SI Chronicles the Sad Saga of James Hardy

[TBBills Fan]

On 11/15/2018 at 9:45 PM, PUNT750 said:

 

COME ON SHAW - you're making me cry - for no reason.  He was a lousy player and couldn't be coached.  Blame the NFL for making him a 'star' in the making for $1.4 mil.  He's so typical of the vast majority of NFL players today  - really minority people - that want the money but can't play by the rules of athletic or social conduct.

What makes me sad about this is his son, and just like he had no dad, his son is going to.carry scars and continue the legacy of.pain....its a tragedy and that child is going to be affected

[boyst]

53 minutes ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

Fair enough

 

 

Eh.  Writers gotta write and it's a good story, as stories go.  Sad, no doubt.

It was just the "saddest thing" I have trouble with, I kind of find my saddest emotions going to stories that are less ambiguous - like Hadiya Pendleton or the like.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-hadiya-pendleton-trial-date-20180109-story.html

 

 

We all have our inner *****.  I had a "Please don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry" moment myself over my mother's medical care yesterday.

 

-Hapless, turning green

Even that is a tough story to follow because gosh, if that girl just ran with a different crowd ... Maybe she didn't know better or have a choice.  A young girl like that, easily influenced; there isn't much that can be said.

 

I can think of 10 other sadder things this week I've dealt with than a story like this scumbag.

 

When I think about how precious life is and when I read about someone saying hown unfortunate it was that Hardy killed himself, or the bad luck of this girl (she picked the wrong crowd)... I think of a story like this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/myfox8.com/2013/07/16/girl-11-fatally-electrocuted-at-brookside-swim-club/amp/

 

The inner beast in us all is one that we do not like to unleash. 

[HardyBoy]

Sounds like he was dealing with bipolar, schizophrenia, depression and likely CTE...so let me make sure I understand some of your guys' take...a man with severe mental illness, acts like a man with severe mental illness, and you call him a pos...stay classy Bills fans!

 

Also, a lot of people here need to learn about and understand synaptic pruning before they start going off on personal responsibility is situations like this...you sound ignorant.

 

When a person is a baby, they have all these potential connections. Your brain has all this potential, but is inefficient because the paths for the neurons to flow through are not yet defined. As you grow as an infant and toddler, certain pathways are used, some are not. Eventually around I believe 3 you get synaptic pruning, which is the brain removing the unused pathways...they literally go away forever.

 

Humans literally have the capacity to be feral beasts (I'm talking about during the ice age), or extremely civilized (not sure we've attained this yet)...it's because of synaptic pruning of unused neural pathways. Children who have tough upbringings, specifically lack of stability and the ability to have control over getting the world to give them what they need (ex. baby cries and gets fed quickly) have different pathways that get reinforced compared to someone who has all their needs met.

 

Are people from tough upbringings lost? Of course not, it could be a strength in many ways, but you can't go through that early childhood and then get that sort of reinforcement as a teenager; it will lead to this situation lot more than average.

 

As a society we must help children from ages 0-3. This is both a moral responsibility issue and a fiscal responsibility issue...costs a heck of a lot less to provide effective interventions to babies than it is to fund the consequences (people not entering the labor force, criminal justice, etc.)

 

By the way, has anyone heard about Diaper Poverty befoe? I just did a few months ago, it's wild, look it up. 

[ColoradoBills]

10 hours ago, TBBills Fan said:

As a father, I wiped a tear reading that. Gonna hug my boy real tight when i get home

 

Then I would say the story had a positive effect and was worth telling despite what some others may say.

[PlayoffsPlease]

On 11/15/2018 at 9:45 PM, PUNT750 said:

 

COME ON SHAW - you're making me cry - for no reason.  He was a lousy player and couldn't be coached.  Blame the NFL for making him a 'star' in the making for $1.4 mil.  He's so typical of the vast majority of NFL players today  - really minority people - that want the money but can't play by the rules of athletic or social conduct.

Young man ends up dead.  Something went wrong.  Even if the wounds were all self inflicted normal human beings with an ounce of charity in their souls should feel bad for the guy. 

