I, too, thought when you mentioned her before that she was your son’s SO. It’s not much better that she’s your ‘more or less’ step-daughter, of course.

(Threads looks at new DIL, thanks lucky stars…….)

The woman in our example was raised by a mother in my generation — and we were brought up to believe that a woman served a man in every way, and the man (a.k.a. “the breadwinner”) took care of her and their children. When I left my husband, at the age of 48 (!), my father advised me to stay for monetary reasons, and when I refused to do so, he looked at me scornfully and said, “Where will you ever find another man?” In his world a woman had to “have” a man to survive…and for my mother, that was entirely true. She couldn’t earn enough to keep a roof over her head. The obverse of that was that the woman did expect, as you say, that she ought to be taken care of, in return for the physical and spiritual work involved in taking care of the man, his home, and his children.

But our daughters were faced with two new circumstances: first, women in the new generation had no problem entering university programs that qualified them for high-paying jobs and then landing those jobs (the woman in question has earned as much as 90 grand as a burn-unit nurse); and second, the average wage-earner no longer can support an entire family alone, meaning that women not only have the option to earn an income, most have to. So that cultural belief — a woman is entitled to be supported by her mate — has gone by the wayside.

So…unless you believe that the irresponsible urges inculcated by mass marketing and incessant advertising qualify as cultural belief (and they may!), then you have to wonder about the mental health of an adult who self-destructs financially.

In your example, I would guess that the woman in question probably has something wrong with her- she’s failed at long-term planning in many areas of her life. The question of illness becomes iffier when you look at people who seem to have everything else in their lives together. Barreiro has not drunk or drugged or overeaten her health away and takes decent care of her children. Why is money and career such a blind spot? I would guess that she was raised to believe that she ought to be taken care of, that nothing in her earlier life contradicted that, and she’s followed that idea to its logical, destructive end. It’s hard for me to call believing a certain commonly held cultural belief is illness.

I don’t have any comments, really. This makes Edmund Andrews and spouse look like sane managers of life and finances.

IMHO, “intentionally reckless, destructive and selfish behavior” is, by its nature, pathological. It defines mental illness. It’s drastic malfunctioning, and the only reason individuals who suffer from this kind of malfunction survive at all is that they exist in a civil society.

Suppose we consider this sort of behavior in evolutionary terms. Living things have a powerful instinct for survival. A living being — say, a fish or a cockatiel — that engages in self-destructive acts DIES. If it begins that kind of behavior at a young age, it dies before it reproduces, and so in theory self-destructive behavior should select out, over time. So obviously, something is seriously wrong with a creature — human included — that habitually does self-destructive things.

In a colony of social animals, some protection exists for creatures that engage mildly self-destructive activity. There’s a back-up plan, so to speak. But even in that context, there are limits. The colony loses patience and ejects the creature. Or the member of the group goes too far — in human terms, he or she breaks the law — and is punished or killed. Thus even for a social animal of a species whose members are mutually altruistic within their groups — such as humans — self-centered or self-destructive behavior is counterproductive, especially if the behavior harms or disturbs other group members.

This particular young woman is alienated from her mother and her sister; because of her disturbing behavior, she has cut off two crucial sources of social, financial, and psychological support. The only person left to help her is her father, and he is too old to provide much help, nor does he want to. He also is sick of seeing her ignore wise advice, get herself deeper and deeper into a mess, and then beg to be pulled out of the quicksand. He is deeply unhappy at and, yes, resentful of the ordeal she is putting him through right now.

A social animal must have the support of its group. Once it is alienated and outcast, it will die. So, here again we see that self-destructive behavior is maladaptive: it’s not normal. In a word, it’s sick.

Frankly, your mom may be right: the kid may be mentally weak. Which is just another way of saying mentally ill.

This then raises the question: how do you differentiate between intentionally reckless, destructive and selfish behavior and that driven by a mental pathology? The end result may be the same, and it may seem like a superficial distinction but I think it’s important. At least it is to me because of my family.

I still can’t fathom how my parents raised two children that turned out so monumentally differently when our basic childhoods were about the same.

In general, they paid more attention to him because they “didn’t need to worry about” me, so he actually didn’t have to act out for attention, he was just selfish and manipulative from a young age. It didn’t necessarily manifest in harmful ways when we were children, but once he was in his 20s, he was completely self-centered, wasteful, destructive, and in many ways, seemed almost delusional in his sense of self-importance. In those years, my mom began to claim that he “couldn’t help it” because he was “mentally weak.” [loose translation]

I couldn’t buy that. So much of his behaviors were built on his earlier years of getting away with everything; how was I to believe that his financial instability, academic failings, and his almost pathological need to convince everyone that they liked and wanted to help him were anything but a product of slack parenting and a willful desire to be that way? With him, it’s not a cumulative downward spiral with no stops along the way. As long as he’s got someone subsidizing his latest scheme or spending money with him, he’s happy as a clam. It’s only when he’s “down on his luck” that he’s back at our doorstep begging for another chance.

That’s probably one of the two reasons he’s not a bankrupt: for years, my parents kept bailing him out. And he’d occasionally try to make good on his debts. He’d just run new ones right up again, and I’m sure no bank will offer him accounts ever again, but he always finds a way to rack up debt again. I’d be very surprised if he hasn’t run up his girlfriend’s cards again.

And yet, despite some very mild responsiveness to my tough-love regime, I can’t wholly discount the possibility that he truly does have a mental illness now. I’m conflicted. I feel like the whole picture would be a lot clearer if I weren’t knee-deep in his muck.