It sounds silly, but I understand where he's coming from. I used to live in Philadelphia. You couldn't leave your bag down on the subway without someone running off with it right before the doors closed.
Wild. a family member of mine has paranoid schizophrenia and if something isn't where she thinks it should be she immediately jumps to "it was stolen." Even if the glasses are on her head or the phone is literally in her hand, she'll declare it was stolen and get upset.
It makes me wonder if she lived in one of those places earlier in her life (before I knew her) and might be more justified than it seems... ?
I know lots of people think that when they can't find something; it doesn't mean it is schizophrenic behavior in and of itself. I remember as kids discovering that other friends of mine also jumped to that conclusion. To my knowledge, none of us then or are now schizophrenic.
Sure. I also live in a place where you can't leave your belongings unattended even for a short time without a high risk of them getting stolen. But there's a simple solution to that: don't leave your belongings unattended, ever. Everyone I know who lives where I live knows that, and the incidence -- at least among my friends -- losing things to theft is super low.
I don't think this is a good situation, mind you, but I think people in my circle still misplace things orders of magnitude more often than their stuff gets stolen.