[Hapless Bills Fan]

57 minutes ago, PlayoffsPlease said:

Young man ends up dead.  Something went wrong.  Even if the wounds were all self inflicted normal human beings with an ounce of charity in their souls should feel bad for the guy. 

 

I can go with this.

 

Do you know where we can buy an ounce of charity and send it to Boyst?

 

 

 

[Dr. Who]

1 hour ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

I can go with this.

 

Do you know where we can buy an ounce of charity and send it to Boyst?

 

 

 

I think you might need a pound or so to see any effect.

[PlayoffsPlease]

4 hours ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

I can go with this.

 

Do you know where we can buy an ounce of charity and send it to Boyst?

 

 

 

A soul is a pre-requisite.  Please make sure one is installed first. 

[Hapless Bills Fan]

3 minutes ago, PlayoffsPlease said:

A soul is a pre-requisite.  Please make sure one is installed first. 

 

Above my pay-grade.  Though I'm told we all have 'em

[Buffalo716]

2 hours ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

Above my pay-grade.  Though I'm told we all have 'em

That’s false information 

 

South Park was clear that Gingers possess no soul ?

[Alaska Darin]

19 hours ago, HardyBoy said:

Sounds like he was dealing with bipolar, schizophrenia, depression and likely CTE...so let me make sure I understand some of your guys' take...a man with severe mental illness, acts like a man with severe mental illness, and you call him a pos...stay classy Bills fans!

 

Also, a lot of people here need to learn about and understand synaptic pruning before they start going off on personal responsibility is situations like this...you sound ignorant.

 

When a person is a baby, they have all these potential connections. Your brain has all this potential, but is inefficient because the paths for the neurons to flow through are not yet defined. As you grow as an infant and toddler, certain pathways are used, some are not. Eventually around I believe 3 you get synaptic pruning, which is the brain removing the unused pathways...they literally go away forever.

 

Humans literally have the capacity to be feral beasts (I'm talking about during the ice age), or extremely civilized (not sure we've attained this yet)...it's because of synaptic pruning of unused neural pathways. Children who have tough upbringings, specifically lack of stability and the ability to have control over getting the world to give them what they need (ex. baby cries and gets fed quickly) have different pathways that get reinforced compared to someone who has all their needs met.

 

Are people from tough upbringings lost? Of course not, it could be a strength in many ways, but you can't go through that early childhood and then get that sort of reinforcement as a teenager; it will lead to this situation lot more than average.

 

As a society we must help children from ages 0-3. This is both a moral responsibility issue and a fiscal responsibility issue...costs a heck of a lot less to provide effective interventions to babies than it is to fund the consequences (people not entering the labor force, criminal justice, etc.)

 

By the way, has anyone heard about Diaper Poverty befoe? I just did a few months ago, it's wild, look it up. 

Excellent post.  At some point in the future,  we're going to find out just how much mental damage contact and combat sports are doing to athlete's brains.  Even then,  there will still be people who need to show their superiority whenever someone else fails. 

[MJS]

I hope his son doesn't meet the same fate. Hopefully he has more support around him.

[Hapless Bills Fan]

2 hours ago, Alaska Darin said:

Excellent post.  At some point in the future,  we're going to find out just how much mental damage contact and combat sports are doing to athlete's brains.  

 

You may be correct about the mental damage, but I think Hardy Boy may be talking about Reactive Attachment Disorder and Borderline Attachment Disorder.  Fundamentally the idea is that there are critical development ages in human infants/toddlers where they develop normal emotional attachments to caregivers that are needed to become healthy, mentally stable adults with an appropriate sense of empathy etc.  Infants whose needs aren’t consistently met and who don’t have someone react when they cry/seek comfort at these critical ages are at high risk for this, though it’s not clear exactly why some infants are affected and others with superficially similar care are not.

 

I didn’t see enough background in the cited article to determine if this might have been a factor for Hardy, so it’s kind of being inferred I think.  But HB could be correct.  Or not - plenty folks who had affectionate adequate care grow up with a screw or five loose.
 

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-reactive-attachment-disorder-4136080

[Cripple Creek]

8 hours ago, PlayoffsPlease said:

A soul is a pre-requisite.  Please make sure one is installed first. 

he's just acting out for attention

[LSHMEAB]

Just so we're clear, we all understand that this man literally drowned himself in a freaking river, correct?

 

I understand that he wasn't a saint, but there's something really creepy about berating a guy capable of that level of self destruction. Quite frankly, I WOULD have less sympathy for him if he took somebody else out. He didn't.

[Bob in STL]

The Bills drafted this guy and he had a rap sheet that was known by all teams. 

 

I remember him scoring a TD on a high pass "jump ball" play and thought maybe we found a great player. 

 

Not that I am blaming the Bills,  just thinking about how to avoid these pitfalls.  I wonder if the Bills did anything to help him get acclimated to the NFL, to life on his own, and how to handle the big pile of money that was coming his way?   I thought I read that they did.  Going back to the Marv era, I heard that they provided basic home and financial management support. 

 

Anyway sad story.  The importance of family and the need to take care of children properly is what resonates with me. 

 

Seems like a lot of the players coming out of college need this kind of help.    

 

 

[HardyBoy]

On 11/18/2018 at 8:17 PM, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

You may be correct about the mental damage, but I think Hardy Boy may be talking about Reactive Attachment Disorder and Borderline Attachment Disorder.  Fundamentally the idea is that there are critical development ages in human infants/toddlers where they develop normal emotional attachments to caregivers that are needed to become healthy, mentally stable adults with an appropriate sense of empathy etc.  Infants whose needs aren’t consistently met and who don’t have someone react when they cry/seek comfort at these critical ages are at high risk for this, though it’s not clear exactly why some infants are affected and others with superficially similar care are not.

 

I didn’t see enough background in the cited article to determine if this might have been a factor for Hardy, so it’s kind of being inferred I think.  But HB could be correct.  Or not - plenty folks who had affectionate adequate care grow up with a screw or five loose.
 

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-reactive-attachment-disorder-4136080

 

Didn't mean to, was just going to write a quick thing with a link or two, but this got long. Wrote it on my phone the last hour or two, so sorry for any typos. Would normally reorganize some of the flow, but maybe one day when I finally go and start that blog I've been putting off for five years, I'll do it right.

 

Hapless, thank you for listening and considering my point of view, I really really mean that. I fully agree his behaviors were awful. Not at all defending them or giving him an excuse to act that way. However, as an explanation of why he acted that way, and why, in my opinion, we should condemn his behaviors, while separately viewing his story as sad, and as a human worthy of recieving compassion, I think it was largely out of his control, even before the mental illness (I promise I give reasoning to back this thought up below).

 

Attachment disorder is interesting stuff (was actually just watching a youtube video on it yesterday). I think you're right that attachment disorder could be a great lens to see this through. Could actually be the behavioral manifestations of the consequences of synaptic pruning. 

 

Article on synaptic pruning: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3722610/ (there are less dry articles out there for sure, but once you get past the baby brain development it's really a pretty interesting read).

 

So what is synaptic pruning based on my understanding (I'm a psych major, but mostly I read a lot about things I find ingesting like this and watch a lot of youtube videos, so take my qualifications with a grain of salt, since I don't really have any, other than I have thought about it a lot):

 

When a kid is born, their brain is a tangle of potential pathways. Think of it like roads on a map, but arranged like a bowl of angel hair pasta, times a million. So their brain has all these tangled roads, which means they can basically get from almost any one spot to any other spot, but it's super inefficient and easy to get lost (they don't get a map). As they have more experiences, based on their environment, they travel between one set of points more than a different set of points, and they use certain roads more than other roads. As those roads get used more, they get bigger and wider, so they can move faster on them, but the unused roads are taking up space so they go away to make room for parking or just so they have to spend less money on maintaining roads that are not traveled.  As a side note, it's a bit funny and ironic how much of that happens before you have the ability to reason and remember, but it's probably a large part in why we can reason and remember, since without pruning things are tangled up. Also, research is pointing to issues with synaptic pruning could be at play in autism, especially regressive autism, where a kid is developing typically, but suddenly losses a bunch of skills (coincidently coincides timing wise with certain vaccines too, which has lead to a lot of correlation jumping to blaming vaccines) synaptic pruning potentially implicated in autism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25845529/.

 

Anway, as certain points on the analagous brain map are traveled to more and more, they become key hubs that all the roads lead to, while the roads leading to the non-traveled spots, get pruned to make space for a highway that runs through the non-traveled to town, and there is no exit (sort of like parts of Chicago).

 

That first pruning starts early on, but higher level pruning happens into adolescence, because things like higher level emotional regulation and delaying gratification develop later on. You mix Hardy's early life, with a lack of any demands to fight through short term adversity to achieve a long term goal (he was a sports natural) in adolescence and you have a situation where it's not necessarily in his hands how he reacts, at least not without significant work with a behaviorist to apply habits that over a long time rewire his brain. It's doable as an adult to an extent, but it's damn hard and takes a lot of time and delaying gratification, things he literally might not have had the brain mechanisms to do (like someone who is blind can't see, but can learn straregies to navigate their environment super effectively).

 

Sort of like addiction in a way actually. You can identify the individual's negative behaviors, and label the behaviors as awful, and as the behaviors of an awful human being. You can also blame the addict for starting, but once the addiction gets bad, it's not a matter of reasoning with someone, or even something they choose, their neural pathways have been rewired to demand the quickest method of dopamine release possible, which is their drug of choice.

 

I know this sounds like I am saying that it isn't anyones fault for how they behave, and I truly don't believe that, but at the extremes, children who have gone through early trauma, a lack of stability in early childhood and abuse really should be looked at as victims in a lot of ways (him being treated as a god as a teenager is abuse, not saying no to a kid ever is abuse, who knows if he went through more typical types of abuse, with the lack of consistent positive adult supervision that would not at all surprise anyone).  However, that does not mean that those behaviors can, or should, be tolerated, because often those behaviors are completely unacceptable, but treating them as criminals that you cage for 10 years and let back into the world is not a good plan and it's not a cost effecticlve plan.  

 

They need therapy (assuming there isn't a personality disorder, because those don't really ever go away), but more, there needs to be real intervention and support for these babies, as babies, and changes to the educational system that inspire kids to be driven by their curiosity to drive through difficulty to learn for the sake of learning would be a heck of a step. Big picture, that probably starts with a resetting of priorities to spend money on keeping kids out of jail as adults.

 

It cost so much more money to jail even 5% of a high risk population for 30 years than to provide 3 years of somewhat intensive therapy from 0-3 with lower intesity mentoring through adolescence (the indvidual's life time of contributing to society, and the removal of the impact of their crime to society need to be weighed into the cost benefit). I'm sure there is research on this, but I have to think that the cost of one murder, where you lose the person killed's economic participation and the murder's loss of participation (they would have received support and be contributing in the alternative reality and therefore much less likely to kill someone), plus the cost of 30 years of incarceration, and the indirect ripples of kids growing up without parents.

 

I wouldn't be suprised if that added up to at least a million dollars in negative impact that you could remove, and use the money to fund services to a huge part of a city for that...all you would need to do is prevent one murder basically (this assumes the person killed is contributing).

 

In Hardy's case, and as with any baby, he was born into that situation, and it was basically completely out of his hands the whole way through. He had other friends with tough upbringings that were referenced in that story, who made it out alright, but they didn't have the super-natural athletic skill Hardy had, so they never really got that second whammy of bad fortune of no consequences and there you go.

 

This isn't an uncommon behavior pattern among pro athletes from rough childhoods either (he is in the extreme though) and makes you wonder if it could be a function of very similar environmental factors present in early age and adolescence, leading to very similar brain development. It could also be that at the 99% extreme, confident people are jerks and you almost have to be that  confident to make that level of competition, but I think there's something more fundamentally similar in terms of brain development.  Being told you're the best and having the temporary skill to back it up, when most of that is a lucky dice roll, man that's a dangerous combination...and not just in sports, look at Orson Wells.

Edited November 20, 2018 by HardyBoy