What exactly was it about you that disturbed people?
For the record AHunter3, you’ve inspired me and/or started trouble. 
I’ve been talking to Sr. Weasel a lot about this thread and your comments in particular, and he plans to read it this weekend. I told him I’m sick of all these fucking medications.
He’s like, ‘‘Well, we’ll see. You should be medicated for a while, you haven’t even been stable for a year yet.’’
I love him, and I do trust his expertise, but he also has no fucking clue what it’s like to live with all this. And I told him so, and I told him it’s time for him to stop acting like he knew better than me what is best for me.
I said, ''It’s not fucking up to you! Nothing about us without us! Mad Pride!"
He said, ‘‘Let’s not argue before bed.’’
It’s going to be an interesting year.
I have an ego sufficiently big to enjoy it when threads become All About Me, so sure, what the heck… 
• Having arrived at an understanding of my sexual/gender identity that really seemed to help me (see post #34), I quickly became convinced that this set of ideas & understandings would benefit other people who were in a similar situation, and also that it was politically-socially relevant in a general way, sort of like feminism — and therefore that I should spread it around, see what other people thought, hit them with my new insights.
• As I said, I wasn’t particularly good at putting it into words in my first attempts. (Partly because I was a music student, not a sociology or psychology student and, unfamiliar with terms and jargon used by folks who study things like gender roles and socialization and internalized identity and stuff, I invented my own as need be). The upshot of it was that there was this college student darting around campus, distributing poorly written (handwritten, xeroxed – as a music major in 1980 I did not need, or have, a typewriter) screeds that were about sex and sexuality. And acting like this was all Very Important Stuff. And being very intense about it + sort of behaving like this was a triumph, that he was in on some kind of Great Secret that he was now letting the rest of you folks in on. C’mon, you should be able to visualize how that could come across as rather nutty, yes? Especially if to most folks the material didn’t make a whole lot of sense?
• Among the target audience of people I distributed this material to were the counselors at the university’s mental health wing of the medical service. I had been popping in to talk with them for years, going back to before I was a university student there. (They had never been of any real HELP, honestly, but they had been available to listen when I was miserable and frantically lonely and feeling isolated and desperate for understanding). In my current mode of dashing around distributing my Brilliant Writings™, I didn’t sit down with them to discuss this right away but instead left it behind with a note. Unknown to me at the time, they had had some turnover in their front office and the packet was redirected to staffers other than the counselors who knew me by name.
• Also among the target audience of people I distributed this material to was the director of the Rape Crisis Center on campus. She was also a feminist poet and I had heard her read poetry about gender and power and patriarchy at a coffeehouse across the street, so I was particularly interested in her feedback. She was out when I came by her office, so again I left the packet behind, in her campus mailbox, addressed to her personally and with my name and contact info. Let me remind you that this material was not easy to understand. So a woman running a Rape Crisis Center on campus gets a handwritten manifesto about sexuality and gender and stuff from a male student and finds it a bit worrisome, possibly threatening.
•Meanwhile, liberated from previous worries and unconfident furtiveness about my identity, I was OUT, doing things like wearing skirts on campus or bantering with people in a new and disconcerting way when they hinted or made double-entendre insinuations and innuendos about my possible sexual orientation and etc. I knew my behavior was pushing some people off-balance and delighted in it. Turnabout is fair play. People had been making ME feel off-balance for a long long time and how I was sure I was fundamentally OK and enjoying other people’s squirminess and insecurities about a openly sissy male who didn’t categorize in any way they were accustomed to.
It was brought to a head by my resident advisor who left a note on my dorm room door. I went by and was told “Yeah, people are ‘concerned’ about you, if you don’t mind please go over to the university health service and ‘talk’ with the mental health people. Just to alleviate people’s apprehensions that something about you is something the campus needs to deal with”. I went over and they had my writings and started asking me questions and asked me to ‘talk’ with the psychiatrist and first sign a permission form.
My sister (“Sylvia Plath”), now 40, sucked and continues to suck the family’s time, resources, and energy with her mental and addictive issues. She truly does have real psychological and physical problems, but she’s also in running for the World’s Greatest Drama and Laziness Queen.
The other siblings, myself included, had and have varying degrees of anxiety/ depression/addictions but didn’t receive the attention needed as kids because what little time and resources the parentals had was devoted to Sylvia. Mom is still roped into Sylvia’s daily dramas and gets upset when we kids (now ages 35 - 50) don’t want to hear about Sylvia’s problems, bad behaviors, hospitalizations, 911 calls, and so on . . . we just don’t have it in us to care any more.
