Category Archives: Stigma

On Fear

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I once read that the opposite of love is not hate, but rather fear. Interesting, right? Fear, is the absence of love, it is what drives anger, violence, and other negative emotions/actions. Hate is a complement of love, therefore, it is comprised of love at its core. This may sound a bit metaphysical to some, but the point that I am trying to get at is that fear is the opposite of love.

That being said, when we act out of fear, we unleash all kinds of wrath onto ourselves and others, which prevents us from doing good for ourselves and others. Let me give you an example. When you are stuck in a job that you absolutely dislike, but are too afraid to take the next step and apply somewhere else for fear of letting go of your supposed comfort.

Refusing to change for the better even though there are greater benefits than consequences to the change for fear of [insert excuse here]. There are so many instances where fear holds us back from our true potential, and let me tell you, I have been guilty of all of them I’m sure.

But the beauty of life and living, I believe, comes when we release that fear. Yes, it is easier said than done, but if you go through the correct process for yourself, the benefits are amazing. Suddenly, that new positive relationship you have been looking for everywhere appears to you. Your dream job becomes suddenly available and you have the opportunity to apply.

It is important to note as well that opportunities present themselves to us on the daily, whether we choose to act on them is on us. Again, what keeps us from acting on those great opportunities is fear.

Fear is comparable, in my opinion, to sucking our thumb as an infant. It becomes ingrained in us as a sort of comfort that we can revert to whenever something is different or challenging. We know that in the long run it is bad for us, but we do it anyway. Why? Because it is what we learned as children.

Fear kept us from running into the street because a car might run us over. Fear kept us from touching the stove because we might get burned. Fear kept us from staying out too late as teenagers because we might get in trouble. Fear, fear, fear.

Now, in all of these examples I just gave fear has kept us safe, but it is a false sense of security with a double agenda. Yes, fear keeps us from doing dangerous things, but at the same time, it also keeps
us from doing amazing things.

What we should focus on, then, is respect. I respect traffic laws, therefore, I will not run into the street. I respect that heat can hurt me, so I will not touch a hot stove. I respect my parents and their rules, so I will not come home late.

See what I just did? I turned the fear around and converted it to respect.

If you respect someone, you don’t try to infringe on their rights. However, if you fear them, you try to take away their rights and privileges for fear of what they may do if they have them.

I can go on and on about fear and how it is the sole cause of so many terrible things that happen in our lives and in our country, but the truth of the matter is, I don’t want to. Why? Because I don’t want to sound preachy and you do not want to hear it either. It’s not hard to see for yourself how fear is at the core of violence, oppression, racism, discrimination, etc. I invite you to look beyond what the telecasters tell you and really examine the news for its core values. You will find fear in the most unlikely of places, even in a television commercial advertising a clothing sale.

Should We Lock Up the Sane?

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A new study — the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study — found that those living with classic mental illness — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression — alone are not likely to use guns when they commit acts of violence:

“For the small group of people with mental illness who are at risk of committing gun violence, improved collaborations with the criminal justice system are clearly indicated,” the researchers stated. “However, directly targeting mental illness as the major driver of gun violence is misguided. … Prior violence, substance use, and early trauma are more likely to contribute to subsequent violence than is mental illness per se. In this regard, the politically inspired haste to focus gun control efforts on people being treated for a mental illness, rather than on people with demonstrated indicators of violence risk, such as restraining orders related to domestic violence, seems particularly misdirected.”

This contradicts the latest psychophobic reign of error that comes upon the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. It isn’t the mentally ill who shoot people, but those who have no psychiatric diagnosis. So what are we going to do about them?

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Charleston AME Shooting

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As I write this, I can only begin to imagine the number of people who have jumped to the conclusion that the shooter at the Charleston AME Church was mentally ill. By this time tomorrow, even if the shooter has not been caught, we will hear the pundits debating what kind of disability afflicted the shooter. Undoubtedly there will be more calls for Forced Outpatient Treatment.

There are a few things to keep in mind before we turn Charleston into our reason-to-support-Murphy’s-Law-of-the-day:

  • We have no idea who the shooter is at this point, except that he is white and in his twenties or thirties.
  • South Carolina has “Assisted” Outpatient Treatment. So even if he was mentally ill, the much ballyhooed program sure as hell didn’t prevent anything here.
  • The man had a gun that let him kill a lot of people including a state senator.
  • White supremacist activity has been on the rise.

