Dear god Help

Your friend is busted and it's not ever going to get better due to the circumstances that he was raised with. Without serious professional help he's only going to wallow in his mother's own bad decisions and influence like an echo chamber greenhouse. You can either drop him and hang with the rest of your friends or drop the rest of your friends and hang with him. I can already tell you what I'd do but this is up to you and the choices are obvious.

Sorry mate, but Kevin isn't going to fix himself, and you certainly aren't either. You can either wreck your life trying to be everything he and his mother should have been from the start, or you can cut your losses and save your own sanity. It's an awful choice to have to make, but I've seen this before, and making his problems your problem will cost you absolutely everything. You don't have to cut him out completely, but if you don't draw the line somewhere and say "this is not working and it needs to stop" you will never get out and the whole thing will burn down around you.

OP Here. I guess I know what I need to do, it's just kinda hard to wrestle with. Thanks guys for being willing to listen, it means a lot to even hear a response right now.

30 is fast approaching for him and I. Last year I started helping take care of his mom since she's getting older and it's added to the stress.

I want to help someone I consider family, especially after my own issues, and I try my best to be kind an accepting, but it's such a mental strain.

Again, I want to thank everyone for replying. The honesty was needed.

you can't have someone who doesn't even attempt to fix his life and mental health bring you down.That's for sure.

you can choose to help him by doubling up on your efforts to bring him to a specialist.I can't help but share his mom's distrusts of expensive pill-dispenser doctors, but a therapist that helps him realize that he should socialize should be the first proper attempt.My psychologist didn't fix my problems, but it helped me realize exactly what they were and what i needed to do to solve them. it's a great help.I think you should work on her mother accepting her son's need of help first, so that it will be easier convinging him.

you can choose to help him by fixing his problems directly. "be his therapist"(within the limits of what a friend can do), train him into not behaving in a weird way, help him get a sexual partner and socialize more. that would be an act of charity and requires incredible effort, but it sounds better than keeping a problem friend for 30 more years.It can only get worse as he gets older, you know?

you can choose to burn all the bridges with him. that might be the only option if he refuses to improve.it think it's the best option regardless, but be aware that if he does not have other friends the results might be a bit extreme, with him getting strongly depressed.

That's my Biggest fear. Of all the friends he's had, I'm all that's left.
A mutual friend tried to get him to a bar for two years and gave up. His ex-girlfriend used him so he refuses to see anyone again. His mother is in poor health and he has difficulty with that too.

You're a good person and you don't deserve to be chained to somebody who doesn't realise the value of the gift you've given him.

You don't need to cut ties, but you do need to make clear that you aren't going down with the good ship Kevin, if that's what it comes to.

It's not your fault if his mother is a religious nut who raised an insane son, and you only get one shot at life and you should spend it for yourself.
You're going to get sucked into a situation that will last forever, because you along have no power to change things if this person has zero will to change his ways in the first place. Give him the talk, tell him to see a doctor and get himself fixed, and keep playing with your friends.

You don't have to burn bridges with him completely unless he overreacts and acts like a child - which he probably will. Just separate your personal life from him or you'll get swallowed whole. Carefully think about his behavior, is he a social / emotional vampire? If he's damaging you you need to take distance.

You've got to decide if you're obligated to be his caretaker (and by extension his mother's) for the rest of your life. Are you prepared to live every day like you have been? Do you feel responsible for elements you have no control over? His life might turn to shit if you start to distance yourself from him but are you willing to let him turn yours to shit on the other end of the spectrum?

