I hate this generic stock advice. It presumes so much. Like it presumes that a person hasn’t already gotten as much help as they can afford. Or that their problems can even be “helped”. Just because a person isn’t functioning at full capacity doesn’t mean they haven’t explored all the options. Maybe they have. Maybe they haven’t. Telling them to get help isn’t helpful unless you know what they’ve been through.
I have a wonderful therapist who has helped me in a ton of ways. But someone could look at me and my life and still think I need “help” just because I don’t meet their standards for normal. It would never occur to them to try to imagine that I’m exactly where I am supposed to be, given what I have to work with. It also doesn’t occur to them that therapy isn’t a cure-all even when you’re working with the best practitioner in the world. And there’s only so much an individual can do if their external circumstances are crummy. Like, when people castigate a poor person for not getting professional help, I always wonder what kind of rainbow and lollipops world they’re living in, where a poor person can just take off from work until they get their disorder(s) straightened out. Hell, even non-poor people can’t afford to do this.
Like Wesley, I don’t talk about this stuff anymore. And it isn’t just because people don’t get it, but also because I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I know I don’t like hearing about other people’s problems that I can’t remotely identify with. And I really don’t want sympathy or understanding. I just want people to not give advice about stuff they don’t know anything about and to stop making assumptions they have no way of knowing are true.
I grew up thinking that mental illness was pretty much a moral failure - I don’t recall anyone specifically saying that, but it’s the impression I got from comments of adults around me. My mom still clings to that on some level. Her sister, who was mentally handicapped, was very very angry in the last years of her life. I suggested that she was probably suffering from depression after losing her parents and having her life turned upside down, but my mom dismissed it as something that couldn’t be helped with “happy pills.” While I have zero training in mental health, I still think her anger was a chemical issue rather than a moral one. I also wonder how much might have been due to the many medications she was taking for her various non-mental physical ailments.
The point is, I expect there are a lot of people who don’t know or refuse to accept that there are physical reasons for mental problems. I guess it’s easier to believe in demons of some sort.
My uncle was paranoid schizoaffective - pretty hard to ignore when he started ranting about aliens trying to control his mind through microwave beams - but the resulting attitude in our family was that the slightest hint of mental illness = psychosis, hospitalization and being pumped full of meds against your will. There was no middle ground so every other problem was ignored, and my uncle’s problems were translated into moral failings all the time. According to everyone in my family he used his mental illness as an excuse to get out of work. Maybe he did. But his life was a living hell of believing people were out to kill him and one summer he was hospitalized eight times, I’m not sure I can judge too far. I think they just resented him for the time and resource and energy required to care for him.
My Mom refused to even acknowledge she needed help until I was long grown because she was so terrified of what ‘‘mental illness’’ meant in our family. And she often didn’t get the help she needed because all the resources and attention were being focused on my uncle. Also conversely, my Mom was scapegoated for all the dysfunction in our family. A lot of her reactions to the injustice in our family were totally justified (her own abuse, which was ignored), but it was always written off as ‘‘that’s just **Weasel Mom **being crazy.’’ In her research on Borderline Personality Disorder, Marsha Linehan identified this as a central component of what makes Borderline people Borderline - a consistently invalidating environment for having natural reactions to trauma.
So when I started feeling suicidal around the age of 12 or 13, I asked her if I could see a therapist, and she basically said, ‘‘Well, I guess, but it’s not a responsible way to address your problems.’’ When I finally started seeing a therapist around the age of 15 or 16, I told the therapist about my conflict with my mother (who was abusive) and she immediately pulled me out of therapy. I was in my twenties before she started getting therapy – but she hid so much from the therapist she was diagnosed with ‘‘adjustment disorder’’ which is the catch-all for ‘‘going through a hard time right now.’’ It wasn’t until she got real honest in therapy, in my late twenties, that she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. And she made a lot of progress but then she decided that meant she shouldn’t ever have to deal with the consequences of all the shitty things she did in the past and that’s where things broke down for us.
My Aunt once caught my Mom in a fit of rage and said she understood why people believed in demon possession. Extremely disturbed behavior can be fucking scary. Unfortunately most people with mental illness aren’t like that – it’s an overgeneralization.