I’m sorry, in a general way, that my sister deals with major and awful things like BPD and bipolar, but my sympathy/empathy for her was drained years ago. I have mostly cut her out of my life and don’t take the bait when mom tries to draw me into the drama.
I’m fortunate in that I work in a field (college teaching in humanities) where it’s weird if you’re not a little crazy. We regularly discuss our therapy, meds and daily/life challenges and are able to ask for and receive mental and material support.
There are several Facebook groups that are “us” that you might want to join: NARPA, Pyschiatric Revolution, Psychiatric Survivors, Pyschiatric Consumer CQU , this “interest” page Psychiatric Survivors Movement… there are various local groups that meet in person in brick-and-mortar settings etc and NARPA has annual conferences.
You could also make a trip to the local library and snag copies of:
Judi Chamberlin, ON OUR OWN: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System
Janet and Paul Gotkin, TOO MUCH ANGER, TOO MANY TEARS: A Personal Triumph over Psychiatry
Kate Millett, THE LOONY-BIN TRIP
Linda Morrison, TALKING BACK TO PSYCHIATRY: The Psychiatric Consumer/Survivor/Ex-patient Movement
… and download and read Sally Zinman & Gayle Bluebird’s history of the movement
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First, {{{Spice Weasel}}}… that sounds raw and protracted and frankly awful.
OK, let’s say we know someone who is
• miserable
• not making good decisions
• of questionable relationship to reality / doesn’t discern things well / harbors peculiar attitudes, draws strange conclusions about people, etc
• absolutely no fucking fun to be around, total pain in the ass, being involved with this person is an embrace of an emotional black hole that just sucks your heart out
We can…
• ignore them and avoid them, which is probably good for OUR emotional health but abandons them, and maybe we don’t feel so good about that; or
• we can try to offer them some form of help, although as mentioned above most official professional help is of uncertain efficacy, has stigma and very real loss of rights attached to it, and may involve outright coercion and horror stories far worse than what this person is going through; or
• we can try to link them up with user-run mutual-support / patient-controlled alternative help, which avoids most of the negatives of the professional type of help, but still isn’t very useful if the person doesn’t perceive themselves as being in need of anything of that sort; or
•we can try to listen, communicate, be supportive one-on-one, validate the valid stuff and try to provide a reality-check and other forms of love, tough and otherwise, to help them grow and/or sort stuff out, that also isn’t very effective unless the person recognizes their connection with us as a healthy one rather than seeing this as another relationship to manipulate and/or be on guard against
I know those aren’t very reassuring options, but mostly this is a lonesome valley that one has to walk by themselves, at least to the point of coming to recognize what to reach for.
We are entitled to…
• protection from ANY abusive, violent, or exploitative person, regardless of whether we should feel sorry for them at the same time or not; there are laws that make destructive behaviors illegal, and laws and provisions that support a person’s right to extract themselves from another person’s poisonousness;
• our own freedoms including freedom of expression, freedom to make our own choices and not curtail these because of how they might make someone else feel, and freedom of association both pro and con, the right to say “no” or “yes” to various forms of interpersonal contact.
Those are things I most often stress when talking to another psychiatric-system survivor or sufferer, but they are our rights because they are human rights, and they are therefore the rights of any person who has to interact with one of us!
We are NOT entitled to…
•force someone to accept what we think is in their best interest because of how strongly we want a good outcome for them and how poorly we view their own decision-making prowess — nope, this is usually a self-lie, unless you’re a parent dealing with a young child. (It is quite often a lie even then, but it rises to the level of a Rule once you are no longer dealing with someone for whom you are legal guardian). Usually this is a self-lie to hide the fact that the actions one is taking are being taken on one’s OWN BEHALF. It is legitimate to take actions on one’s own behalf but bad to disguise it to one’s self as an act of kindness undertaken for the OTHER person’s benefit.
• disregard the general social contract’s provisions for self-determination and right to make personal choices simply because we feel so sure that in this or that instance the person needs help a lot more than they need their rights to be respected, and because we’re so absolutely sure what we want for them is what they need — nope, the moment you do that, you weaken everyone’s rights, including your own. Spectacularly bad idea. Take a moment and write down the name of 10 people who you would really really hate to barge in and start making your decisions for you if they were to decide it was for your own good if they did. YES, it means some people die outdoors underfed and unclothed and their lungs full of pneumonia and confused and miserable. I’ve seen far worse outcomes than that when people have been involuntarily institutionalized though.
