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ON MENTAL ILLNESS: Expectations of Mentally Ill Completely Different vs. Non-Disabled

Jack Bragen
Friday July 03, 2020 - 03:52:00 PM

The mental health treatment system, composed of the people being treated for a psychiatric condition and those treating us, could be seen as a sub-society; it would be a small segment of society that can be distinguished from the mainstream of those who work at professional and/or union jobs, as well as the affluent, as well as undocumented workers.

Within this sub-society of mentally ill people and their practitioners, the often-unspoken rules of behavior and the expectations are substantially different from the rules and expectations in other areas of life.

Mentally ill people are taught helplessness. Psychotherapists have a great deal of verbal agility, and they use it to steer the thinking of the consumer toward beliefs of generalized impotence. Medication plays a role in this. Psych meds do a lot to make clients' minds malleable. Many mentally ill people do not have the same level of psychological defenses as the average person. The therapists know how to take advantage of gaps in our defenses, whether they are produced by being medicated, or whether they arise from other causes.

When we are taught helplessness, we become easier to supervise, easier to keep corralled, and less a potential source of problems for the greater society. Most of us are not potentially a threat to people. Yet people do not want us showing up at Starbuck's during the morning busy hours and dancing shirtless. (This scenario is not intended to ostracize mentally ill people. I have heard of a man who got into trouble for doing just that, at a business.) 

If more mentally ill people believed in our potential empowerment, we might do something crazy such as registering a fictitious business name statement and starting a company. People in the mainstream don't want to deal with that. 

It is not so much that we normally can't handle the responsibilities. It is more like, if we went off medication while running a company, it could cause a lot of social and legal fallout. Those who would need to clean up the mess created would not enjoy doing that. People become concerned when a mentally ill person approaches a position of power. 

Mentally ill people are taught to be open about our feelings. This is not done in society at large. In the mainstream, we are expected to lie about our feelings, conceal them, or otherwise hide them. People are not normally expected to tell the truth about their feelings. Among other things, it leaves them more vulnerable to an attack from an unscrupulous person--and many people are unscrupulous. 

We are taught that someone will be there to take care of us when we cannot take care of ourselves. We are taught to have meagre expectations of our future. We are pacified with pizza and cupcakes. 

When mentally ill people within one's local group, die before their time, and this happens all too often, it seems as though we are expected to shrug it off or otherwise trivialize it. 

Counselors and other mental health professionals impart to us that we should have extremely limited expectations of our lives. This can end up becoming a core belief. We should strive to dispel the stinking thinking promulgated by treatment professionals. 

Most mentally ill people have most of the same abilities as most other people. When the treatment system tells us that we are limited, it is yet another barrier to having a fulfilling life. 

It takes a lot of effort to maintain an internal belief that mental health professionals are wrong about us, yet to still cooperate with most of the treatment--the treatment being a thing we are essentially forced to do. Circumstances force us to cooperate with treatment, and so does a mental illness. We must cooperate or get extremely sick. However, we don't have to buy the whole produce stand about us being incapable of doing anything.  


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