I remember reading a study once in which the general public was found to be more accepting of mental illness if you pointed to a specific reason vs. identifying as having a biologically based illness. If you said, ‘‘I am depressed because I lost a loved one,’’ or, ‘‘I’m depressed because I’m unemployed,’’ people were more understanding than if you said, ‘‘I’m depressed because I have a chemical imbalance.’’ The theory was something about the evolutionary distaste for disease, but maybe Dr. Strangelove is onto something about empathy. People can relate to losing a job or a person they love, but not to having a brain that is arbitrarily out to kill you.
Thanks! Most of my life I’ve been pretty proactive about mental health, and now it helps that I’m married to a psychologist, but I’ve had my moments of not wanting or seeking help, and I think it comes from this pervasive, insidious idea that you should be able to do it all on your own, you should be able to will yourself well, and that it is a moral failing if you can’t. So sometimes even I fall victim to that mentality. And sometimes it’s just pure resentment, having to take medications with crappy side effects and devote all this extra time and energy to wellness. Sometimes a large part of me just says, ‘‘Forget this bullshit! I’m out!’’ But I can never really do that. It’s more wishful thinking.
I, on the other hand, do not go to counseling, and do not have any more contact with the mental health system than I absolutely have to, and most of that is adversarial in nature.
Please leave room in your heads, people, for the possibility that someone has problems that they’d ideally like to have some help with, but that the existing systems would not be at all helpful to them, and that therefore they’re doing the wise and healthy thing to avoid those services.
And for the record, I’ve known many doctors, teachers, counselors, policemen, salespeople, managers, supervisors, and parents who were of a dangerously and maliciously harmful state of mind and perspective on life, and I would not regard people in the beforementioned categories as being de facto reliably mentally healthy.
I agree with Wesley Clark that there are levels. I don’t think I know anyone who hasn’t been touched by depression/anxiety in their families. It seems the stigma of being open about struggling with it has lessened to a great degree. Nearly everyone in my life knows I take an antidepressant and have been in therapy. I feel no shame whatsoever for that and have not been treated any differently as far as I can tell. With the more “serious” psychiatric disorders, there is obviously still tons of misunderstanding.
Spice Weasel, I was diagnosed with epilepsy about 15 years ago. I haven’t been diagnosed with any form of depression, but when I go through seizure clusters lasting 2-3 days I definitly can spiral down to a very low place that is difficult to pull myself out of. That’s one group I can empathize with.
Most people know of things like Alzheimer’s or dementia even though depression and epilepsy are more common. (I guess that’s crossing the line to neurological diseases though. Still another area most people know next to nothing about though. People expect an epileptic to collapse to the ground if you flick the lights.)
[QUOTE=AHunter 3]
Please leave room in your heads, people, for the possibility that someone has problems that they’d ideally like to have some help with, but that the existing systems would not be at all helpful to them, and that therefore they’re doing the wise and healthy thing to avoid those services.
[/QUOTE]
Would you mind elaborating on this?
While I understand it on a cognitive level, I was hurt by so many people who refused to get help for their problems it is absolutely my default assumption that it’s better to be in treatment than not. That is a hard assumption to shake. My mother’s refusal to acknowledge or do anything about her own mental illness was at my own expense.
Which isn’t to say ‘‘do something about it’’ must mean becoming a formal mental health consumer, but based on research, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy was her best chance at healing and it did help her enough at least to find her own happiness, even if that happiness requires her to leave me behind. I’m still bitter and can’t help but note the irony that she had to deep-six the most honest and real and validating relationship she ever had in order to liberate herself from the painful past.
She doesn’t even have a therapist anymore, because two years of therapeutic work after forty years of violent and irrational behavior is apparently sufficient to declare yourself healed and ignore the past wrongs you’ve committed. Yeah, I’m just fucking bitter, I’m sorry. I’m not over it yet. I loved her so much and it never fucking amounted to anything.
