First of all, how mental illness has affected my family. Well, both of my parents suffered from some form of depression. My father, specifically, was bipolar. And although we had to involuntarily hospitalize him once (a very hard thing for any family to do, BTW), he was never violent.
That last item actually brings up a good point. Most mentally ill are NOT violent! But it is still so easy for politicians to cater to people’s irrational fear.
We all know, gun control is never going to happen, politically now, or ever. But focusing unfairly on the mentally ill (making it easy to take away their rights in other words) is a very easy and expedient thing to do politically. I just know, every time someone bring up the topic, they are met with thunderous applause. The mentally ill are very vulnerable, politically now especially. Am I wrong?
And I think it goes even deeper than that, in our society. The mentally ill are the only handicap minority that you can discriminate against freely. And I also read something interesting on the internet that stuck with me. They are the only mental handicap you can laugh at! Think about it. Crazy cat ladies, bag ladies, crazies who run thru parks naked as a jay bird. Those things are all funny in our culture. Really? We would never, for example, laugh at a mentally retarded person, even if it was funny.
Oh, and BTW, here and here are two websites you might find interesting.
Yeah, I think the mentally ill are going to be a very vulnerable target politically now. What do the rest of you think?
This seems to be the lynchpin of your thesis, and it is, unfortunately for you and your thesis, not true in the US. Mental illnesses are included in the ADA.
Yeah, but will that all change some day? I know one guy they interviewed after a shooting (poss. a politician), said it’s our “duty” to discriminate against the mentally ill! Our “duty”? I am not afraid of where laws stand now, I worry how they may change in the future. (And BTW, I was already aware the mentally ill have some protection against discrimination under the law [it was ironically my father who showed me an article in a newspaper on it once]).)
Yeah, OK, but there’s the law and then there is actual practice.
Ask anyone with a significant disability - the ADA provides limited protection at best. Discrimination against the disabled (whether mental or physical) is still a very real thing.
The notion of discriminating against a handicapped person is anchored around the idea that it becomes discrimination when you treat them differently than their disability requires them to be treated (and where that different treatment disempowers them). Thus, it isn’t discrimination if you decline to hire a blind person to do color sorting in your fabric shop (barring reasonable ways of accommodating a blind person so that they could do fabric sorting by color) but it’s generally discriminatory to refuse to consider a blind person to work at the computer answering customer emails (because there’s software to read the emails, headsets, and dictation software).
People tend to approach psychiatric disabilities differently than others: “The core of who that blind person is, her intelligence and personality and creativity and friendliness, isn’t affected by blindness, it only impairs her ability to see and we should not let our prejudices cause us to see her as less of a person”, goes the common logic for the typical disability. Or “I may be paralyzed from the neck down but I’m 100% a complete person with insight and aspirations and plans and concerns from the neck up”
It doesn’t play out quite the same way with impairments of the mind: “The core of who that mentally ill person is, his intelligence I guess and, umm, personality and creativity and uh. friendliness…, um, oops…” To a much larger extent, we do think of the core of who a person is to be their mind, their thoughts, opinions, perspectives, hopes and desires and so forth. It doesn’t work to say “I may be impaired from the neck up but I’m 100% a complete person from the neck down”. So there’s stigma. People don’t relate to us and the prospect of it ever happening to them is frightening in a different and more unsettling way.
Is there discrimination? You bet your ass. Care should be provided in the least restrictive setting with the maximum degree of patient self-determination possible at all times, as required by law. It usually isn’t. People should view us as differently minded without hanging a negative value judgment on that entire difference, and try to be realistic about the actual impairments.
With regards to the fallout from any recent spate of violence, I wish the damn media would put a moratorium on including a violent criminal’s psychiatric history or condition (alleged or otherwise) in their stories until such time as they find it appropriate to include the psych history etc for everyone else they write news articles about. They are part of the vicious circle, stigma-wise, because they only write about us loonies individually when we do frighteningly violent things. But it’s not a new phenomenon. Yeah, someone shoves a subway passenger off the platform into the path of the train and for a few months there’s more pressure to lock us up and keep us locked up. Sometimes new laws are passed that we have to deal with. But I don’t see any immediate threat to our tattered civil rights that hasn’t been looming there all along.
Other than that, I’m bipolar, OCD, SAD, GAD and ADD. Whenever a story of somebody with a mental illness getting violent makes the news, my second reaction is to fear for my rights. It wasn’t too long ago you could be involuntarily sterilized for being ‘mentally defective’. I don’t mean in some distant, evil country either. It happened right here in the US. Then there were involuntary lobotomies. Then there was involuntary ECT. I’d like very much to keep those days behind us.
I am Bipolar and unemployed and have made recent attempts at getting a job but was not successful. 3 attempts within one year, did not keep any of the Jobs, two were part time. You can’t blame an employer for not wanting to hire/keep an undependable or incompetent worker. (I was not incompetent but I missed lots of days of work). I do not really feel stigmatized by society in fact I think the USA is pretty accepting of Bipolar/depressed people. Some may resist the idea of taxes supporting this particular disability, but I think most of those people would take exception to taxes being spent on almost any disability.
My problem is I just don’t feel like leaving the house. I am mildly depressed and have no ambition, no drive, no motivation. I could probably work a part time job if there were a city/county shuttle bus to come pick me up and take me to work. Ideally, I and others with mental illness could be trained to work on cars as a mechanic and fix all the city vehicles or work as a janitor at a school or government office building. Some people with mental disabilities would rise above menial labor given the proper support and some would not even be able to keep the most basic job. But the type of thing I am talking about takes way too much coordination and oversight to ever work in the USA.
Fair enough, but anhedonia and depressive disorders are extremely treatable. I reckon talk therapy, exercise, and (appropriate, monitored, and restrained) medication are cheaper than restructuring our workforce.
I used to hope that the media excitement, however stupid and ghoulish, would lead to a real discussion about desperately needed research, prevention, treatment of mental illness in the US. But then, I was quixotic enough to hope that the ACA would spur an honest and nuanced national discussion of mental health issues. Clearly I was smoking a ton of crack.
But more and more…yeah, I think mental illness is becoming a bugaboo and an easy way to ignore the real underlying issues.
Except in a lot of cases, it’s not. You get to a point where you’ve taken your meds and had years and years of therapy and psychiatry and you get to a certain level and you are stuck. At that point, a drill sargent to get behind you and give you a push is what is needed. Like, for guys who can’t jump out the plane without the drill sargent pushing them. I realize drill sargent and mentally ill patient is kind of a bad example but I am making a very broad metaphor here. Of course it would have to be done in the right way and it won’t work for all patients. But for some it would, for them it is the last step that is needed.
Yes but the idea is if you can train and support someone with a disability you either reduce or remove the tax burden to support them on disability. In theory it would make money for the system.
I regret to inform you that involuntary ECT is not yet a thing of the past. (Although I’m pretty sure you already know that and didn’t mean to imply otherwise).
I’m not entirely sure involuntary psychosurgery isn’t still taking place in the US as well, although certainly not on the scale that it did in the 1950s.
. . . Shouldn’t that drill sergeant be found somewhere in all those years of therapy and psychiatry? ISTM a psychotherapist would be the only qualified drill sergeant here; you really, really don’t want a motivational speaker or a “life coach” or a concerned relative to push a person with a genuine diagnosed mental illness.
I don’t know to answer your question and have not given it much thought. I do think it is shameful how mental illness is looked down up and not taken as seriously by many people. Or that somehow people with mental illness are somehow not worthy, when they are sick just like those who are physically sick.
