as small as a world and as large as alone

9:42pm May 24, 2014

otteractivism:

don’t you dare use mentally ill / neurodiverse / disabled people as a scapegoat in order to denounce violence

don’t you fucking dare

And can people stop saying that this is just an “SJ thing”?  Like people just want to talk about misogyny and ableism and that’s why we’re saying these things?

Because people with psychiatric and developmental disabilities have to live with the fucking stereotypes that people are creating.  I was denied housing in Isla Vista because the landlady heard I was autistic and thought I would be dangerous to her son.  How many people would rent to me there now?  People are talking about this stuff because we face real-world consequences whenever anyone blames evil on mental illness or other disabilities.  

The reality is just that people can be evil.

All people have the capacity for evil.

Mental illness and other disabilities are not magical gateways to evil in people who would otherwise not do evil things.

Mental illness is not another word for evil.

People do evil things.  All kinds of people do evil things.  In my experience, “normal” people do the most evil things of all and get the least blame for being evil.  Disabled people are far more likely to be the targets of evil than the perpetrators, and we get shit on every time anyone does any kind of large-scale evil.  Which makes people fear us and hate us, and makes people fail to go to the root of the problems that are actually creating the evil.

(And no, the root of the problem is not “failing to get mental health treatment early enough”.  I know at least one instance in which mental health treatment almost triggereda mass shooting.  Mental health treatment is not magical and it can actually be rather awful at times.)

Anyway the reason people are reacting so strongly is that we have to live with the fucking stereotypes that everyone else is so happy to build.  Everyone wants to believe that some other type of person commits evil acts.  The reality is that every type of person is capable of committing evil acts, there is no special kind of person who doesn’t, and there’s certainly no category called ‘mentally ill’ that you can shove everyone into who does something sufficiently evil.

It’s like a cultural belief right now – “nobody in their right mind would hurt anyone that badly”.  Tell that to every disabled person, every mentally ill person, who has been abused, hurt, or even murdered by sane, nondisabled, white, middle-class people.  Who are the ones who do the majority of the violence in the world, actually.

I’m writing about this because I’ve had enough of being a scapegoat, not because of some abstract ideology I’m trying to uphold.

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