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ON MENTAL ILLNESS: "Psychotic" and "Schizophrenic" are Adjectives, Not Nouns

Jack Bragen
Friday April 06, 2018 - 12:02:00 PM

When someone is called "a schizophrenic," this strikes me as derogatory. It implies you are not really a person, but rather, you are an individual defined by a disease. The word is an adjective. In other words, I am "someone with a schizophrenic illness." If someone were in treatment for cancer, you would not refer to that person as "a tumor," or as, "a breast cancer." It might not seem like the same thing to you, but really, it is the same thing. "He was schizophrenic"... In that sentence, the word is used as an adjective, and it is used to describe a person's state, without calling him names. "He was a schizophrenic"... In the second instance, simply by adding the word "a," you are in the zone of name-calling. 

The above sort of sensitivity is not demanded in modern day society because people still can get away with being bigoted against mentally ill people without becoming socially unacceptable. At some point in the future, prejudice against persons with mental illness will become as unacceptable in mainstream society as racism is today. 

People with psychiatric diagnoses are a minority group, and that should be recognized. I make that assertion for the following reasons: We are discriminated against in housing and employment; we are presumed to be below normal intelligence, even before having a chance to open our mouths and speak; it is socially acceptable to hate us based on physical appearance, diagnoses, and stereotypes; we are not considered actual human beings--people incorrectly believe we are subhuman. 

People with mental illnesses are what I would call "The last minority." Additionally, it is harder for us to stand up for ourselves, compared to other minorities, because we are medicated, and because we are subject to symptoms of mental illness. We must somehow subdue these two impairments if we are to fight for our human rights. 

I believe that the best way for mentally ill people to "fight the system," is by cooperating with the "system." Even if we do not buy the idea of having a medically produced mental illness requiring drug therapy, we are still stuck with how things are set up in society. And, part of that is the fate of uncooperative mentally ill people. 

If your behavior is too divergent, or, if you have a period of not being able to meet your basic needs, then you will receive treatment--involuntarily if need be. The alternative, if you were to insist on not being treated, is that you will face dire circumstances, such as homelessness, incarceration, or worse. 

I don't recommend "noncompliance." It seems nearly universal that the noncompliance path is the wrong path. I haven't seen any noncompliant person have a good outcome. Some would assert that once you've been medicated a while, your brain is permanently rewired, and you can never successfully quit medication. However, what are your options? Your options may very well be limited. 

I am taking the maximum of two antipsychotics, because this is the only way that I am viable in society. If I were under-medicated or were to gradually quit medication, both of which I've tried, the results are disastrous. It can take not just years, but decades to recover from this kind of folly. 

If you resent the unfairness of the situation, I suggest that you work to fix it while cooperating with treatment. 

We are a minority in part because society has laws pertaining to mentally ill people, laws that impose restrictions, ones that most people in the mainstream would consider ludicrous. We are a minority because we are stereotyped and ostracized. We are a minority because we are believed to be "sick people." 

On television news, I periodically see stories of cops killing people believed to be mentally ill. This usually happens in the context of a "wellness check." The mentally ill young woman or man does something that could remotely be considered threatening such as holding a screwdriver, and police respond with deadly force. Or else, I've heard of stores of excessive force and/or excessive restraint (such as zipping a person into a canvass bag), and the patient dies because of not being able to breathe or sometimes due to hyperthermia. 

I cannot in any way minimize the recent wrongful deaths of young unarmed black men, brutally gunned down by police. These atrocities are tragic and an outrage. 

Yet I also want to point out the fact that persons with mental illness also experience wrongful deaths. However, since many of us are in restricted living situations, and because medications inhibit our energy levels, it is a lot harder for mentally ill people to organize a protest. 

In the past, there were demonstrations by mentally ill people that were peaceful and relatively small, and that apparently received little or no news coverage. However, with the advent of atypical antipsychotics, much more powerful than the older drugs, I have not heard of mentally ill people demonstrating. Modern psychiatry, social, legal, and economic mechanisms, and modern medications have succeeded in the goal of neutralizing what little activism we once had.