The Next Great Mental Health Crisis May Have Arrived

Author's preface: This story is primarily targeted to my neighbors in the small community where I live, but as a warning to the larger global community I felt I should go public with the issue that has hit my own neighborhood very hard. To any of my neighbor's who may be reading this I say congratulations for taking this very difficult first step toward healing. Know that I am here to support you in whatever limited way I can. To everyone else, I hope you can take what you learn from this story back to your own communities and spread the word. This is a global issue and the more awareness we raise the better. We can get through this, but only if we work together and know the signs to look for so we can quickly identify those who truly need help before it is too late save them.

In my own community in Baja California a mental health crisis has reared its ugly head. It has been building and spreading slowly but surely since the moment I first moved here close to two years ago now. In retrospect I should have seen the signs earlier, but alas, I had no clue what was happening. Like most people I had never heard of NADDs or Foraminis Ablepsia cum Celeritas Gibba Minium until very recently when I happened to stumble across a description of the only recently described disorder while browsing through the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). There I saw an entry in section II on Neighborhood Association Dissociative Disorders (NADDs) and was intrigued since I had been feeling uneasy about the current mental health of some of my neighbors for some time. Moreover, my neighborhood happens to have a totally dysfunctional neighborhood association which seemed entirely coincidental until I saw this section in the DSM-V . A lightbulb immediately went off in my mind. Could this be the explanation for the bizarre behaviors, attitudes, and practices I had been observing amongst many of my communities' members over the past year and a half? Immediately I turned to that section and was stunned with what I found there.

Foraminis Ablepsia cum Celeritas Gibba Minium is Latin medical mumbo jumbo for Pothole Blindness with Speed Bump Obsessive Disorder. Most often this is abbreviated as PB with SBOD for obvious reasons. The Neighborhood Association Dissociative Disorders are a complex group of conditions of which PB with SBOD is only one, but in my own neighborhood it is by far the most prominent and worrisome. The primary symptoms are bizarre and puzzling and quite frankly hard to believe. Even as I type them out here my mind protests that it can't be possible. How could people think so illogically, believe things that are so obviously incorrect, and act in ways totally inconsistent with reality? And yet they do. The evidence is all around me, and plain as the nose on my face. In my own neighborhood the roads are strewn with potholes, some as large as six feet wide and up to two or three feet deep, plus a seemingly infinite array of shapes and depths of medium and smaller sized potholes. All the streets are affected, and some have become nearly impassible. But, even under these conditions, there are a large subset of persons in my community who do not actually see them (pothole blindness), or at least they behave as if they do not, for they are obsessed with putting in speed bumps on every possible street (speed bump obsessive disorder). Take a second and take a deep breath.

You may have to go back and reread that as I am sure your mind is likely reeling, struggling to process exactly what you just read. It is so far outside the norm of what any sane, rational human being might consider plausible that it makes it almost impossible to comprehend, and yet I swear to you it is true. Our streets have so many potholes that to drive faster than 5 miles per hour is to risk seriou back or head injury and likely signficant steering or suspension damage, and yet, these (clearly mentally ill) persons are advocating and actually building and installing new speed bumps on almost every street. Not only that, they are at the same time not repairing any of the existing potholes. Spending money that could be used to fix them on totally unneeded and ridiculously stupid speed bumps. I need to stop there myself and catch my own breath. My own brain is about to suffer a meltdown. I am attaching images of the relevant sections from the DSM-V for posterity. It makes for some seriously grim reading. I just hope, for all our sakes, this illness stays confined to my neighborhood for if it spreads, God help us all.