So help me understand, where is the line? How do you know when your illness is causing too much harm to go unchecked and how do you cope with an inadequate system and what it is like to not view treatment as an absolutely critical lifeline?
Usually, if depression is extremely treatment resistant it is assumed to be biologically based. I’ve had four or five different kinds of evidence-based therapy, tried 12 or 13 different medications in various combinations, and even shelled out $10,000 to shoot magnetic pulses into my prefrontal cortex for an experimental, promising treatment called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. I’ve been depressed since I was twelve and in therapy since I was 18. I have, conservatively, spent over $30,000 out of pocket on treatment. I still have depression. It’s probably biologically based.
Most therapists assumed by default when they learned my personal history that my depression was a result of trauma and that once the trauma was healed, I would be cured. I do have PTSD also, it complicates the cause and effect relationship, but there is a clear genetic history of depression in my family in addition to Pre Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder, which my great-grandmother had so bad she had to be permanently institutionalized, and all three generations of women before me had hysterectomies (I assume it’s just a matter of time for me.) In my family, mental illness is very much linked with hormonal imbalance. Both my mother, my mother’s sister, and my father have Recurrent Major Depressive Disorder as well. It is logical to conclude this is genetic.
It’s impossible to say how much better off I would be without PTSD or how much of my depression is PTSD related but at this point it’s a solid conclusion that my depression was not caused solely by my trauma.
One thing I’ve learned this year is that epilepsy and depression often go hand in hand, and after having my seizures it’s no small wonder why. I had three grand mals in one day, two back-to-back, and spent three days in the hospital. It was a completely and total disruption of my life and four months later I still have not fully recovered. And I can’t drive until September - because the best possible thing you can do to a depressed person is socially isolate them even more!
I already had that vulnerability toward depression, the first thing they did is take me off of the most effective depression medication I have ever taken (it is known to lower seizure threshold) cold turkey and place me on Keppra, an anticonvulsant whose two major side effects are severe fatigue and suicidal ideation. And suicidally ideate, I did. I went through a two month period that was probably about the worst I’ve ever been in ten years. I felt 17 again, and then 12. My PTSD, which had been successfully treated, was suddenly back in full force. It’s like the seizures unwired everything in my brain. Over the course of a couple months it improved but it seems to have plateaued now and I’m just going to go to the neurologist and tell him I’d rather have seizures than take this medication any longer. I’m miserable on it, i can’t focus, it’s 6pm and I haven’t even showered today much less done any work.
I’ve been going through a period of depression again lately where I am just excoriating myself for how little I am able to accomplish while on this medication. Reading through everything that’s happened since 2014, the miscarriage, the unemployment, the emergency surgery, the seizures, the Keppra, I’m reminded of everything I’ve had to face, and hopefully I can start cutting myself some slack now, but I doubt it.
Sorry I’m kinda using this thread as my personal venting but I’m just so fucking tired of dealing with this shit. Have you ever read the Richard Bachmann horror novel The Long Walk? It’s a marathon you can never quit.
To the likely annoyance of those who are tired of seeing me on my soapbox… sure!
• Some people probably benefit from psychiatric pharmaceuticals, some from cognitive-behavioral counseling, some from classical Freudian psychotherapy… but for some of us, our experience of psychiatric “help” falls somewhere between “a highly annoying waste of time” and “by far a more destructive presence in our life than the original problems for which we received a psychiatric diagnosis”
• “Treatment” is a word that has more than one meaning. To be “in treatment” typically references being the recipient of professional services, but it also conventionally refers to the entire gamut of behavior directed towards a person — as in “is this how you want to be treated?” For many of us, we’d be hard put to describe a more invasively hostile way of being treated than we’ve been treated by mental health professionals; and if asked to describe least thereapeutic possible way of treating another human being, the actual behaviors we’ve been subjected to by mental health professionals could be used without much exaggeration.
• The basic model of mental health therapy assumes that a) there are perfectly health people in the world who cope with the circumstances of their lives in a healthy fashion, which is to say without being alienated and emotionally traumatized; b) that anyone who does not fit that description has an ailment, a problem that lies within them, and the changes that need to be made also therefore lie within them. This is a politically conservative view of society that I do not share. My default assumption about anyone who is alienated and traumatized in this world is that they have been victimized and that what needs to be changed is at least partially exterior to them — some form of social change.