Literal spectrum in this case desu

I have a sibling with an entirely different issue, but one with similar impacts on his life (in my situation, sever schizophrenia), the difference is that he had access to a highly supportive family, as well as medical and psychiatric support.. He still has issues, but was able to be a functioning member of society all the same.
In your case, unfortunately, there is probably just no hope for him. These kinds of issues can be reduced in severity with proper support, but only if it is caught early. People get stuck in their way, and people with his kind of issues even more so. He is a sad victim of anti-intellectualism. I do not believe "fixing" him is possible at this point. I should note, that I am not advocating giving him up, that is for you to decide, I'm just giving my opinion on the situation at hand, and that opinion is that the choice on hand is not between fixing him and giving him up, but rather, giving him up or accepting what he is.

this is the sort of thing that happens when the government refuses to install proper safety nets for the mentally ill and autistic. people fall through the cracks. I'm struggling to get help myself. If you need to break it off with him dont blame yourself blame the system.

Aren't Americans vehemently against public health? In this case it isn't even relevant since it's mostly about them being extremely religious

Only part of america. Consequently, that part of america tends to be the part that is religious.

I'm actually australian but the mental health system is so badly managed and up its own ass you cant get anywhere. I struggle to imagine how bad it must be over in america.

We're not against public health, it's just that our idea of public health is slightly modified from the classic "flog them until the demons go away" methods of yore. Same thing with our prison system really.

Hey OP. Everyone's given you advice already, and they've pretty much covered the bases, but I just wanted to tell you to hang in there. No matter how tough life gets, no matter how insurmountable things seem, no matter what decision you make for this difficult problem, I want you to know that you're a good person who seems lovely and I have the utmost respect for you.

what he said stay strong op.

you might want to consider contacting adult protective services if you chooses to permanently distance yourself. I wouldnt normally suggest that but it sounds like Kevin and his mother are a binary black hole. if no one does anything there could be serious health and safety risks for them.

good luck man hard shit. just remember you are worth giving yourself your own life, if that makes sense.

having Autism in australia is fucking debilitating, let me tell you that.

I know that feel user

You don't go unless it's an emergency, and even then you hesitate because of the debt that will crush you for the rest of your life. Mental health isnt covered and what little there is, is shit.

yeah, being goddamn smart while being treated like a kid who needs a wheelchair to get around is dismal. everyone treats you like a gibbering idiot, especially as their all a bunch of country/city idiots.
it doesnt help that im lonely either.

I went to the literal hospital suicidal, they made me sit alone for 3 hours and once it was midnight gave me diazepan and told me to fuck off while I was still sobbing and threatening to kill myself.

Yeah, I've seen what passes for mental health care here in Britain; unless I can go private, I'd never want to even touch it.

What a shitty situation.

I still fail to wrap my head around this face of the USA (this and the 2nd emendment craze really)... I paid about 30€ for my first psychiatric evaluation (taxes) and after that I got an exemption so I don't have to pay anymore for life, medicines are in the range of 2-6€ per box every 2 weeks. My biological therapy for Crohn's Disease is completely free, for life again. Visits for my chronic pathologies are free. I also have sinusitis so I'll have to do a cranial MRI which will cost me about 30€.

There is no way I could have afforded any of that otherwise, like wtf I would've died or something. How can a civilized country not have a public health system?!

If God wanted these people to live happily/healthily/at all he would have made it so. They probably did something terrible to deserve it in a past life anyway, they should just pray harder.

...

IN GOD WE TRUST

okay I'll take the bait, If we did something terrible in a past life, what use is punishment if we cant remember what we did wrong and repent. if this is the way god works he's either an idiot or an evil man.

No that user is right, thats the basic thinking of every nasty fuck who votes against it. A whole lot of sociopaths and evil fucks infest America and will vote to fuck over others for a few scraps instead of helping everyone.

Welcome to Christianity 101. You're being punished for something someone else did a long time ago.

I've always thought the same thing, although in Britain my experiences have been somewhat less shiny. Isn't that kind of sweeping quality of life improvement that would be unsustainable otherwise most of the point of having a fucking government?

Of course you enjoy not having to pay for that shit. Now remember that most Americans are much more individualistic than your average European and literally don't give a fuck if you just died in the streets as long as its not on their property. Of course they don't want to pay for some lower class faggot's Crohn disease.

Have you met Republican Jesus? He is very much an idiot and a very evil mangod. And is really fucking popular in rural America.