When I was in elementary school there were two kids I knew who were “crazy”. One probably had ADHD and the other just acted weird. I didn’t understand why the first kid didn’t just do things properly and was always annoyed by his antics. The teacher hated him, once locking him out of the portable classroom in winter, and throwing textbooks in his general direction. I honestly don’t know how that teacher didn’t get fired. (Certainly if they behaved that way this today, they’d be “transferred” after kids cell phone videoed his own antics.)
The other kid might not have any a mental illness. Unfortunately, he was raised by a single parent who was visibly mentally ill. I believe that like other kids he first learned social skills from his parents, and since he only had one who had problems, he didn’t realize that he wasn’t acting normally. I’ve never seen him after high school and have no idea what he is like today.
I think I just have a hard time understanding how someone could not control their conscious behavior. Mood disorders I can understand, even paranoia, anxiety, phobias, and hallucinations, but there’s some that will make me (if only internally) cranky or annoyed because their behavior is bothering me and they won’t stop doing whatever it is that’s annoying me. I think a lot of people become dismissive of certain kinds of mental illness as well. If they’ve never undergone it (at least not of this type) there’s no sympathy. Maybe empathy.
Honestly, I don’t even think having experienced something first-hand necessarily equips person with enough empathy for others. Take depression or anxiety. Lots of people have dealt with these disorders. Not just subclinical forms, but full-blown disorders. Many are lucky enough to have the internal or external resources to escape from or cope with them.
So it can be hard for someone in this category to have sympathy for someone who they perceive to be “wallowing”. It can be difficult to appreciate that just because something worked for Person A doesn’t mean it has to work for Person B just as well. And just like any disease or condition, mental illness does not have the same course for everyone. Just because Person A was clinically depressed for only a few months doesn’t mean that he or she cares more or is more virtuous than Person B who has been depressed for years.
I think compassion is a lot more important than sympathy or empathy. The latter two emotions require someone to feel something they may not be inclined to feel due to lack of experience or deep understanding. But if a person tries to cultivate compassion for everyone, then it doesn’t matter. Compassion doesn’t require a deep understanding. It just recognizes that a given person is going through shit for reasons beyond their control and that more than likely they are trying the best they can, so their suboptimal behavior should be viewed with some lenience. I honestly think if people could cultivate a little more compassion, then sympathy/empathy would eventually flow from that.
That’s an interesting take. There’s a default assumption that the more empathy you have for someone, the better, but as someone with a high level of empathy I can attest that, in the very least, it’s a double-edged sword. There are times I’ve been paralyzed and made useless by empathy, for example when my grandmother’s son died I was so absorbed in her pain I fell apart myself and was not nearly as helpful as I could have been. I had to call my Aunt for help, who arguably has more compassion than empathy, and she drove 12 hours back home in order to clean grandma’s house and take care of things. She did not come for my grandmother, she came because I was emotionally overwhelmed and could not handle the grief that wasn’t mine to have. I am ashamed of this.
Empathy could also be the culprit for why I remained in a toxic relationship with my mother for so long. Because I am the only one who understands her, and thus the only one who can help her. Because I get the trauma that drives her behavior. Well, it was less than useless in the end.
Likewise, I have a friend with severe depression that I have a difficult time with because I perceive her as never doing anything to improve her circumstances. Is that fair? Probably not. She doesn’t have a supportive partner like I do and lives in an invalidating environment with few resources of her own. Her experience of depression is different than mine.
So yes, I think you’re onto something there. I’ve always viewed empathy as a requisite for compassion but maybe that’s not true. Maybe they are separate things.
Spice Weasel, I’m not too ashamed to admit that I don’t have sympathy/empathy for most people and their situations. People may take this to mean that I’m heartless and don’t give a shit about anyone. Maybe they are right, I dunno. But I know that lack of feelings doesn’t translate into lack of decency.
I probably won’t weep for you.
But I will help you come up with solutions and do what I can to help those solutions come together.
I will offer words of encouragement.
I will not yell at you or tell you you’re wrong for feeling a certain way.
If someone badmouths you in my presence, I will stick up for you and ask for some compassion on your behalf.
Really, I don’t think it is fair to demand anything more from a person.
I’m glad you feel comfortable enough to talk about it openly because this is a pretty big paradigm shift for me. I’ve judged people in the past for not having enough empathy, which is something they probably can’t control anyhow.
I guess what it all comes down to is how you treat people. And honestly, by that standard, sometimes empathy fails.
The description of your sister and part about just not having energy for sympathy/empathy anymore made me think about one of David Sedaris’s This American Life episodes where he talks about the death (by suicide) of his sister, Tiffany. He talks about his own reaction to her death, and the reactions of his other siblings. The episode is here.