Rest assured that the NRA — which backs the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act — will blame this on mental illness at the earliest possible press conference. We’re the scapegoat for this kind of thing every time it happens.

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Buzzfeed Petition

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I am deeply disturbed by the recent quiz on Playbuzz that purports to inform its takers whether or not they are bipolar. For this reason I have composed the following petition on change.org which I ask you to sign and circulate among your friends:

Buzzfeed calls itself the largest humor site on Facebook. It reaches nearly 500,000 people, many of whom are impressionable teenagers and young adults.

Recently, it published quizzes purporting to identify whether the test taker was bipolar or OCD. There were many problems with these quizzes.

The first was that many of the questions — especially on the Bipolar quiz — had nothing to do with the disease itself. People with bipolar disorder who have taken the test have been told that they don’t have the disease. Others who don’t have it, have been told that they have.

Second, they make light of syndromes that wreck the lives of those who struggle with them.

Third, the results may give the people the illusion that they have the disease when they don’t or don’t have it when they do. This can lead people to unwisely abandon their treatment or eat up valuable time at the psychiatrist assuaging their fears that they have the illness when they do not.

Fourth, the test has no medical disclaimers to the effect that it is no substitute for accurate diagnosis by a medical professional.

Fifth, the staff at Buzzfeed has been disingenuous about these harms and refuses to remove the tests from their site on the grounds that they are “just entertainment”.

We who live with mental illness live with the hardship of stigma. We are treated like children. We are told that we are faking our symptoms or that they “really aren’t that bad”. Buzzfeed’s arrant insensitivity must end.

Please sign the petition at the site.

I was forced to grow up

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At age 20, I was diagnosed with Bipolar I after a manic episode mixed with psychosis which sent me straight to a psychiatric hospital. Well not really a hospital, rather, a rehabilitation center in Georgia. No, I’m not from Georgia nor have ever lived there, but it just so happens that I was visiting a friend when I went “manic”.

But don’t be alarmed, this is not an account of my (mal) treatment in the rehabilitation center or in the jail I was held for 5 days because of all things, my mania began at the Atlanta airport. No, this is about how I was forced to grow up after my experiences. How I could no longer consider myself just a care free college girl with no worries, but rather, an adult woman with a mental health diagnosis, which was tough, at best.

I could not accept my diagnosis, nor did I want to admit that perhaps I needed help from someone other than myself. As a psychology major I should have known better than to fall prey to stigmatizing myself and my diagnosis, I thought “But I’m not crazy.” How ignorant and little of me to think such a thing.

And after yet another stint in a psychiatric ward in the Bay Area, literally three days after returning from Georgia, I was convinced I had Bipolar I. It wasn’t the psychiatrists who convinced me, nor my arsenal of daily meds that did it. No. It was my mood swings. My constant flow between happy and sad. My to and fro, that’s what convinced me I had Bipolar I, and yes I needed help.

I became my own advocate, then. Seeking help and resources in my community. Standing up for myself whenever necessary and becoming an adult, in a manner of speech. I never thought I would have to grow up so fast and so soon, it was in the summer before my Senior year in college.

I felt as though the Universe had screwed me over, big time. And after wallowing in my self-pity, I got it. I understood. Sometimes it takes a huge life change to make you appreciate life better and make you a better person. It’s life’s way of putting you back in your place and giving you perspective. And wow, did I ever get perspectified! Yes, it’s a new word, I just made it up because I can do that. 🙂

 

 

We Should Stop Using Mass Murderers as Our Poster Children for Change

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It’s going to happen again with the same reaction by the media. Maybe we will wake up tomorrow morning and see the report in our morning newspaper; maybe we will hear about it from a coworker at lunchtime; or it will be the lead story of the evening news. Mass murder. Mentally Ill Man. The words will be slung together and dished out to a public which has been bred to believe that mental illness and violence are strongly correlated. Politicians, doctors, family members, and activists will devise plans to cope with the problem. It happened with the Virginia Tech shootings, it happened with the recent Germanwings crash. Autism, bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia have all been implicated at one time or another. The mentally ill cannot be trusted, goes the drumbeat. Schizophrenics and bipolars are killers.

Statistics show that about 3% of the mentally ill are violent. We are ten times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than perpetrators. Yet when we are portrayed on television or the movies, sixty percent of the depictions commit crimes, especially violence. So coupled with the way news outlets spin stories about mass murder, the general public believes that we are ax murderers and serial killers.