• Obviously not all mental health services are directly coercive, however conservative they may be, and how inclined they may be to perpetuate the blaming of victims; but institutional psychiatric services are embedded at the core of the mental health system and they are wedded to a model of involuntary incarceration and involuntary treatment. This is a massive poisoning of the entire well. A fundamental social purpose of involuntary psychiatric service is to handle disturbing people for the benefit of others. It distorts the entire conversation once that function is mis-described as “helpful” to the people who are targeted by it. (In any specific instance it may or may not be helpful to them, but that is secondary to the police function of protecting the rest of the community from them in some fashion.
• The psychiatric profession has made many unsubstantiated claims about their comprehension of our problems and the treatments they are able to provide to mental health patients. Chief among these is the notion that each of the individual psychiatric diagnoses represents a known and understood physiological deficiency of the brain (either an oversensitivity to or overproduction of this or that neurotransmitter or an undersensitivity to or underproduction of one — colloquially referred to as “a chemical imbalance”); and that they have medication which directly fixes these “chemical imbalances” the way insulin addresses diabetes or synthetic thyroid hormone replaces natural thyroxin for people with hypothyroidism. This isn’t true. This isn’t merely not entirely true, it is COMPLETELY NOT true. All the profession has is a set of generalizations, clusters of repeated patterns, that loosely support the idea that the various mental illnesses exist; they haven’t the foggiest notion what causes them or if they have social components, physical components, a combo of the two, or what. Their theories of “chemical imbalances” were historically derived ass-backwards from having first started using certain pharmaceuticals to manage symptoms and then assuming that whatever those medications were actually doing in the brain must be ameliorating an underlying condition that was the logical opposite of whatever the medications were actually doing in the brain. Be that as it may, they do seem to help some people, but their claims for knowing what they’re doing and the efficacy of these treatments belongs in the same pile as homeopathy and Laetrile.
• Psychiatric ailments —as has already been commented on extensively —are seen to discredit those so diagnosed. This is not only a problem as far as blaming people for the problems that they self-describe themselves as having, it is also a problem for people who have been diagnosed but who do not regard themselves as suffering from anything other than having an unwanted diagnoses hung around our necks. Let’s get real — if I am seeking social change, other people who inhabit my world may not want that social change to occur, and as a value judgment they may consider my thoughts and priorities to be crazy. I’m OK with that, they are entitled to their opinion. But to be preemptively marked down as a person whose mental content should be ignored because it’s just neuro-static, meaningless side-effects of bad brain chemistry, that’s not fair. And that’s real stigma.
•Borrowing from a combo of the LGBTQ community’s attitude towards sexual-orientation differences and the disabled community’s attitude towards dis/abilities, my inclination is to say I may or may not be different — cognitively, emotionally, or what the hell, biochemically — but a difference is not a disease unless it is undesireable, and I’m proud of mine. Wanna call me schizophrenic? Go ahead (there’s no formal biomedical mechanism for ever ruling it out so I guess it’s mine for life). But as with gay people being out and proud, I’ll put “I’M SCHIZOPHRENIC AND I VOTE” on my t shirt and I think we should have hiring quotas and other forms of social parity. We’re just as good as nonschizzies if not better in various ways. And who’d want to be normal? From the disability community comes the imperative to provide any and all services in the least restrictive setting possible with the maximum opportunity to do the things one is able to do without being relegated to being a second-tier citizen. Hell yeah, Mad Pride!
• In a dehumanizing world that has careened far away from appropriate human values, there is no possibility for anyone to be well-integrated, socially connected, fully in touch with their own feelings and expressive of their own thoughts, and solidly in touch with reality. No possibility. What you have instead is people who are alienated in the normal everyday sense of conforming and copying others after having given up trying to figure stuff out and make sense of the world, and usually in various stages of denial and anger and feelings of having been cheated and betrayed due to life not turning out as advertised for people who obediently do that conforming and copying; or else alienated in the other typical way, pursuing their own route, coming to their own understandings and getting riled up about thinking that they see things as they actually are, unlike the people surrounding them, and thus increasingly cut off from others, cut off from the reality-check process that comes from interactive communication.