I understand that, but what really puzzles me is how do they reconcile that line of reasoning with Christian values

The double think is strong.

I don't really understand my country's stance on government. A government exists to serve the people and if it fails to do that then it achieves nothing and is worthless but here in America it's often treated as little more than a military to defend from the boogeyman of the week as well as to enforce laws against things I don't like because my tastes are objective. Where is the government supposed to get the power for such a thing? Not from me, what do I look like, some kind of commie?

God is in control of all things so if people are miserable then God must will it because if he wanted it any other way, he'd change it. If that fails then we can pull the whole "Well it's all pointless since you'll go to heaven when you die, unless you're a SINNER in which case your suffering doesn't matter anyway" card. Really this whole thing is a way to get out of doing stuff or feeling empathy.

American christians are highly selective about what part of the religion they follow. Ultimately it is an excuse to behave in certain ways while ignoring anything they don't like about it.

I'll tell you a secret: 'Religious' people usually just get random bits and pieces of the religions' teachings through memetic osmosis and then bend these to justify what they're already doing anyway.

tl;dr

government sucks, religion sucks everyone wants to die

I'll preface this by saying we obviously don't have the entire picture by your description and it's absurd to try to diagnose someone over the internet but there's obviously something going on with him.

Getting him a referral to a psychiatrist for a diagnosis would be a powerful step in helping him deal with whatever it is.

Beyond that all you can do is act like an adult yourself.

If you're running the game. The simplest way to describe it is to treat him as though he's a child. Be firm, clear but also accept that it isn't his fault the way he is so there's no point getting angry about it etc.

Ask for what you want. Even if it makes things uncomfortable.

Attention is currency. Once you've told him you don't want to engage in the argument further ignore him. Do not respond. Continue the game.

If he becomes belligerent ask that he leave until he can calm down and return. good luck

I've always wondered why Britain has a military with the gear it has. I suspect there's very few polities around that a smaller military + hiding behind America's grossly oversized one and our other allies won't be able to beat but that adding two empty carriers will. I mean, either you need no carriers to do the job or your enemy is so oversized that they won't do a huge amount, we're not a superpower anymore. Then again, I'm no general.

Probably the same reason Britain still has a queen. It's just for old times' sake.

A lot of people won't go to that even if it's cheap/free, because it gets you put on a list that often curtails your otherwise inalienable rights.

Inalienable* rights

Yes, that's what I said.
There are places where if you are on record as having ever gone to any kind of mental health service, you lose rights. Doesn't matter if it was involuntary, doesn't matter if they found nothing, doesn't matter if the record shows that you got over it or were misdiagnosed. You went at all, you lose rights.

But you can still buy tons of guns and go shoot up a mall regardless

every time there's a shooting people will say
"guns aren't the problem its mental illness" but you never see these people push for more accessible health care

Because it sucks

It sucks basically being blackmailed into paying for broken retards because otherwise they will shoot up a school

And because that thought sucks so much, people just forget about it three days after each mass shooting.

Because the actual situation is that, instead of making health care more accessible, they want to make the existing system fuck law abiding citizens more. Instead of making it easier to get help, they take more and more rights away from anyone who tries to get help, making less and less people willing to want it.
Of course, not being able to legally buy a gun has never stopped anyone, ever because there are countless people willing to sell guns outside of the system, and a significant number of guns that end up back in illegal circulation even after being picked up by the police and locked away.

>It sucks basically being blackmailed into paying for broken retards because otherwise they will shoot up a school
This is the most twisted mindset I've ever seen, holy shit this is how Americans think

>twisted
why?
I don't give a fuck about you. I want to live my life and not be burdened by any random retard. I'm absolutely willing to organize with other people for mutual benefit, i.e. a private insurance where only people who contribute get payouts, or would be if these weren't as cancerous as they are in the states. But being strongarmed into financing some Sperg who probably should have been aborted in the first place, who has never contributed positively to anything and never will, but is actually likely to cause harm? Why should I LIKE that concept?