Also, there’s a person in my family very similar to your description of your sister. Had to distance myself a long time ago just out of self-preservation.
it’s people like your family member as well as “Sylvia” points to Jennshark’s post which contributes to the stigma.
It’s one thing to have a mental illness. It’s a wholly different thing to have a mental illness and NOT even try to help yourself.
I once worked with a young person who had something-or-other coupled with substance abuse. This person’s life centered around either and utterly exhausted anyone connected to her, coworkers included. The person was fired, rehired, then fired again. There were a couple of arrests. I often wonder what became of this coworker and frankly, wouldn’t be surprised if this coworker has since passed from either OD or suicide (I hate thinking either but either was the obvious trajectory. I hope I’m wrong on both counts.)
Well said, this is exactly what my feelings are about my sister. She has fully embraced the victim role for decades; to reiterate, she deals with some awful mental health issues, but she doesn’t raise a finger to help herself. She has actually run out of doctors in the region who will treat her because she doesn’t want to do any heavy lifting, she’s only seeking drugs.
She does have some kind of seizure disorder, but it has never been definitely diagnosed. Personally, I think they started out as fake fits when she found that they garnered attention.
What is really egregious is we have a brother who regularly had grand mal seizures and died during one. Afterward, sister’s “seizures” began happening almost daily and she got her hooks into my mother, who was terrified about losing another kid.
I told my shrink that I feel guilty about not caring about sister. Her basic, and oddly comforting response, was that I didn’t have to care.
Anyhoo . . . thanks for the space to vent.
This is a really interesting thread. I had to skip the last few posts because of time constraints, and I don’t have a lot of time to really get into a detailed post, but when has that ever stopped me before?
I’ve got various “issues,” “problems,” “diagnoses” or whatever you want to call them. I’ve posted about them before, but many years ago so people may not be that familiar with my stuff.
Let’s see, here’s a thread: Prepubescent boys don’t have hymens, but we too bled the same red which was from September 21, 2007 the first anniversary of my oldest son’s death.
My younger brother is nuts. I had to cut him out of my life. My second sister is on disability. I self medicated with alcohol until that became worse than the sickness. Spice, not to play one upmanship, but the amount of money I’ve lost dealing with this is mind boggling.
I’m on the fence about therapy. I don’t think in general it’s particularly effective for people with serious issues and I think that, worse, most therapists have no fucking clue that they’re dealing with something completely out of their league.
I had been the dutiful client, doing the homework going back week after week after week with a dozen different counselors over a score and a half years. My longest was with one who sort of helped and also made things much worse at the end. If he didn’t name his BMW after me, I’m going to be really pissed.
I had bought into the myth that they had some sort of clue, that they could help but it’s like a cub scout learning some first aid and showing up in an OR expecting to take on cases.
Therapy helps help would would be able to solve problems on their own, but need some help. It ain’t for those of us who truly know the abyss.
I absolutely don’t buy the idea that because we “fail” therapy, that it must be biological. Aspirins can’t relieve serious pain, that takes a stronger drug.
I try to write more tomorrow, because I have to get off this damn computer and get some sleep, but my theory comes a pretty [del]healthy[/del] large sample size.
My mother is one of six children: the oldest was a boy, AKA The Golden Child Who Could Do No Wrong (TGCWCDNW – fuck that, it’s too long GC) and then the five sisters who do do not right, fighting with each other as they scrounged for the tiniest scraps of love left over after GC had his fill and more.
All five sisters married the same guy. Sure, different people but all the same guy. Losers. Bullies. Abusers.
Long story short, GC became a professor of engineering at a respected university, had five children, three boys and two girls. All the children went to college and got their undergrad in four or less years, two of the boys got PhDs, and the other has a master’s. The oldest boy followed his father’s choice in profession, the second has a distinguished career in Boeng as an aeronautical engineer and the third has his own consulting firm.
Since they’re Mormons on my generation, the girls married grad students.
None of the five of them have any significant issues.
Of the 29 other grandchildren, maybe one did college in four years. More than half didn’t attend or dropped out. Of those who did graduate most of us were on 10 year plans. I think there are two who have master’s.
Mental illness, depression, anxiety, really poor choices of spouses, bad careers and countless other symptoms are pervasive.
Our family had the most abuse and we have the worst problems, but still, 29 out of 29 have had significant issues.
The odds just don’t work that way for random distribution of genes.
I’ve talked so much about my mental illness on this board over the years, I’m sick of hearing me. So, I just wanted to thank everyone else for having such an enlightening discussion and for allowing me to learn more new things that might help me. Especially, Spice, whose in-depth knowledge and real attitude about all this is refreshing.
