Was Roxy's mother in a normal mental state?

Use this forum to discuss the August 2022 Book of the Month, "Wild World", by Peter S. Rush
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Victoria Ukamaka
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Re: Was Roxy's mother in a normal mental state?

Post by Victoria Ukamaka »

Stress and trauma affect people differently and at different degrees. She has been traumatized by past events and even confuses her present daughter for a different one. I don't think that is not normal. I think her trauma has caused her a mental damage.
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Post by Jelly_J »

Yeah, I think she was. However, religion sometimes shrouds our judgement. She paid attention to one daughter, who followed her words but she apparently didn't like Roxy, because she had a mind of her own. This coupled with religion was her fault.
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Post by Marsha JJ »

It did seem to me that Roxy's mother was suffering from mental illness. She demonstrated some behaviors that suggested this was the case. I found it sad that her relationship with Roxy was so strained.
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Post by Kira Bonita Reece »

Yes. After losing her husband and favorite daughter, she seemed to have went into a downward spiral, neglecting Roxy and everyone else around her. Turning to religion was probably her way of trying to heal and recover all she had lost.
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Post by bruin »

When Roxy's mother came home, saw that the pillows on her bed were rearranged, and figured out what Roxy and Steve did, she flipped out! I think that since she lost her daughter and husband, she needs to feel like she has some sense of control. She tries to control Roxy and realizes she can't. If she can't control Roxy, then it's as if she has no control over her own life. I think she is just so hurt by the tragedies that happened to her that she needs to find a way to control Roxy or let the church control her.
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Post by Regard003 »

I don't think the woman is mentally alright. She does even know which of her daughter Roxy is. Even for an overly religious person, she didn't act alright
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Post by NancyDrew12 »

I think its absolutely possible she could be suffering mentally after the death of her child. I think the death of ones child would leave behind many scars and even cause a rift between any other children the person may have.
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Post by Soshell Williams-Witter »

Yes, I think she was suffering from some mental illness, which is expected after such emotional distress in losing a partner and then a daughter soon after. Her behaviour just did not seem entirely rational.
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Post by Mistie Bickford »

I think Roxy's mother had some mental illness going on. After reading the interactions between her and Roxy, Roxy's mother didn't seem to realize what was real and what wasn't. Roxy's mother's grip on her faith seemed to be the only thing keeping her going, which was truly unfortunately when she had a daughter she could have gripped on to.
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Post by Missing Person »

Before I get into why I think Roxy´s mother´s behavior was not in any way influenced by her past trauma, I´m going to briefly discuss why I think mental illnesses don´t exist. I think a mental illness could not possibly be the cause of Roxy's mother's behavior because I don't think mental illnesses exist. In my next post, I will explain what I think is the actual cause of her mother's behavior.

If you read some of the books of Thomas Szasz, a former psychiatrist, you might also be convinced that mental illnesses don´t exist. He uses a lot of clearly thought-out logic to explain why the way in which most if not all societies have formulated and defined most mental illnesses has nothing to do with science. In his books, he describes the concept of mental illness as a tool for social control exercised by political institutions and by whole societies.

For example, we don't say children can't pay attention in class because schools are boring. Instead, we say that children who can't pay attention in class have ADHD and need to be medicated. Not paying attention at school no matter how boring your classes are is socially unacceptable and that is, in my opinion, part of the reason why bored or hyperactive children are accused of having ADHD. The other half of the ADHD story is gluten toxicity: some children are hyperactive and can't concentrate because a protein from bread called gluten might be poisoning their brains.

First of all, the mind cannot be sick independently of the body. You cannot experience mental problems without those mental problems originating from the brain. A diabetic will experience manic mood swings because of hypoglycemia. My father own would scream and become very aggressive when his type 2 diabetes was out of control whenever he experienced hypoglycemia. But my father´s aggression wasn´t the product of a mental illness that did not originate from some physical problem in his body. Once his diabetes lessened and his blood sugar was under better control, his violent mood swings disappeared. I think most if not all of the so-called "mental illnesses" that actually exist and are not figments of the pharmaceutical industry's imagination are by-products of physical injuries to the human body. The exception to this would be PTSD, but even that may be solely caused by some external or internal injury to the human body. I just don't know enough about PTSD to provide an alternative explanation for its cause.

Harvard psychiatrist and medical doctor, Christoper M. Palmer, recently wrote a book called Brain Energy in which he explains how ketogenic diets have resolved a wide variety of so-called mental illnesses. If your supposed mental illness is caused by a defect in your diet, then how could your illness be a purely "psychological" problem?

