- So, this ‘mental illness’ thing…you folks are just moping around and you’re kind of weak and you’re not coping, and you whine a lot, and you’d do just fine if you got a little ‘grounding in reality’, a little ‘tough love’, ya know, some uncompromising insistence that you deal with fucking reality for a fucking change, am i right?
I thought I’d start off with this one, just because I so seldom do. I don’t know what you think it’s like to be an inpatient in a psych ward, and to be sure they probably aren’t all the same, but I can tell you that this attitude is spectacularly well-represented among the staffers and doctors of psychiatric facilities. (Hence my antipathy towards the profession).
I don’t whine, motherfucker. I want to see schizophrenics employed at your business in direct proportion to our distribution in society as a whole.
Reality is overrated, and you non-schizzy folks have way too much to do with keeping it extant. I see some need for some changes. I’m certificably nuts and I vote.
Meanwhile, people who experience pain should be cared about. It should matter that live hurts to enough people to fill large buildings, enough people to identify patterns and generate classifications for. Someone oughta care. And no, giving us a goddam label doesn’t constitute an act of compassion.
Maybe we’re intrinsically different; maybe the only meaningful changes would have to be wrought in us, so as to make us experience less pain the world as it is. But you wanna entertain a revolutionary thought? That’s not where to start. That is, at best, where to arrive after exhausting the other possibilities. You start with the possibility that something is wrong with life, and that only some of the general population is sufficiently strongly affected by that as to be shut down by it. And you consider the possibility that, if left unaddressed, such problems could cause such symptoms to appear in a larger and larger portion of the general population.
2) There are a finite number of well-known and well-understood psychiatric ailments — such as “schizophrenia”, “bipolar disorder”, and “clinical depression” — and all you folks with the same diagnosis have a disease in common and need the same specific treatment, which will make you “normal”..
No. No. No. No. No. No. And no.
There are some idealistically dedicated researchers, a small army of procedure-followers, a triple-handful of sadists, and more than a sprinking of well-intentioned mavericks inhabiting the semi-medical field of psychiatry. I say “semi-” because, historically speaking, the profession started out as pseudo-medical: using the authority conferred by “Doctor” to stand at the front of what was essentially a police or social-control function; and that old thread of what psychiatry was about was never uprooted and removed and still has its strands. I say “no” because, as a profession (and I will at this time include the pharmaceutical folks, the NIMH folks, & the neuroscience folks) they do not, as of yet, have their tongs on what is “mental illness”. A half-century+ of asserting that “mental illnesses” are somatic, rather than psychosocial, in their origins, in combo with funded studies, have failed to yield really clear pictures. On the other hand, it does seem increasingly & compellingly likely that there are physiological manifestations that go hand in hand with the constellation of symptoms that generate the various diagnoses. Clearly something is going on with the behavior of neural systems. That doesn’t establish cause & effect though.
Seriously: they are still pretty much in the dark. Or, if they are in the light, it’s because they are doing their looking under the lamppost, because the alleyway where the answers lie is in darkness and they can’t search there. So they are searching where the answers are NOT.
- People with psychiatric diagnoses suffer horribly and can’t function like normal folks to any appreciable degree
I’ve been different all my life, and I’ve known it most of my life. Sometimes I’m jealous or feel limited, but a whole lot of the time I’m feeling smug and superior. The bottom line is, I like who I am and I do not want to be changed, “fixed”, “cured”. I have suffered horribly in my life but mostly as a consequence of how people treated me, which they did because I was different. Other groups of people have been subjected to that: gay folks, for instance, have been treated horribly just for being different, their feelings hurt, their fundamental humanity scraped raw and bloody an then dunked into attitude-sewers of hate and disgust. Doesn’t mean that the problem was in them, does it? Same with us, maybe. Think about it. Consider it. Give us some space, let us decide whether or not we’d like to be cured or if, instead, we’d like to be “proud and schizzy”. Oh, and I’ve been gainfully employed since 1993. I’m a bit withdrawn, and I’ve found a better niche in a computer-geeky field rather than the people-centric field I started out in. But under decent (let alone ideal) circumstances I really, vividly enjoy interpersonal contact and I daresay my presence in at least a few lives is valued by others as having brought them warmth, support, understanding, etc.
No, it is not necessarily a horrible tragedy to be “mentally ill”. It may be so for some, perhaps most. It might be the case that if we weren’t social pariahs and had our own community and “pride movement”, far fewer folks would fall into that category.
Some of us like being this way. Really.