As for me, I’m doing the best I ever have in twenty years. Despite my husband’s death last year, I’m working and mostly functioning on my own. Most days are pretty decent, but the sadly precarious part is, it can collapse in a moment’s notice. I eagerly await reading more about how you all cope. That’s my main focus of my various therapies and medications now, so any helpful input is greatly appreciated.
Thank you. Sometimes I feel like a whiner.
There is something to be said about the contribution of trauma. My depression has been worsening over the last few weeks for no apparent reason (other than this stupid fucking medication) but I’ve also been feeling a lot of guilt, both for how I handled the aftermath of the miscarriage and how I’ve dealt with my Mom. I got a kitten, and I’m not gonna lie, it was basically because I wanted something to mother because it’s gonna be a few years before a baby happens. But that has contributed to some issues with my pre-existing cat and given me something to feel more guilty about.
I kind of had the breakdown a couple of days ago where I sent a short, very bitter non-fiction piece I wrote about my adopted father’s abuse to a writer friend who didn’t know about my history. I already sent it to another writer friend a few months ago, and he said I needed an inspirational message in it, so when I sent it to this guy a couple of days ago, I said, ‘‘This isn’t really a finished piece, I just wanted to share this part of my life.’’
To my surprise, he got really excited about it as a piece of writing.
‘‘Well,’’ I said, ‘‘Brian said it needed to be inspirational.’’
‘‘No, fuck inspirational. This is brutal and darkly humorous and I get what you’re trying to do. You’ve really got something to work with here.’’
I spent the next two hours (mostly while he was sleeping) ranting via PM about my mother, and how I promised myself before I wouldn’t write about my life out of deference to her feelings, but fuck that, I no longer care, if he thinks there’s something worth writing about, I’ll fucking write it. He said yeah, there’s definitely material here.
I woke up the next morning feeling better, like some kind of cathartic miracle had occurred. All the guilt and rage or something comes out for me in the creative process and I just cope better when I feel like I’m contributing something creatively.
I think one of the best ways to educate about mental illness is to sometimes be open about your own struggles (without inappropriately vomiting all over people).
Here are some ways I have selectively shared:
-I connected with a very shy and reticent colleague that I also shared about my own seizure disorder. He was a wreck after having an out-of-the-blue grand mal and now we often check in with one another. I think it’s helpful for him to have a “go to” person. Along these lines, another colleague also had several seizures and my dean, who is a friend and knows about my struggles, asked if I was comfortable helping. I was, and helped the colleague with getting in to see my neurologist/seizure specialist.
-I talked about about my own anxiety/depression issues with a much younger colleague who experienced a really awful depression after his first child was born. He was calling in sick often and was afraid to tell our admin what he was ill with; I shared my own journeys with depression and I like to think I helped get him back on his feet.
A colleague and BFF who deals with depression and anxiety has been invaluable. We talk when one of us is having a crappy time of it and remind one another that sometimes our “monkey brains”* lie to us.
I also, very, very selectively, disclose to students that I have my own battles with mental health issues when they come to talk to me about an assignment and have an emotional break down. Anxiety and depressive issues are, unfortunately, epidemic among this generation.
I hope I sometimes serve as an ambassador for mental illness. As someone posted earlier about themselves, I seem to be hyper-normal and laid back on the surface; most folks express that they had no idea that such an outwardly “well-adjusted” person has struggled with similar issues. IMHO, the crappiest aspect of depression and related conditions is feeling as if you are all alone and a f**ked up person.
*This term is from an author who wrote a memoir about his mental health struggles. I can’t remember the title/author name and am too lazy to boot my Kindle up 
.
‘‘Monkey mind’’ is also a common term in Zen used to refer to our every day, non-mindful mental states.
I’ve found that mentioning it in a matter of fact manner when appropriate in a conversation has be quite refreshing.
For example, when one colleague asked about my weekend, I told him that it was OK, but since I sometimes get anxiety attacks, that part sucked. He then was able to open up and say that he gets them as well and we swapped stories, compared meds and discussed therapy or not. All simply because I could note in passing that my anxiety attack sucked.
There seems to be much less stigma associated with mental disorders nowadays.
I really have doubts to the efficacy of the current state of the mental health profession. I don’t believe that their self-confidence is warranted and that patients would be better off understanding the actual level of uncertainty which exits.
It applies to physical ailments too, or to stuff like feeling like a fish out of water in a new place. I even know people who said they felt kind of relieved to get a cancer diagnoses because it meant that they had a perfectly fine reason for having felt so shitty lately.
It’s like a twist on magic thought… once we can label something, we can think about it more easily.