Thank you for sharing. I am going to read and re-read this and let it sink in, and discuss with my husband, who is a psychologist and has a better grasp on the current state of the mental health profession than I do. I was hospitalized only once, for suicidal ideation, and it was voluntary because I was genuinely afraid I was going to kill myself. I’ve felt misled at times but I’ve never felt choices were taken from me to determine my own course. Also, I have a super compliant nature. They told me to get up at 9am and eat breakfast, I did it, they gave me worksheets to fill out, I did them, they took away my razor, whatever, I never questioned that they knew best.
But I do remember the doctor talking to me for all of 15 minutes, asking me about my abuse history and then remarking something to the effect of, ‘‘you need to let go of your past,’’ and thinking man, this guy doesn’t have a clue. I like my current therapist because she’s just as crazy as I am and she’s not shy about it. There’s a taboo against therapists revealing personal information about themselves but she does and it works really well for me because that is the sort of person I am, just wide open and needing to connect.
As I mentioned previously, my uncle was diagnosed paranoid schizoaffective and I have real problems with the way he was treated, both by society and within our family. But I am ashamed to admit I don’t know a better way. There were times he was forced to take his medication because he physically attacked other people and he was institutionalized more times than I can count. He was rarely coherent, but who can say how much the medication contributed to that? He hated his medication and he didn’t trust his doctors or his family half the time, but it’s difficult both because his family really was shitty and because paranoia is endemic to the disorder.
I know there have been global studies of cultural attitudes toward mental illness and people with schizophrenia tend to have better outcomes in cultures that do not share the medical model of mental illness, where the afflicted individuals are included in all of community life and where common symptoms of depression, like social withdrawal, are seen as more problematic than psychosis. I wanted that culture for him so badly but our family is so fucked up on so many levels it was never in the realm of possibility. He has passed away now and both of his parents basically breathed a sigh of relief they don’t have him as a burden anymore.
You sound so liberated and comfortable with yourself, but I imagine it was not without a lot of struggle. It takes enormous strength to reject any prevailing model of what is considered Normal and I absolutely agree with you about the need for social change. I’m not ashamed of my mental illness but I want to feel like I’m not broken, and I still do. I feel like I’m halfway there, but not quite.
It doesn’t help that due to my husband’s profession I really do have a lot of pressure in my relationship to remain ‘‘in treatment’’ whether I like it or not. I don’t want to be this medicated but I’m not sure I can function otherwise.
[QUOTE=AHunter3]
This is not only a problem as far as blaming people for the problems that they self-describe themselves as having, it is also a problem for people who have been diagnosed but who do not regard themselves as suffering from anything other than having an unwanted diagnoses hung around our necks.
[/QUOTE]
I think this is what I’m struggling to comprehend. Presumably, there was some collection of symptoms that got you involved with the mental health industry in the first place and diagnosed as schizophrenic - I don’t know what you would describe these symptoms as, but do they not cause you suffering? Have they ever caused you suffering, apart from how you were treated by the mental health profession? Do you think anyone close to you has suffered as a result of your illness? How do you cope with that collection of symptoms on a day to day basis, or do you truly feel you don’t have anything to cope with?
For me, the understanding that I had a mental illness came when I could no longer actually function in my day. I was depressed and suicidal, but I thought it was perfectly logical since I was a loser and my life was shit. I resisted getting help until I hit the point where it impacted my job. I wasn’t paying attention, I refused to speak to people, I exploded for poor reasons, and eventually I just walked out of my office one day. I had been pulling myself along and getting by - marginally - for several months, but it just got to the point where I couldn’t even fake functioning any more.
Between approximately middle-school age and the winter I turned 21, I was periodically overwhelmed with worry that there was something different/wrong with me, something that was the explanation for why I didn’t fit in anywhere and was often beaten up and made fun of etc. Suffering was involved. I didn’t like my everyday life and I was worried that I was bringing all this mistreatment upon myself, by being something… horrible, something wrong with me. Like if I could see myself as others saw me I’d understand why everyone wanted to mock me and harass me, like I was something pathetic and creepy and disgusting.
