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3:15am May 12, 2014

patternsmaybe:

Abuse and mental illness are *different things*.

I know someone who is horribly abusive.  I mean, above and beyond ordinary abusiveness.  Because ordinary abusiveness tends to stem at least partly from impulsive anger.  And this person is abusive in a cold, calculated, sadistic way.

But she tries to make it look as if her abusiveness actually stems from either PTSD (it doesn’t) or paranoid delusions (also doesn’t, gives people with paranoid delusions a bad name in the process), because she knows that will make her a more sympathetic figure.  She works really hard at projecting this image, so that instead of the cold, calculated abuser picking random targets, she’s the poor, helpless mentally ill woman who is being picked on for things she can’t help.

It’s really horrible.  And before I became one of her targets, she managed to suck me in and use me to hurt other people at one point, doing exactly this kind of routine.  (She loves playing people against each other, breaking up friendships, and breaking up communities.  Those things are fun for her.)

It’s possible for mental illness to contribute to abuse, but even then mental illness isn’t the entire story.  I used to behave abusively and think it was okay because I did it almost entirely when triggered by PTSD.  I learned, however, that I had a responsibility to control my behavior even when triggered, and I did learn to control myself in the end.  But getting those messages that it’s not abusive if it’s mental illness, I’d never have learned how not to hurt people.

So confusing abuse with mental illness actually contributes to abuse in many different ways.  And it harms people with psychiatric disabilities, whether we also happen to be abusive or not.  If we do happen to be abusive, it harms our victims too.