There is also a long Wikipedia article on the hypothesis that lead poisoning is the primary cause of extremely violent crime in the United States. I've also seen some research papers that suggested that a lot of American serial killers suffered from serious head trauma. It could be these and other physical injuries to the brain that transformed otherwise "normal" (maybe hot-tempered) individuals into extremely violent individuals who could not control their own behavior. Since the start of the industrial revolution, a lot of toxic chemicals from manufacturing plants and cars have poisoned the water, the air, and our food. All these toxic chemicals may be the primary or secondary cause of a wide variety of so-called mental illnesses.

In my opinion, psychiatry is a religious pseudoscience that espouses a dualist perspective. In other words, psychiatry promotes the idea that the mind is a separate entity from the body. If you are a religious person then you have a dualist perspective and believe that the mind escapes the body after the body dies. If you agree with the assertion that both psychiatry and traditional mainstream religions have a dualist perspective, then you have to concede that psychiatry is just one of many mainstream religions in the modern world. Dualism is not a scientific idea and that's why I'm saying psychiatry has to be thought of as another religion.

If you consider yourself a dualist, then let me add that there have been experiments conducted to prove the existence of a literal human soul. You can find some Wikipedia articles documenting attempts to weigh the human soul the moment a person dies. The weight of the tested subjects remained the same immediately after their deaths and that information was used by observers of such experiments to conclude that there was, in fact, no human soul.

And finally, I would like to say that Thomas Szasz famously argued that the concept of mental illnesses is as useful for describing the problems of human behavior as demon possession. In other words, people are "possessed" by mental illnesses in much the same way that other people are possessed by demons or angry spirits. Szasz's reference to demon possessions in his analysis of the phenomenon of mental illnesses was no accident of history. You can find some scientific articles talking about how many of exorcisms in the medieval era may have been instances of priests trying to exorcise non-existent demons from children and adults with epilepsy. Now that epilepsy has become a very famous brain disease, exorcism cases have coincidentally gone down.
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Post by Missing Person »

I think Roxy's mother may have become a lot more religious after the death of her husband and her other daughter. Roxy's mother may have felt that he mortality was under grave threat and the solution to that threat was to become more religious and pray harder to God to ensure that she doesn't die anytime soon and to ensure that when she does die that she will go to heaven and not to hell. And in the process of intensifying her religious beliefs, she became more committed to the idea that sex outside marriage is an intolerable sin. But Wild World never describes makes it clear if Roxy was always very religious or if she became more religious over time.

I would have preferred to see Roxy's mother become more religious over time after the deaths of her family members so that the narrative would have a stronger sense of causality.

Nevertheless, I don't think you need to explain her selfish behavior toward Roxy by saying that she has a mental illness. I think her intolerant religious beliefs could be the source of her selfish mindset. I think the narrative best supports the idea that Roxy's mother's religious beliefs have made her so selfish that she is willing to throw her own daughter out of her house. The narrative in no way suggests that Roxy's mother might have a mental illness unless you want to describe Roxy's mother's religiosity as a mental illness.
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Post by Missing Person »

Would you have also thought that Roxy's mother had a mental illness if she had any other prejudice other than her Christian prejudice against fornicators? For example, if Roxy's mother had discovered that Roxy was a lesbian and decided to throw Roxy out of the house because Roxy is a lesbian, would have also thought that Roxy's mother had a mental illness as a result of past trauma like losing her other daughter to cancer? Or what if Roxy's mother threw Roxy out of her house after she discovered that she has a black boyfriend?

I feel that saying that Roxy's mother has a mental illness ignores the fact that the basis of Roxy's mother's actions is her religious prejudice and I think the author's intention was to make readers believe that Roxy's mother's behavior was the direct result of her religious belief.

Is your post's question about the authorial intent behind Roxy's mother's behavior or is it about the plausibility of the mother's behavior?
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Post by britcott30 »

Yes, I think so. When there is no trauma, then no mother will treat their children very differently like that. Even she doesn't consider Roxy as her daughter.
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Post by Fredrick Felix Mnjala Maneno »

She was probably hung up on her other daughter's death. She had not moved on according to what she does when Roxy leaves and promises never to come back.
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Post by Atieno Magero »

I don't think Roxy's mum was in the right mental state. The way she behaved, treated Roxy and some of the things she said made it seem like she was going through some things with her mental health.
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