I had been dropping in on a couple of counseling centers intermittently and found some good listeners but they had no answers to give me or magic wands to wave over me and fix me. I wasn’t consistent about going to them; I was more consistent about “working on myself”, trying to sort out how I was different and whether I could ever catch up with other people, get over the effects of my earlier-life isolation and gain better social skills and stuff.
Looking back on it, I would say I was not ill. There wasn’t anything wrong with me. I am different but not in a bad way, not in a way that means I am inferior or impaired. I did not know that then, though.
Right around my 21st birthday some stuff clicked into place for me, and I realized that a difference that I knew about was a much bigger deal than I’d previously realized: I’d identified with the girls, not the boys, growing up; had emulated them, admired them, valued what they valued, went to great lengths to avoid being perceived as having much in common with the boys, and so on. That had never stopped being who I was but it got complicated as a teenager because I was sexually attracted to girls which finally DID give me something centrallly important in common with the boys. But yeah I was a sissy fellow, a girlish boy (and proud of it) and I had managed to be pretty oblivious about how big a deal that was to a lot of people.
Once I formulated the idea that this was actually “IT”, everything made sense, so strongly and immediately that I expected it to make sense that same way to anyone I explained it to. In actuality I wasn’t explaining it very well (this was 1980; in 2016 I can say “I"m genderqueer” and people may nod or they may roll their eyes but it isn’t completely unheard-of, but in 1980 there was no such word and I was a college student very fired up about some ideas about sex and sexuality that folks around me weren’t understanding). I disturbed some people.
At a time when finally I was no longer worried that something was wrong with me, and was exuberantly confident, I was asked to go talk to the university psych services people just to clear up concerns because I had disturbed people. I signed a consent form, which seemed to be authorizing a psychiatrist to talk to me and had nothing on it about relinquishing my self-determination, but was in fact regarded as a self-commitment. I found the locked ward environment to be a horrible place to put any vulnerable emotionally frazzled person or any alienated person; I couldn’t believe the way patients were treated there! Fortunately for me I was no longer particularly vulnerable or emotionally frazzled and instead I was sure that there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with me – society needed changing!
Being able to lable issues can make things so much easier sometimes. You go from “I am the only person this messed up and I don’t know why!” to being able to research it and find stories of people like you.
I’ve heard several other stories like that; people who felt out of place and confused until gender roles came into the public eye.
Let’s be real here - people have some pretty ignorant notions about diabetes and cancer, too.
It took me a long time to understand that my sister’s death was a bad outcome of her mental illness just as an amputation is a bad outcome for diabetes or death is a bad outcome of having cancer - it doesn’t mean anyone did anything wrong, or failed, it means we don’t understand the disease very well and we don’t have a cure and the tools we have for treatment are far from imperfect. Of course, the notion that someone can come down with a disease for which there is no cure and for which the treatment options are far from perfect scares the hell out of a lot of people.
Since early adolescence I have experienced periods in my life where I’ve been depressed to the point I can no longer function. My parents were instrumental in me not getting treatment early on. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I took the initiative to pursue treatment. Treatment has certainly been no panacea, and I have some beefs with the mental health profession/industry. That said, I place myself firmly in the ‘as a rule get treatment’ camp.
My intent here is not to air the aforementioned beefs, but rather to focus on what can be done to improve the public’s understanding of mental health issues. I’m convinced I would be better off today had my parents not been adamant in denying I had a problem, or worse, treating my condition as if it was some sort of moral failing on my part. Years later I recognize they were very much a product of their times and can’t really be held accountable for their attitudes and opinions. It would be nice, though, if future generations could pursue and obtain treatment for what ails their minds without encountering medieval attitudes along the way.