- You have to take your medications or you will become dangerous to self and/or others, violent, etc
I’m not on psych meds, and never have (voluntarily) partaken thereof for any period of time in excess of 2 weeks. They help some people, ranging from “yeah, that helped me get through a bad patch” to “I totally owe my life to <Medication Name>”. Other people have had such bad experiences on psych meds that if you came after them with a psych-med needle they’d feel ethically justified in killing you to prevent you injecting them, same as if you were trying to rape them. (In fact, involuntary medicaiton with mind-altering chemicals is invasive as hell). As with the diagnosis situation, the treatment situation is very much a guessing game, with slender information and a dearth of solid info on why and how chemicals achieve the effects they seem to achieve. Also, the old ugly thread of police powers / social control rears its head here: psych meds have become popular throughout history not via accaim from the folks taking them, but from acclaim from the folks in charge of the folks to whom they have been administered. A huge percentage of psych meds are in use for their efficacy at rendering crazyfolks manageable and nontroublesome on a ward, not for their long-range effectiveness at getting folks back on their feet and in charge of their own lives. Even the most popular categories of psych meds (antidepressants) affect different people in different ways and are most totally not a “one size fits all” kind of solution. Some folks are just plain better off not taking psych meds.
They are strong, sometimes have lots of side effects, and they ain’t for everyone.
- What about the ‘dangerous’ part though? Aren’t the rest of us entitled to the safety of knowing that you crazy folks are on your meds?
We aren’t statistically any more dangerous to you than you are to us. You’re entitled to the same protection of the law that protects you sane folks from each other, and us from you, and so on.
- OH come off it, you obviously aren’t really schizophrenic or whatever or you wouldn’t be able to write / participate in the board / stay employed / stay out of the mental ward / etc, but the real mentally ill need our help and you’re just obfuscating the issue
Oh, a misdiagnosis, am I? <sigh…>
Look, a few zillion posts ago, when I’d been here for quite a while, this new poster Satan popped in, made a big splash, and eventually got banned for something or other. That was a long time ago. Know what? He’s still probably better known than me, even though the SDMB is probably my single best self-integrated particpatory social environment. I said I like who I am and how I am and I meant it, but for a mixed set of reasons — some of which amount to just being different and some of which have to do with specifically how I’m different and how that impacts on how I related to people and vice versa — I’m never ever going to be anywhere but on the fringes. And my head is full of thoughts, ideas, perceptions, priorities, etc, that only kind of tangentially overlap with those of other folks. And because I don’t get the easy, unquestioned, normal-person opportunity to compare notes with folks on the same wavelength as I am, I go off into left field, right field, or field where no man has trod before, from time to time, and I don’t know I’ve done it sometimes until I’ve built on it. And I so totally expect contempt, dismissal, non-comprehension, hostility, etc, from people in general that when folks try to tell me I’m losing it, it doesn’t stand out as dramatically different from everyday feedback. Which I’ve got on a serous static filter. Which means you experience me as distant, borderline hostile, distracted, at 10-foot-pole’s length, so of course you don’t befriend me and vice versa.
I don’t want to be normalized but yes I dream sometimes of being with “my people”, whoever that might be. To belong and be among and be home. Yeah, whatever, yeah life hurts, yadda yadda.
You can’t have it both ways. I’m not sufficiently differerent from the other folks who have inhabited mental wards, and certainly not enough so to be able to say “Uh, 'scuse me, I think y’all made a mistake, I’m not supposed to be here” and have them open the doors and let me out.
7) What about the people who really benefit from psychiatric help?
More power to them! You don’t think the pharmaceutical industry would try to provide things that people would enthusiastically consume, in a consumer society? Of course they do, of course they would! I said there was a lot of blundering around in the dark going on, and I said there was a thread of legacy police-control utilitarianism within psychiatric pharmacopoeia, but I most certainly did not say that they would not do their best to provide folks with stuff they would continue to show up at the prescriptions counter for, med insurance card in hand, mm?
People vote with their feet (usually metaphorically) and their credit card (literally) and the pharma industry, bless their collectively repulsive hearts, really are trying to do their best, if generally not for particularly altruistic or compassionate reasons. (No different than their motivation for developing a good vaccine, mind you).
In addition to schizzy-rights perspectives like my own, the scene is rife with consumer-services activism, people who partake of psychiatric services but want a say-so and a chance to play a role in shaping services, rewarding those that fit their needs and addressing their concerns w/regards to their insufficiencies. Most of them see psychiatrists; most of them take psych pharmaceuticals of one sort or another. I should write of them more often than I do, I guess. Different take on things, but lots of convergence on rights issues, etc.
