as small as a world and as large as alone, perfectworthlessdove: i have some thoughts about...

10:10am August 13, 2014

i have some thoughts about how we keep mentally ill and addicted people silent that i think are relevant tonight. because i think it’s important that we don’t just look at suicides as a singular tragedy, as something that only comes from deep misery, but as an event that is fed into by our toxic culture surrounding mental illness

i am a person who straddles two “hidden” identities - i am gay and i am mentally ill. i don’t really live in a place that is hugely friendly to either marginalized group, but if i were given the choice i would rather be outed to someone about my sexuality than my mental illness. despite the pervasive homophobia and heterosexism in my area, queer groups have taken wonderful footholds in our community. our gay-straight alliance has been active (albeit with shaky leadership and sporadic participation) for ten years; meanwhile our organization for mental health advocacy, active minds, had one person in it when i was a freshman in college. today it is a dead organization.

this year i donated two books to our equity and diversity center about mental illness and self advocacy. that brought the total of books about disability to four.

mentally ill people, diagnosed and undiagnosed, often live in perceived isolation. there are few examples of the excellence of mentally ill persons presented to us in the media, and in most spaces where we wish to be respected there are unspoken assumptions that we must be closeted.

i am in the sciences and until this year when i started meeting more people online who were other mentally ill scientists, i assumed that i was rare. these are the myths of the inferiority of the mentally ill that are perpetrated by our culture and internalized even by those that are considered normative and successful.

if you are not mentally ill and you are reading this, i want you to ask yourself if you’ve ever gossiped about a “crazy” coworker/friend/ex-partner out in the open. if you’ve ever called someone crazy or a psycho for being cruel or bigoted in a professional setting. if you’ve ever said something like “i’m so ocd” when you just meant you were clean. if you’ve ever asked questions of a coworker about why someone doesn’t want to/can’t drink alcohol or caffeine. none of these things are generally frowned upon as racist or sexist comments would be, and yet they all contribute to a culture that makes mentally ill people feel unsafe and isolated. that makes them feel like a burden when they are ill. that often makes them set their worth on what they can contribute to the world to “transcend” their illness, and then when their illness makes it so they feel like they can’t contribute to anything (i.e. work, create, etc.) it causes their feelings of lack of self worth to increase and causes suicidal thoughts and actions.

one of the world’s most well known, beloved comedians committed suicide. be mindful of your microaggressions. don’t let this happen in your own life.

Another form of bullying I’ve personally experienced, is people using past mental health diagnoses (whether true diagnoses or misdiagnoses, it doesn’t matter, they use both indiscriminately) in an attempt to make me sound like I’m not a creditable source about my own life. If I attempted to live up (or down) to the expectations of psychiatry at the time of diagnosis, they will also accuse me of “faking mental illness for fun”.

It’s honestly hard to know which one does the most damage to my reputation – the idea that I genuinely had any particular mental illness or the idea that I went around faking diagnoses for fun (and by extension probably continue to do so and shouldn’t be trusted about any diagnosis, mental health or otherwise, that I still have). But all of these have an effect, and all of the effects hinge on psychiatric ableism.

If you think it’s cool to use people’s (real or purported) psych history against them, or to (regardless of how sure you are) accuse them of faking illnesses (mental or otherwise), then you’re probably contributing to the problem as well. There was a time when I was fragile enough that the kind of bullying I receive now could have driven me to suicide.

And yes, people can be driven to suicide. I know you’re supposed to say it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the illness, the illness attacks on its own and isn’t influenced by how the person is being treated. But honestly? Bullshit. That can happen. But. People can be driven to suicide, and people who already have a psychiatric disability are the most vulnerable to this. All you have to do is press the right buttons, and you can bring a vulnerable person much closer to suicide than they were to begin with.

So don’t.

Don’t be an asshole. Don’t bully psychiatrized people. Don’t use our diagnoses or misdiagnoses against us. Don’t accuse us of faking. Don’t use a history of having lived down to psychiatry’s expectations of us, as an excuse to accuse us of faking ‘for no reason’. (Hint: When you’re in the psych system, or when you’re being bullied in certain ways around mental illness, sometimes you have to lie in order to get by. This is not the same as just making shit up for the hell of it.)

Don’t do something horrible that you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life. Just don’t.

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