Public Comment

You may have heard the astounding statistic estimating that about one in four adults suffer from some type of mental condition in a given year. Additionally, if my memory serves me, one in three hundred adults suffer from a schizophrenic-type illness. 

Many people with a psychiatric disorder have professional jobs, college degrees, and high levels of achievement. However, when we seek help from the mental health treatment system, and when we become diagnosed and medicated, the original problem may be compounded with an entirely new set of problems. Once you are in the clutches of the mental health treatment system, and they've got you diagnosed and medicated, you could be unemployable and could be treated as subhuman. It is potentially a path to rejection, to poverty, and to wondering "What happened?" 

The decision of seeking help from the treatment system (versus not) is sometimes made for us, rather than it being a choice. In my life circumstances, the condition was bad enough that I really had to be in treatment. If a psychiatric problem is severe, then we can't ignore it and can't treat with alcohol, with pot smoking, or with immersing ourselves in work. When we have something severe, we must be in treatment, and it is simply not good enough to try mindfulness, homeopathic remedies, or any kind of "natural" cure. Once stabilized on something that truly works to treat severe symptoms, that's when we have an opportunity to try mindfulness or other alternative ideas. And this must be in addition to medication and counseling, not instead of them. 

However, when the above-described scenario takes place, we could be facing some harsh collateral realities. 

The prejudice against mentally ill people is one the few remaining socially acceptable forms of bigotry. We've been taught by the Civil Rights Movement that hating people due to race, gender, sexual preference, or physical disability, is bigotry and is an indication of ignorance. This upgrade in human consciousness hasn't taken place on its own. Marginalized groups had to stand up, make themselves known, and had to fight for their rights. And it is clear we aren't all the way there. Yet, a lot of progress has been made. 

However, it is very hard for severely mentally ill people, especially those who are medicated, to organize and stand up. Additionally, the Patients' Rights Movement, which did exist in past decades, has been decimated, possibly by the overwhelming strength of newer medications, or possibly due to a form of social engineering. 

A psychiatric disability continues to be a major obstacle to living, due to the impairment of the disability, due to the additional impairment caused by medication, due to the invalidation of many treatment practitioners, and, finally, because the public perceives us in a bad light. 

Because of that prejudice, many people with mental illness will not seek help. And many of the ones who seek help do so in secrecy, and give no indication to coworkers, and even many friends, that they have a condition. It can cost a person their job and it can cost a person many of their friends. 

I have spoken with small business owners who had mental illness. Their condition had not been severe enough that it prevented them from working. They told me about it, yet it wasn't something they advertised to those employed by them. It is sometimes easier for a mentally ill entrepreneur to open themselves to another mental health consumer, compared to some others. 

I usually haven't hidden my psychiatric condition for most of the past forty years that I've had it. My willingness to share is because under some circumstances, not all, I'm thick in the skin. 

Mental illness can ruin your life. But you don't have to let that happen. I use mental illness as built-in subject matter for numerous pieces of writing that I sell. This is a way of capitalizing on misfortune. I think more mentally ill people should become psychiatrists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and mental health treatment professionals. And this group, the mentally ill, credentialed experts, (which I wouldn't qualify for) should write about it. This is a strategy for uplifting mentally ill people, and for finally getting us some respect.