Brian Windhorst reported today that Delonte has officially been charged with two counts of carrying a concealed firearm - both of which are only misdemeanors in D.C. BW also reports that in the past, athletes who have pled guilty to this same charge have been hit with 5-7 game suspensions by the league. That’s 3-5 games less than Rashard Lewis’ pending hiatus for unwittingly taking a banned substance, if you’re looking for a reference point.
This is certainly good news for D. But he’s not exactly out of the woods yet - and in some sense, he never will be.
By no means am I speaking for Mike or my dad when I say this, but for me, one of the saddest aspects of this story has been what it’s revealed about the lack of understanding out there for people with serious mental and emotional disorders.
Go over to Cleveland.com and take a look at the comments about Delonte’s arrest, and you’ll see that the crowd primarily breaks into two factions: people who want to crack jokes about it, and people who want to call Delonte “stupid” or bash his decision-making skills in some capacity.
By no means am I an expert on mental health, but at various times in my past, I’ve had to do research on and deal with people who have had documented emotional conditions. The most long-term exposure I’ve had comes from being the son of a Special Education teacher. While I may not have a ton of specific technical knowledge from this, I have learned one simple fact: living life with an emotional disorder is a hell of a lot more complicated than many people want to believe.
To my understanding, the big public relations fight for mental health professionals and patients has to do with very basic misunderstandings. On the one hand, there’s a misconception among many people that depression / bipolar disorder is about making choices. For instance, they believe that a depressive’s problem is that they’re unwilling to take a ‘glass half full’ approach to life, and that if they just refocused themselves mentally and stopped pouting, everything would be okay.
Even worse, there’s a belief that anyone who continues to struggle is at fault themselves.
The reality is that depression is an illness with detectable physiological signs and symptoms. It’s something that happens in the patient’s brain, but it happens because of chemical imbalances that have nothing to do with whether or not the person wants to believe that it’s going to be sunny or cloudy when they get out of bed. This is what “mood-stabilizing” drugs do: try to rebalance the chemicals in a patient’s system to counteract the naturally occurring problems.
In that sense, mental illness is no different than any chronic physical illness, like asthma or diabetes or multiple sclerosis. Think about how much of an idiot someone would look like if they tried to bag on someone with muscular dystrophy for not being able to walk normally.
Even if the general public gets past the hurdle of acknowledging bipolar disorder as an actual medical illness, they still often resort to the idea that someone like Delonte goes wrong because they’re “off their meds.” But even that’s an oversimplification.
The National Institute of Mental Health notes “to date, there is no cure for bipolar disorder.” Drug treatments and therapy are both used simultaneously to try to treat patients. But often times, there isn’t just one magic pill that a doctor can prescribe - not even just to complement the counseling aspect of treatment.
Instead, patients have to be frequently tested so doctors can understand what’s happening internally / chemically with that patient over time. Drug therapies often have to be altered again and again, either by adjusting dosages or changing the actual drugs being described. It’s a constant balancing act that’s affected by physiological elements in the patient’s body, the effects and longevity of the current prescriptions, and the life that person has outside of treatment. Any one element of the equation can cause a ripple effect through the entire medical strategy.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just bad times that can bring on particularly severe mood swings or behavior in depressives, either. As Windhorst notes in today’s article, Delonte has admitted that he often struggles the most when things in his life are actually going well. This is counter-intuitive, even to those who are completely willing to try to see things through the eyes of the affected person. I would be completely out of my depth to try to explain why this is, but it’s a great illustration of the fact that emotional disorders are a lot more complex than a lot of people realize.
We may never find out where Delonte was riding last Friday when he got pulled over. He could have a perfectly legitimate, innocent reason to be carrying those guns - going to a shooting range or just someplace secluded to take target practice, heading to a licensed gun dealer to sell them off…who knows what else? There are a thousand theories being propagated by a thousand people trying to read between the lines of what’s out there in the public record.
However, the one thing I’m sure of is that it’s not as simple as a “spoiled pro athlete” making a stupid decision.
For the sake of Delonte and the ~6M people in the US alone who share his condition, let’s all give the guy some respect. Most signs point to him being an honorable man struggling with a problem that he didn’t start and can’t control without serious professional help and a huge amount of daily effort.
The only strictly ”idiotic” or “stupid” thing about this story is that a bunch of mentally healthy people are falling over themselves for an opportunity to demonize someone they’re making no effort to understand. I’m not surprised by it - just thoroughly, thoroughly disappointed.
From the entire Jose Mesa Is Dead staff: we’re with you, Red.
-T
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