It's a better mindset than punishing everyone except the criminals for what criminals do. The big media pushed mass shootings are literally insignificant statistically. If you really wanted to fix gun violence, you start by dealing with inner city black on black gang violence. Literally, if you just removed that, America would have about the same gun violence rate as most of Europe.
And gun deaths don't even rate in the top 10 causes of death in America. Suicides are down at slot number 10, but that includes all forms of suicide.

Bloody expensive nostalgia, and I actually like all our assorted weird traditions. £6.2 billion is another 5% on the NHS, and that money actually does something other than look completely fucking awesome.

Thing is the whole "let's not talk about this now, here's a scapegoat problem we're not going to try to solve anyway" thing is so blindingly obvious I'm distinctly surprised nobody's just stood up and chewed them out for it explicitly without carefully maneuvering around each other's buzzwords. Maybe I'm used to British politics where bitching at each other in public is absolutely the norm, but the Tories have been doing something similar with regards to Brexit for the last year and they get slammed for it for half an hour every Wednesday, and then ridiculed for their incompetence by joke candidates in elections.
I shouldn't be so confused, since fuming rage covered by a thick layer of etiquette is how each third of Britain deals with the other two-thirds, but somehow our governments have swapped cultures somewhere.

Here we have exhibit A as to why America is fucked up. There are people out there who think you literally deserve to die for being born "wrong."

>Why should I LIKE that concept?
Because it raises the living standards for everyone? People like you are why the US is such a shithole.

Removing rights from everyone never raises living standards. Britain and Australia both saw huge jumps in violent crime after tightening their gun laws, but then it went back to following the same trend it was already following, meaning they gained nothing except a temporary spike in violence, and lost a whole slew of rights.

Welcome to America, we have zero concept of ethics and the progression of society. As long as it doesn't bother me or my own we couldn't give less of a fuck, at least until it DOES bother us and then it's a fucking crisis. Truly the pinnacle of the NIMBY lifestyle.

We're not even talking about gun rights, we're talking about the shitass mental health system.

No, the US is a shithole because nothing is done about the most prevalent sources of violence, while insignificant sources are used as excuses to push agendas.

Gonna let you in on a really big secret:
A huge amount of welfare and healthcare in America is directly funded by churches. You don't hear about it much because the churches that like trumpeting to the world about how awesome they are are the ones that buy their pastors private jets, but the other ones, the ones that are actually Christian, often have pretty big rolls of people they're caring for. They don't think the poor should be hung out to dry, they think charity is better if it's not forced.

>We're not even talking about gun rights, we're talking about the shitass mental health system.
They're linked, because the health system is used as a weapon against gun rights, which means there's huge backlash against it. Maybe if they didn't continuously try to weaponize it, people wouldn't be against it so much.

because far more of the taxes you pay go to the wealthy and the already over bloated military budget then to those who need help. helping 'retards' is not wasting nearly as much money as tax cuts that put money into the pockets of those who have never worked a day in their lives. your mindset that people deserve to die if not useful is not only despicable but it isnt even consistent.

>Removing rights from everyone never raises living standards.
Oh god you're probably one of those people who thinks that having police is communist aren't you? Jesus christ why do I argue on Veeky Forums

Good question. I'm kind of wondering why you're having this argument in Veeky Forums.

Oh yes, because you're a retarded asshat.

The whole topic at hand is that nobody wants to use the existing mental health system BECAUSE it takes away your rights. Gun rights and a stronger mental health system are entirely compatible. The strengthening of one is not inherently an attack on another.

>a weapon against gun rights
fuckin lol
the point I was trying to make is you cant have liberal gun laws and not keep an eye on the mentally ill. so either get rid of guns or help people who feel the need to use them violently. you cant have your cake and eat it too.

That's a nice strawman you've got there, but you should probably put it back in the field before the crows come around.

The government is currently abusing the shit out of the mental health system that is in place. Why should they be trusted to extend it?