Some reformers use this fear to drive some very specific agendas, namely destruction of our rights to privacy, forced medication, and the resurrection of mental hospitals. The objective is to control the mentally ill. They might argue that this is the best we can get in a society with our values, but that is a weak defense of some very problematic and questionable policy changes.

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Why We Shouldn’t Let Our Loved Ones Do the Talking about Stigma

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square850Glenn Close is a woman who I admire for her dedication to her sister and her resolve to upend stigma. When Jessie Close was 51 years old, Glenn drove her to McLean Hospital in Boston where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Their commercials questioning the labels applied to mentally ill family members and their relatives are known to millions. We have every reason to admire and respect her for her work. But recent research suggests that maybe family members aren’t the best ones to be talking about stigma.

The research has nothing to do with the political issues surrounding mental illness. A pair of researchers looking into the rise of a culture willing to accept same sex marriage outline a successful strategy that we who live with bipolar disorder and other organic brain dysfunctions can employ:

Michael LaCour, a UCLA doctoral candidate in political science, and Donald Green, a Columbia University political science professor, have demonstrated that a single conversation can go a long way toward building lasting support for a controversial social issue. In addition — nearly as surprisingly — the effect tends to spill over to friends and family members.

The key is putting voters in direct contact with individuals who are directly affected by the issue.

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11 Commandments for People Living with Bipolar Disorder

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Recovery from bipolar disorder is almost like a religion or an ethical system. Certain devotions must be part of our lives if we are to recover our balance.

  1. I shall hold myself accountable for all works of my body and my mind including those which I wreak when I am in episode.
    It is important, I feel, not to separate the illness from ourselves. We did the things that happened while we were in episode. There was no second soul seizing control of our bodies. Our mind is a stream that flows continuously, sometimes over rough ground, sometimes in placid stretches, and sometimes over cliffs. We own all these states of our being.

  2. I shall never use my illness as an excuse.
    Our episodes explain what we did. The difference between an explanation and an excuse is this: An explanation asks only for forgiveness. An excuse entitles us to both trust and forgiveness. We do not deserve the former until we have earned it.

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Did the Meds “Erase” My Personality?

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The thing I don’t like about being angry is that it isn’t the me that I want to be. It’s a nuclear fireball, a complete eradication of the rest of my personality. For a few seconds, everything that I love becomes less than a memory. The witnesses to my explosion see a six foot six inch tall brute with a beard screaming at the top of his lungs and waving his arms about. Wouldn’t you be scared? Wouldn’t you keep that memory in your head purely for reasons of defense?

These scenes came more frequently when I was soaring in and out of manias and mixed states. It isn’t hard to see that my anger could be tied to my suicidal inclinations. Because I could not and would not destroy the objects of my ire, I turned that impulse towards myself. One time too many it brought me to a place where I was studying the veins on my wrist. Beyond the eradication of myself that was caused by my disease, lay the prospect of self-annihilation as punishment or revenge.

Maybe now you can understand my reaction that came while I was planting vinegar weed at the Native Seed Farm. I had done something stupid — I had mentioned my involvement in the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance in a passing comment. Most people let it drop, but this one woman wanted to know more. What were the people like? Was I ever scared? And then the most stigmatizing thing someone can say about someone who takes his meds faithfully: don’t the meds erase your personality?

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A World Bipolar Day Rant

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Bipolar and unhappy about it

sign saying rant

Bipolar is quite a large part of my life, of that there is no doubt. Trying to find the sweet spot of correct medication is challenging with some meds making me incredibly tired all day. I take an antidepressant which works well, and also Lithium works very well for the mania. Although I still have the occasional manic period and sleeplessness so need an antipsychotic, and it is this that is wiping me out. This in itself is making me feel very low and just for this reason alone I wouldn’t wish any type of bipolar on anybody.

My GP has been trying to prescribe me medications with minimal intervention from my psychiatric consultant. This is a bit of a joke as I have never seen this consultant but apparently she has been allocated to me. She is reported to by my GP and CPN (community psychiatric nurse) regularly but very rarely replies to them unless it is for a change of medication.

My own fault?

I should say that I am one of those people who doesn’t really complain too much, as I feel if you complain too much there is a chance you can be easily overlooked as being a pain in the neck. However, I have begun to show how annoyed and upset I am with varying degrees of success. All of this though is another story.
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