I suspect Dr. Strangelove hit a nail squarely on the head when he said true empathy isn’t possible unless one has experienced something like it themselves. He’s may be right, but I’m convinced increased general awareness will improve the current state of affairs. As other posters have noted, the general public’s acceptance, recognition, and understanding of conditions like depression or anxiety disorders is slowly improving. It needs to improve a great deal more, and Ahunter3 made a few promising suggestions up thread. **Spice weasel ** also sounds like she has found appropriate internal boundaries for herself. At a certain point one has to simply recognize those times when dealing with folks who Truly Don’t Get It and mentally write those folks off.
In the Mad Pride movement (also called the psychiatric patients’ rights movement, mental patients’ liberation movement, consumers-survivors-expatients’ movement, and other such things), there are some who, like me, want nothing to do with the psychiatric system and its services, and others who go to psychiatrists and take psych medications, and everywhere in between. What unifies us, I think, is a desire to be in charge of our own medical decisions, much as recipients of other medical practice seek to be.
That means, for those who DO want psych services, that they have the right to do so under conditions of fully informed consent and the right to refuse it otherwise. Don’t lie to us, sugarcoat or gloss over the real risks and lack of precise knowledge, either to con us into doing what you think best for us or to “protect” us from complexities lest our poor brains can’t take it.
It means being able to compare notes and choose from among available therapists to obtain the services (and service providers) we deem to be in our best interests. Don’t conflate “needs services” with “one size fits all” catchment-basin approaches to providing it.
Nothing about us without us. Stop giving the microphone and the newspaper column inches to self-appointed associations FOR the mentally ill when there are plenty of organizations OF us, advocates and spokespeople from within. Involve us, get our input, any time policy is being made that affects us.
A-fucking-men! I find your strength inspirational.
I’d really like to become more involved with the Mad Pride movement. Do you have any resources?
I’d also like to ask, what is your take on people like my uncle and my mother? Where would they fit in this movement?
My uncle completely lost touch with reality around the time he was 19. He stopped eating because he believed people were poisoning his food. This was in the 70s and his first institutionalization was a complete horror story, but it was here he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and eventually, schizoaffective disorder. I cannot ever remember a time in my life he had a firm grasp on reality. He was more involved in family activities when I was younger but his mental health deteriorated even further over the years to the point he couldn’t attend family events. He was able to live in his own apartment with the financial support of his parents, but was frequently thrown out of places because of property destruction and disturbing the peace type stuff. Once he violently attacked a police officer who was called out due to a domestic disturbance and he was court-mandated to take his medication via injection. He talked sometimes about obtaining weapons and committing mass murder. He was in and out of the hospital, involuntarily, all the time.
I hesitate to say this part, because I view it as a separate issue from his mental illness, but he was also a child molester. He was abused as a child and abused others in turn when he was a teen, including my aunt and some neighborhood infants and children. He also attempted to kill my mother multiple times. He spent the rest of his life agonizing over the children he abused and was terrified of molesting children again; it became an obsession. Shortly before he died, he was thrown out of his home because there were neighborhood kids in the area and he was saying sexual things about them - I wasn’t present, but I think he was arguing with voices in his head that he would NOT abuse them… at any rate, it doesn’t sound like you’ve had any problems like this, but you probably know people who have. What’s the solution?
My mother was also severely disturbed, although she was more functional usually than my uncle. She refused treatment or to acknowledge there was anything wrong with her. She was extremely abusive and controlling especially to me, she destroyed property on a regular basis, including tearing up our sofa with a butcher knife, driving her car into the side of my stepfather’s office building, and putting holes in my bedroom walls and doors. She threatened to kill me a few times, and threatened to throw me out of the house often. Some part of her knew I was being sexually abused by my stepfather and she often took it out on me. Occasionally she would just call my grandfather and have him pick me up because she was afraid she was going to kill me. I knew she had Borderline Personality Disorder but it wasn’t until long after I’d legally emancipated she got any help and a proper diagnosis. She did make some improvements with Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, but not enough to save our relationship, I’m afraid. The main issue is she refused to deal with anything she had done in the past, including the damage to me.
I guess the question is, what happens when people truly are a threat to the public, or to their families? What is the compassionate response there? When does someone have a responsibility to get help?