>because far more of the taxes you pay go to the wealthy and the already over bloated military budget then to those who need help

Whoops - you've only been looking at the discretionary budget. You need to look at the total. About 2/3 of the entire US government complex is redistributionary welfare funding.

The military is slightly over a quarter. The US performs a imperialist military-subsidy role for an entire hemisphere, so if you unilaterally reduce it, keep in mind that the rest of the world will be forced to reduce their welfare and increase their military budgets.

What? If you're born as as giga AIDS cripple and make it on your own and become a productive member of society, great for you. I don't care whether thee people live or die, I just don't want any financial obligations due to them.

It lowers my standard of living though. And that of every other productive member of society.

just because one thing is broken doesn't mean we should break it any more.

>That's a nice strawman you've got there, but you should probably put it back in the field before the crows come around.
I'll take that as a yes

You've known this cunt for 21 years and didn't realise he was autistic?

What was that site made by that one nerd about Laws of Friendship or something like that? With lots of statements like "Friendship is not commutative" and things like that. That sounds like what OP would be interested in.

As far as foreigners remotely psychoanalyzing American medical culture, they probably don't understand that traditionally American healthcare has been in the hands of voluntary organizations. Churches, community groups, fraternal organizations, Americans used to be famous for participating in things. Even today, the Shriners promise to treat any child.

The problem isn't that Americans aren't adopting European healthcare culture, it's that they're abandoning American healthcare culture.

>entire hemisphere
plus Europe and the Pacific Rim, all coincidentally places that don't have to worry about defense and can fund massive public health systems

"Help" is a strong word for mandatory and involuntary government meddling in what rights you do and do not get to have. It's not even a slippery slope because the system being described is already at the bottom of the theoretical hill.

So, by that line of reasoning, you think the government should be funding social programs, food banks, and housing programs? Because that's the way to address so-called "black-on-black crime"

I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.

I have a question for you. A child is born with a treatable, but deadly disease. His parents can't afford to buy him the medication, and as a child, obviously he can't provide for himself.

Does the child deserve to die?

>It lowers my standard of living though.
Knowing that you exist lowers my standards of living.

There's very little empirical evidence in favor of this, while programs like stop-and-frisk have been extremely effective. In fact, removing welfare programs that encourage single motherhood would probably be the single most effective thing to do for the American black community.

Sure, but not in the shitty ways they already do. Food banks are generally okay, but low income housing programs are practically scams, and a lot of work programs are easily played as well. Gang culture is a bigger problem anyway, and not really something the government can address. There are groups of people who don't think you deserve any respect unless you've been to prison at least once for violence or drugs, and those people raise kids who believe the same things.

Under the current system, the government will bend over backwards to help that kid.

You are avoiding the question
Say it straight, cmon

Exactly. What you call 'caring' for other people is just another original sin type thing. 'Oh you are healthy and have money so you should CARE and pay for other people'.

>Does the child deserve to die?
Does anyone?

Because I would abolish your autismbux if I could?

wow you're pretty good at pulling statistics out of your ass aren't you? humans are an inherintly altruistic species because caring for other reaps its rewards. you have been raised in a society that taught you to be competitive and selfish with a fatal misuinderstanding of "survival of the fittest" . helping others may open you up to being hurt but if you had any redeeming qualities you would take that risk.

Do what do YOU think? Is it okay that wealth was allocated from a source that wasn't himself, or his parents to save him?

Nah, it's because you're a fucking awful human being who's wasting my oxygen.

Your question is retarded. Life isn't 'fair', most people don't 'deserve' to die when they do. In fact, it's basically retarded religion-tier logic to think about death in categories like 'deserving'

Forcing others to help under penalty is not being altruistic. At best, it's extortion.

shrinershospitalsforchildren.org/
intermountainhealthcare.org/locations/primary-childrens-hospital/
Here are two hospital systems provided for by voluntary donations that will help that kid, BEFORE government assistance programs.