Mental Health and our Squirrel Population

I am hoping to not only give you the fifth installment of the dead animal series tonight, but I want to share with you a huge injustice in our society.

Nina and I were talking on the phone recently about squirrels and why they dart every where and are so skittish. As I have pondered this, I immediately came to the conclusion. It is because our squirrels suffer from schizophrenia. The reason they dart this way and that way and every other way is because they have too many voices in their heads telling them what to do and they aren't sure what to do. Constantly screaming in their heads they hear "Go left. Go straight. Go right. Find the nuts. Survive the ice age. Fly. Touch the power line." Could you imagine what you would do if 7 different voices were yelling at you at one time telling you to do 7 different things. You would dart every where too.

I know what you're thinking, "Sean not all squirrels dart everywhere and surely not all squirrels dart under the tires of my car."

It is for this thinking that I really wanted to talk to you. We have a health care crisis in this country. 90% of this crisis is because of the socio economical situation our country is in. Put Frankly - we have too many poor squirrels.

Let's first discuss the anti-thesis of poor squirrels: wealthy squirrels. Wealthy squirrels sit in the hollows of trees every day eating the nuts of poor squirrels. They exploit the poor squirrels for food, shelter and general labor. They put a lot of stress onto the less fortunate squirrels.

When mental illness creeps into the family of a wealthy squirrel, the problem is taken care of immediately. The troubled fur ball is put on a train and sent straight to a mental health facility where poor squirrels are once again exploited. The poor squirrels are sent out to gather the anti-psychotic medication that human patients tongue and then throw away. The less fortunate squirrels go out to gather these pills, securing them safely to their lips, and diligently bring them back to the squirrels from more wealthier families. This is why, when you see them, squirrels at mental health facilities are really really skittish - they have licks on very anti-psychotic medication even though they don't have mental illness. While we may never know how many licks it takes to get to the core of a Tootsie Roll, we know that low-income squirrels can get really really skittish on just a few licks of anti-psychotic medication. Needless to say, these exploited squirrels don't last long at this job. As long as the wealthy squirrels get their medications, though, most people don't really care.

I think it's now time to discuss the poor and low income squirrels and how this ties into the epidemic of schizophrenia. First off, the reason a squirrel becomes poor are pretty simple and can be divided into two categories: Drought and immigrant. Some squirrels start out as middle class squirrels but after a few years of droughts and low yield nut gathering, a middle class squirrel can quickly become a poor squirrel living tree to tree with no clue of when the next nut might drop on their head. The other reason a squirrel might be poor is because it is an immigrant. As everyone knows, the dream of every squirrel is to make it to the country where trees are plentiful and there are more nuts than what a squirrel would know what to do with. City squirrels are constantly thinking about ways to make it to the country and be in nuts heaven. Because squirrels know that there is a constant risk of schizophrenia in their lives, it is common for a squirrel to try to get out of the city and too the country before they go nuts. Being schizophrenic in the city is an automatic death wish. A million cars, a million people, and 7 voices in your head telling you what to do. It doesn't take long from the onslaught of mental illness before the squirrel is filling in a pothole downtown.

Because they are poor, often low income squirrels have no or little access to mental health treatment. They can't get rides out to the mental health facilities. And they can't get healthy members of their families to go get meds from mental health facilities (usually the healthy family member ends up going nuts from lack of a nutty diet and from holding anti-psychotic meds in it's mouth for as long as it would take to get the med from a mental health facility and get back to the sick psychotic relative).

So instead poor squirrels try to survive as long as they can. They try to use beer and meth to deal with their paranoia. Eventually, though, they lose this battle and you see them dodging and weaving between cars on the road.