It doesn't ever come from nowhere...

[DJRubberducky]

Courtesy of an attorney friend.  Emphasis mine.

Nobody cares about my 20 year old drug addicts. They don't care about themselves. The prosecutors just want to lock them up. The judges want to lock them up too, to get their files closed. Their families are in jail, or dead, or in Oklahoma. I ask them what they want and they shrug. I ask them why they're killing themselves, and they shrug.

I talked to one today. She was probably cute a couple of years ago before her first offense. Now her mouth has started to harden and she wants it known that she can handle the six months the state wants to give her. Because, you know, she's tough. Just one little tear in the corner of her eye when I talked about a couple of meth addicts older than her who I've known, and the path they're on and how she can do better. But we both pretnded that one tear wasn't there.

Next time she'll go from jail to prison, and then more prison, and from drugs to theft to violence, and still nobody will care, and then she'll do something worse and people will wonder how someone can be so evil.

[Jenne]

When does apathy not come from within?  Some people do indeed have the saddest worst lives imaginable.  I've shared benches in jailhouse waiting rooms with scads of them.  But at some point, it really does come from within--where you just don't CARE how fucked up everything is, because you know it's always going to be that way.

The trick is to fool yourself long enough into thinking that caring will do something to change it, change it for the better, so that something better finally does come along.  And you can just stop the cycle somehow.

Otherwise, I have nothing else to say on this that doesn't make me sound like a heartless asshole.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Life is a game. It aint everybody's cup of tea.
Maybe really heavy shit at the start puts you off it.
Maybe a couple of bad decisions here and there leads you to just get totally fed up with the shit.
Maybe listening to happy people telling happy stories and saying shit like "Cheer up" and "it aint all doom and gloom" aint what you want to hear.

Maybe you've made your decision. You're sick fed up with it and you just plain stop giving a fuck what happens to you. Then you get hooked on something with letters in its name and you join the crime statistics. Lucky for you americans you can shoot these sons of bitches. We gotta pretend they was dead when we found them.

At what point, if any, is apathy incurable?

[AFK]

The sad thing is that there ARE people in jail right now, who have figured out their life is on a bad path.  But, they can't do it alone.  They acknowledge they have issues of willpower, etc. that keeps them from doing what they need to do.  That's why treatment centers are important.  To begine to point the way.  Ultimately, that person still owns their destiny, but a little shove in the right direction will give them a better chance.

But, the sad part is that some of these people AREN'T getting the help they want.  They are put on waiting lists while people who don't have that same mindset are getting treatment just to stay out of jail.  There are systematic issues that do present roadblocks to the willing.  If we can somehow demolish those, we'd give a few more people a shot at pulling out of their path to self-ruin.