Abu Dhabi: Malaysian police rescued a 28-year-old Malaysian man after he attempted to swim the nearly 7,000km from Malaysia to Mecca.
He was taken to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation, local media reported.
Video footage and photographs of the incident have gone viral on social media in Malaysia.
Police said the young man was detained before taken to the hospital, as he said he had intended to swim to Mecca.
In his second attempt in three weeks, it was not immediately known why the man wished to swim to the holy city in Saudi Arabia.
Dealing with a relative with mental illness must be a nightmare at the best of times, but restraining one with an obsession to go on 7,000 km ocean swims must be a particular problem, if you live near the sea, anyway.
Earlier this year, on You Can't Ask That, one young woman explained how, while having schizophrenia, she developed the idea that her leg had been possessed by the devil, so she went into her father's shed and cut it off with a saw. Electric or conventional, I don't recall. Oddly, she said it didn't involve much pain, and gave her a sense of relief! I thought this was a particularly memorable story of the disasters that can happen due to mental illness. She's fine now though, which is pretty remarkable in its own way too.
In a more conventional (so to speak, don't get upset, mental health advocates) story about a mentally ill person, Gulf News also notes:
A young Moroccan man was arrested for allegedly beheading his mother and walking with her head through the alleys of the Attasi neighbourhood in Casablanca.
Local media reported that the perpetrator, who suffers from serious psychological disorders, spent 10 years in prison for a terrorist crime.
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