Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 60

While finishing my breakfast and adjusting the contents of my three travel bags for weight and balance I was listening to an interesting documentary on the CBC about bullying. There are often fascinating videos being played in the dawn hours, and often much better than the mediocre daytime programming. This doc is about bullies and bullying. This makes me think of what made me a target in school, and to my vicious aggressive elder sibling (so sue me, Rick). Any sense of difference, weakness, or vulnerability or perceived threat to one's status and, that obnoxiously Darwinist term, access to resources, will make one a target for abuse. I was listening to this one just after another half hour doc about personality disorders and the reason why it is so hard to treat certain people, not because they resist treatment, but because of the bad treatment they often have to suffer throughout their lives. I was also having this conversation with a friend over coffee yesterday. I was telling him how a diagnosis as inchoate and nebulous as schizotypal disorder can lead to a most toxic and frightening dynamic. It isn't that these so-called disorders are illnesses. Rather, those of us who are stigmatized for being different have to put up with a lifetime of crap, bullying, neglect, abuse, social exclusion, you name it. By the time we make it to the psychiatrist's office or are sitting in the waiting room of the local mental health care team we are already destroyed, not by our diagnosis, but by the secondary effects of our diagnosis. This is where the irony becomes particularly cruel. Much of what we call mental illness is a socially manufactured chimera. If those of us who have been diagnosed had found people early on in our lives who could love us unconditionally, who would accept us, nurture and mentor us and help us find creative and constructive ways of expressing our uniqueness without turning self or otherwise destructive, if this sort of accepting and non-judging community could exist anywhere, then I really wonder sometimes if psychiatrists and mental health case managers would end up having to retrain for more useful occupations. One of the particularly nasty judgments that get placed on someone for having schizotypal disorder, and for any number of mental health and personality disorders, is in the inability to make and sustain close friendships. But no one tells us how difficult it is to find real safe friends in a world that judges and condemns us for being different. Not for being harmful to others, or for being ill, or being toxic, but for simply being unusual. For being "interesting." The impact of rejection accumulates. Depression and anxiety, even psychosis can eventually set it, because in the long term, no one can be realistically expected to hold up well under a lifetime of social rejection. Vicious circle. A lot of us really should be ashamed of ourselves.