind. But many people do not. They live alone, or they isolate themselves and their thoughts from the scrutiny of friends and family members around them. With millions now taking antidepressant drugs, there will be people who suffer hideous mental side effects that no one notices. Until it is too late.

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My buddy works at Neiman-Marcus in Las Vegas, in the cosmetics department, where there are forty or fifty young ladies and gay guys, and him, all selling high-end lotions and make-up and creams to filthy-rich wives of filthy-rich gamblers. Recently, his mother died and he took a few days off.

When he returned, various of his co-workers came to him and pressed sympathy cards upon him, five or six in all, each signed by six or eight or ten people. With each card came cash. The total was about $400. He called me about it. He was puzzled. He had never run into this before.

“They're giving me money because my mother died?” he said to me. “I don't get it. It even pissed me off at first. Then I talked to my manager and she chilled me out, but I still don't quite get it.”

I have never run into this practice either, but since he told me about it, I have asked around. “Black people in West Philly do this,” I was told. “Italian families in the old neighborhood did the same thing,” someone else said.

Well, OK. There's a poverty angle that makes sense. It takes money to bury someone and throw a wake and miss some work, and if you're poor, it's nice that your friends and neighbors kick in a few bucks to help you out, and if you know everybody in the neighborhood you appreciate it and you do the same thing for them when the time comes.

But that's not the story in the Vegas Neiman-Marcus cosmetics department, is it? I'm not saying this group of retail salespeople is rich, but they have cars and they have apartments and they have nice phones and they hit the Vegas club scene once in a while. The sympathy cards with money in them is not about poverty. It's not like giving Luigi and Maria a few bucks in the “old neighborhood” when grampa Vincenzo dies.

It's not about poverty. It's about Vegas. Money is the language of Vegas, it's the lingua franca, it's the emotional currency. In a place where there is no “neighborhood,” where most people are driftwood, money and favors and tipping are how you communicate your bona fides, your status as a decent human being. Somebody gives you a lead on a job, well, you're going to take care of that guy. Or if somebody gets you and your girlfriend a comped meal at a fancy restaurant, a simple “thank you” isn't good enough. You arrange to get him a round of golf or a LeBron jersey, or something. It's how things are done. And if you don't do it, you're basically a jerk. In another place, you might say a novena for somebody or bring them a tray of macaroni and cheese. In Vegas, you tip the guy, one way or another. In Vegas, money is often not about money; money is also an instantly-understood and inoffensive way of expressing your emotions.

Friendships exist is Vegas as they do everywhere else. I'm not suggesting everyone is a stranger. But it's unlikely your best friend is somebody you went to elementary school with. It's unlikely you know his aunts and uncles, or the name of his first wife or whether he went to church as a kid, and if so, what church it was. This means that if your friend is experiencing one of those universal human events like a death in the family, and you want to make a gesture that says, “Hey, I'm human too and I care about you and I'm sorry about what happened,” your options are extremely limited. Some gesture from your traditions might be misunderstood. It might even offend. So you make a gesture that is pure Vegas.

You tip the guy.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki