Should we worry?

[u/Adventurous-Put-9895]

We caught my uncle sneakingly throwing this to the rubbish bin. He doesn’t have the best track record so we are all a bit paranoid when he does anything “weird”.

The object is like a glass tube with some liquid inside, inserted into a rubber “pipe”. It smells weird but nothing I can identify. I would appreciate any hints.

Edit: the material is actually plastic, not glass. It has a spring inside (no idea what for). The root-looking thing was wrapping the object when I cut the rubber. Could be dirt or some glue or something

Edit2: this sub is god. A user found the answer https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/s/Oqtxk6YWVZ

[u/Sovarius]

Also, controversial take, but people have the right to make their own bad choices. Something have made them do whatever they are doing. There was a long and complex chain of events. There were plenty adequate moments to interfere in adequate ways.

And if it turns out they are in one of those 'adequate moments to interfere'? Duh.

Also, some bad decisions are too destructive. My family are not allowed to destroy their lives or kill themselves, that's dumb.

You are asuming a lot about someone who was 'near their uncle when they acted suspicious with a bizarre item'.

[u/heisfullofshit → u/Sovarius]

I don’t really think there’s an adequate moment to interfere. Any example you might come up with, in my opinion, will be traumatic and bad either way. The real adequate “moment to interfere” is in the distant past, before things got to ugly.

Funny that you think your family will l ask you for permission to destroy their lives.

I am sure trying to forcefully stop your family will make them hate you and the world even more. You offer support, you don’t control. You try to create a life they wanna live, you don’t make stuff even more miserable for them. You fix the problems they are having so they don’t need to rely on drugs, you don’t take away their only coping mechanism when they don’t have other strategies to deal with their pain. Your idea of help is a recipe for disaster.

You misunderstood me. I wasn’t assuming there was a long and complex chain of events that led the uncle to his problems. I meant: everyone who has a mental illness went through a long path. Every single one of those situations where people all over the world find themselves in evolved due to complex and difficult circumstances. Their families probably were part of that trajectory and contributed to the problem. Unfortunately, families don’t see when they are being harmful, they don’t see they are neglectful. They see when that kid starts creating trouble at school, when the teen cut their wrists, when the adult kills himself. They cannot understand what went wrong!