10 11.15.20 Illustrations by Giacomo Gambineri
Cover photo illustration by Mike McQuadeThe Thread
Readers respond to the 11.1.20 issue.
RE: BASEBALL’S SILENT SEASON
Rowan Ricardo Phillips wrote about the
strangeness of the just-concluded baseball
season during the year of the pandemic.
Wow, I needed that. I’m a long-suff ering
Seattle Mariners fan but do love going to a
ballpark. This captures my mourning, my
loss, my hope to recapture the pure joy of
a sunny day, a crowd and some baseball.
(Maybe even good baseball, if I’m lucky.)
Rose, Seattle
Wait until next year. With any luck there
will be a vaccine. There will be crowds.
There will be minor-league baseball. There
will be Little League. There will be peanuts,
popcorn and Cracker Jack. We may still
need to wear masks, but it will all be fun.
William, Overland Park, Kan.
RE: THE ETHICIST
Kwame Anthony Appiah answered a letter
writer on dealing with a verbally abusive son.
I so sympathize with your predicament.
I lived with my mum, who was verbal-
ly abusive at times, often extremely so.
She was in her 80s. I thought she had
mental-health issues, and her doctor
prescribed her antidepressants, which
she refused to take. Eventually she was
diagnosed with dementia. The drugs
prescribed transformed her back to the
loving person she had always been. She’s
since died, but my biggest regret is not
getting her the medical help she needed
sooner. It’s so very hard when the patient
is determined not to cooperate. But it’s
the most sensible route to deal with the
cause of the behavioral problem you’re
Moved In. It’s a Nightmare. Can I Kick Him
Out?’’ Kwame’s argument rests on ‘‘very
few people are incapable of controlling
some of their behavior if the incentives
are right.’’ It cannot be assumed that the
mentally ill are capable of the same kind
of moral agency as the non-mentally-ill.
If the son has suff ered a psychotic break,
his choices are consigned to irrational
emotion and dissociative thinking. He is
not capable of perceiving reality correctly
or controlling his behavior. Her son may
meet the criteria for a mental-health crisis
unit to assess and provide an intervention.
This will begin medication, treatment and
continuity of care through community out-
reach. Many programs off er assistance with
housing. The consensus of New York Times
website readers seems to be that the son is
of an age to fend for himself, no matter his
mental state. The mother’s responsibility
is over — tough love rules. Kick him out.
Many people who have a mental illness do
not receive help. They end up homeless.
Gabrielle de Gray, CaliforniaWhat none of the commenters on this
article about the 30-something son at
home seem to have even an inkling of
understanding about is this: When you’re
a mother and your adult son suff ers from
mental illness, and your son is abusive in
the home, you know very, very clearly that
to evict him from the home is going to
doom him — to send him into a down-
ward spiral of couch-surfi ng, drug-taking,
unemployment, self-harm, homelessness
and death. Please stop giving advice about
something you haven’t a clue about. Walk
a mile in my shoes, guys, then come back
and make your tough-love judgments.
L.K., New York CitySend your thoughts to [email protected].‘There will
be peanuts,
popcorn and
Cracker Jack.
We m ay
still need
to wear masks,
but it will
all be fun.’THE STORY,
ON INSTAGRAM
Really striking
visual approach.
@iwakeupscreamingexperiencing. I truly hope you’ll fi nd
help and relief.
Ian Haworth, Manchester, EnglandThe humiliation and infantilization of the
family’s son in the fi rst story shouldn’t be
underconsidered. I quit my job in early
2019 to do a program to become a teacher
in New York and actually start my career,
and it’s not been easy, since the program
requirements didn’t allow me to work at all
for nine months last year. Frankly, the only
way I was able to do it was because I had
a small inheritance from my grandfather,
who passed away the previous winter. In
2020, I’ve been working as a substitute,
and while I’ve been lucky enough to fi nd
relatively consistent per-diem work from
January through September, I’ve still had
to ask my parents for help fi nancially, and
it makes me extremely uncomfortable.
If anything, my father’s assurances that I
don’t have to worry about food or rent, and
that I can always come to him for help if
I need it, make me more uncomfortable.
It’s not that I’m ungrateful to him. Just the
opposite: I genuinely don’t know what I’d
do without him in my life. But it doesn’t
make me feel good about myself to need to
ask for help in the fi rst place. I’m 33 years
old, and until last year I was completely
independent and self-suffi cient. I’ve gone
through periods where I don’t eat for four
or fi ve days in a row because I fi nd it so
humiliating to ask for help that I’d rather
be hungry a lot of the time. I’m not capa-
ble of being self-suffi cient right now, and
every time I have to ask for help, that fact
is rubbed in my face — not by my parents,
but in my head. It’s not fun.
Samuel, Brooklyn, N.Y.I was alarmed by the advice given in
the Ethicist column titled ‘‘My Adult Son