Those labeled mentally ill are still open targets for discrimination and defamation. This is grossly apparent when the state tries to open a group home. The controversy has shifted from Albany, where residents held huge angry demonstrations about the placement of a group home, to Corvallis where residents on a street where a group will be opened are expressing outrage.
Letters to the editor damn the mentally ill as all very dangerous. In fact, more mentally ill people are murdered than mentally ill people hurt anyone by a huge huge percentage. And how many people are killed by "treatment specialists?" A grossly large number of labeled people are abused or killed on psyche wards. Shrinks kill them with overdoses of conflicting psyche drugs. The deaths are often not even reported.
The history of the mental health system, as a dumping ground, readily accepting everybody from union organizers to abused women, is despicable. We wear the destructive labels for life. NAMI eagerly advocates for drugging people to the hilt. NAMI is a parent organization dedicated to making sure no one ever points a blaming finger at bad parenting, which is why many do end up in the mental health system.
In fact, so far, there are no definitive medical tests to determine if a person is or isn't mentally ill. It's all subjective. Over the course of 30 years in the mental health system, I received at last nine different labels, that shifted with the winds of diagnostic popularity.
When I left the system, after 30 horrible years of abuse and forced drugging and being shoved into a converted hotel room to stare at the walls, which DHS considers a great outcome, and suddenly got better, once off all their destructive drugs, I was shocked. I had believed them. They took my life, stole it, ruined it with their witch doctoring negligence.
And still, to add insult to injury, I get the stigma still attached, the permanent labels, and the eager still popular acceptable loud mouthed discrimination and public bashing.
I try not to read the paper anymore because to see this allowable discrimination going on, the people angry they may have to live next to someone labeled like me, some of them falsely labeled I'm sure, is difficult.
The whole story of what goes on in the mental health system will never be reported. It should be.
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There are tests but I don't buy them either bec they are made by humans. Even my aunt, a well known a good psychiatrist says she will give ppl MMPI's etc but how valid are they? Good q, imho!
ReplyDeleteYour post makes me think of what I said to someone the other day when they asked if if I would live next door to a group home for so called mentally ill people or parolees. I replied, "If they want to construct a house for people with psychiatric issues, I will bake cookies and welcome all of them. If it is home for pedophiles, I will find a moving truck." As for an avg person who say smoked up and was doing time for that, they can live next door. In our country, that is not necly seen as a crime. And I believe in rehabilitation and not punishment - and it can happen. Rehab I mean. I do not belive in throwing away people bec they my have had a bad start in life! However, the pediatrician in me has NO use for pedohilia! None!