Run and Rant

Once again, I am waxing poetic over a song lyric.  What can I say, I am writing a dissertation, and while part of my active mind is diligently citing, referencing, and implementing APA format, the other part must have something else to play with to keep it busy.  Hence, music.

 

The flavor of the moment is Lady Antebellum “Run to You”.   “This world keeps spinning faster, to a new disaster.  So I run to you…”  The OTHER part of my brain has been contemplating what I run from and what I run to.  I confess, much to my husband’s dismay on many occasions, I am not really a runner.  I’m more of a battering ram with a neon sign that says, “Bring it on!”  I think that that is the quintessential part of my nature, but has also been nurtured in me through life adventures.  

Having said that, I can think of a few things that make me want to run, and as a fairly extreme introvert, I tend to run inward.  I have a very healthy and vivid inward life lacquered with colors and images.  I have comfort there, beauty , and so much that I have cultivated like potted plants to create a garden of eccentricity and eclectic sensory experiences.  

I run from stupidity.  I run from ugliness and violence.  I run from stigma.  I really run from stereotyping, and I run away from organizational answers to individual problems.   Much of this is not so much that I’m afraid but more that I don’t want to get any on me :)  “When lies become the truth…That’s when I run to you”.  I run to Abba when my frustration with such things pushes me into a flight mode.  I am conceited enough to think that running to other human beings doesn’t provide any more answers to such things than what I can provide.  So, I  go to a source greater than myself. 

There is an intersection of this song with the show “Perception” that has occurred to cause me to put technological pen to paper today.  If you have not seen the show, I think it is hands down the best example of life with mental illness, specifically schizophrenia, I have ever seen in any form of media.  Last night’s show was about a paranoid schizophrenic being blamed for a heinous crime.  Not an unusual scenario.  The main character, Daniel, is also schizophrenic, brilliant, a forerunner in neuroscience, and a university professor.  He also struggles to maintain stability with schizophrenia and the yen and yang of medication or no.  

Daniel works with the FBI as a psychological profiler type, and in this scenario, he vouches for the person with paranoid schizophrenic, saying there is no way he committed such a crime.  Evidence, however points to the contrary, and not only is the person with paranoid schizophrenia put on the chopping block, but so is Daniel, whose past stay in a mental hospital to get help with stabilizing is grabbed by the FBI and thrown up as a discrediting point.  And suddenly this brilliant neuroscientist is no longer even considered a viable, functioning human being, much less invaluable in his professional field.

So, several things greatly annoye d me when I watched this.  But the upshot was, once again, the stigma attached to mental illness.  Not every mentally ill person is dangerous, stupid, or worthless to society, but the perpetuation of input, not to mention our insatiable need as human being to put everything in categories and then make assumptions based on those categories, has made us profoundly stupid. 

BUT it is not just those who are ignorant about mental illness.  It is also organizations that work to help the mentally ill that perpetuate stigma.  Why?  Well, for one thing they support a “recovery” model.  Wanna really get me hot?  Tell me I’m going to “recover” from one or both of the mental illnesses I am currently sporting.  There is no such thing as recovery.  Recovery by definition, according to dictionary.com, is “A return to a normal state of health, mind, or strength”.  There is none of that with mental illness, and after 20 years of hammering mental illness down to size in my life, I can confidently say I will NEVER return to any of those things.  I have had to redefine each to accommodate a modified existence.  The ideology is crap, and it is not effectively working for the mentally ill population, because it purports a lofty goal that is unreachable and does not provide practical ways of managing that help the individual achieve their own magnificent potential outside of societal norms. 

Another contribution such organizations make to stigma is the hollering about what society does without embracing options provided within frameworks already in existence.  Here is an example:  I have worked with mentally ill individuals and their families for years, as well as organizations such as police departments and nonprofit organizations.  I have a unique position because I am mentally ill, open about it, and am highly educated, specifically in abnormal psychology.  Where I discover the most hoops to jump through in order to educate populous, is in these organizations…To the point where it is not worth my professional and personal time to try to do all their little classes and seminars just to share my story and ways to cope, even though I have a bachelor’s and master’s in abnormal psych, research, and public speaking and am about to have a doctorate in leadership psychology.

At what point does the mentally ill population get to say, “Hey this is what I need.”  Some of us can speak for ourselves, and we are a helluva lot more qualified than family, organizations, and societal perception.  So…

I run from much of what is stereotypical and stigmatizing, and I rant, occasionally :), at what is accepted.  I confess I am better at accepting ignorance in the populous than in organizations that purport knowing how to help.  There comes a point in the life of an individual dealing with mental illness when they see a way to survive.  Unfortunately, that perception is defined as becoming lost in the illness, and much of that is due to the catch 22 provided by our mental health care system.  I am thankful everyday that I am a battering ram and that my support system did not try to kill that in me, because that God-given aspect of my nature is what helped me fight my way through to shrugging off stereotype, acceptance and redefinition of all my limitations, and to expect redefinition not recovery for my future. 

Blessings,

L