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Hello dear readers. I am not here to argue with psychiatric wisdom or with established science. If you have a severe mental illness, especially one that involves psychosis, you probably need to be medicated. Medicating people with mental illness to help them (us) recover has worked since the early nineteen fifties, with the discovery of Thorazine. 

However, beyond the fundamental idea of medication, I have to tell you that many treatment practitioners have it wrong about us, and many in the public have it wrong. 

When we see a person in public sitting on a bench, possibly smoking, or drinking a cup of coffee, and we see they are rocking forward and back in their upper body, it is easy to think the person is "whacked", or that they are a very ill person and not worth speaking to or respecting. Unfortunately, people are judged based on appearances. The public ought to learn that the packaging doesn't always reflect what is in the person. 

It seems that before hearing so much as a sentence issue from my lips, people have decided I'm dumb. I keep wondering, is it the informality of how I dress and groom? Is it that I have big shoulders (because I worked out and did manual labor as a teenager)? Or do people have x-ray vision so that they know my brain is badly damaged, or not present? 

The person sitting with a rocking motion may not be mentally ill. There are other possible causes. In the case of mental illness, the disease doesn't create the rocking motion, the medication does. Many psychiatric medications won't give you a moment's rest. You might feel as though you want to jump out of your skin. 

Psych meds can make a person unable to sit still. 

The restlessness can be unbearable; and again, it is the medication(s) causing this. Psych meds are a raw deal for the people who take them. We wouldn't be taking these meds unless we had to. Sometimes the court has forced it on us, and we must receive injections under the threat of force. Other times, we are spiritually awakened enough to know we have to take the meds, and we are strong enough to follow through with the medication regimen and do this consistently. 

Yes, above I used the term "spiritually awakened"! You can be “enlightened” and be mentally ill. You continue to need medication. The meditation community doesn't understand this idea. The self-proclaimed "psychics" are even worse. 

The meditation community for the most part has people just as uninformed about mental illness and they assume we have a less than normal consciousness. Many mentally ill people’s conscious minds are as good as or better than normal. 

I have seen a man gyrate in his chair. He was gyrating, probably because of the medication, and two big burly men were summoned to take him out of group and put him in a restraint area. That area might or might not include being tied down, such that we cannot even scratch an itch on the body. And we can't move even though the body really wants to move. 

The presumption that every difference you might observe in a mentally ill person is caused by the illness--it doesn't hold water. But many in the public believe this. Compassion and understanding come about when a family has a nephew or niece, uncle, son or daughter, diagnosed with schizophrenia. Then, the family member of the ill relative can learn to treat us with something a little better than instant dismissal. 

The three areas of massive difficulty for a person with serious mental illness are: The disease itself, potentially bringing disability, danger and a wrecked life; Next, the mandatory psychiatric medication which limits the brain, and which often limits a person's capabilities to the point where we need a lot more help even accomplishing basic things; public perception. For public perception I offer readers the challenge to look at yourselves in the mirror and to try put yourselves in our shoes.