It's All Performance Art 74

I might risk getting fired from my job for writing this, but it needs to be said.  I do not believe in mental illness.,  There is no such thing.

(Gentle Reader, I will give you a couple of minutes to pick your jaw back up off the floor!)

There are certainly symptoms, there are delusions, there are hallucinations, there is paranoia, there are manic and depressive episodes, there is anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, there are personality and mood disorders, and of course there is that famous sexy diagnosis that I had to live with for a while, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, commonly known as PTSD.

And there are pills for almost everything.  Go ask Grace.  She just might know:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug2EcWkb26I

I never went on pills.  My psychiatrist gave me the option, since I still seemed to be managing my life okay.  I had found stable affordable housing and was on my way back into the workforce.  I was not sick.  I was impacted by stigma and by the fallout  of multiple abuse from toxic parents and sibling, and those were the issues that were addressed in my four years of therapy.

I consider myself so lucky that I never fell down the rabbit hole of mental health services, which I think do even more to make and keep people sick than the actual so-called illnesses themselves.  I am thinking of the way so many mental health survivors become so enmeshed and codependent with mental health services that they are not able to really cultivate their own lives.  And this is not to blame the mental health system, because this kind of fallout is going to be in so  many cases inevitable.

Many mental health survivors have no other community, but their care providers and the peer support that comes from within their own ranks.  The very conditions that have made them sick, also keep them sick, because there are four  major vectors for mental illness, and they are social isolation, trauma, stigma and fear.  Shunned by the community, friends and by their own families, we have here a whole population of people who are isolated, lonely and traumatized, plus they have to live under the dark fetid shadow of stigma because of the irrational fear and loathing from the larger community.   They are scapegoats, considered little more than human collateral damage of uber-capitalism.  Human detritus.  Plus, by being expected to define themselves within the narrow grid of mental illness, or being sick, even by speaking out and attempting to advocate for themselves they often end up reinforcing the stigma of illness.  Because that is how the community is going to define and frame them.  And by default, by osmosis, many mental health survivors end up defining themselves by their fictional mental illness.

The various symptoms of mental health problems are themselves very real, and on this basis they could be called symptoms of illness, and I completely accept the necessary evil of psychotropic medications, for reducing the fear, terror and anxiety that comes from living with really severe symptoms, as well as providing a workable foundation for actually being able to rebuild their lives.  in so many cases these symptoms arise and become unmanageable due to those four vectors of illness, social isolation, stigma, fear and trauma, and by the time the poor sufferers come into care it is too late to really address anything but finding ways of mitigating the symptoms and trying to help them make their lives tolerable and meaningful.   This is all survival and triage.  But we need to do better, much better.

We really have to begin forming communities of care, love and support, for one another.  Communities that are more than professional networks, not defined by illness but by the common humanity we all share.  It is the lack of love that makes people sick.  Nothing else.  This might never happen in my lifetime, and maybe never in your lifetime, Gentle Reader, but this is something that we have to start working towards, beginning with challenging our own selfish selves to be a little bit less selfish.  We have to begin now to form and become those communities.  We need visionaries to help bring this about.