X-People

Posted on October 13, 2005 in Compassion Stigma

Living with mental illness gets to be like appearing in the boxes of an X-Men comic book or film: either you seek to live with others like Professor Xavier or you revel in your mania as Magneto revels in his power. We have plenty to fear from the rest of you: we are four times more likely to be the victim than the perpetrator of violent crime.

Policymakers and pundits pay as much attention to this fact as creationists and intelligent design proponents pay to the fossil record. They are quick to blame crime on mental illness, slow to admt that they represent more of a threat to us than we are to them. When they draft laws about the mentally ill, they draft them to contain us. It is true that sometimes we need to be constained until our medicines can take effect. None of us wants to end up burning up in her own tent because we don’t have the money to pay for our medications.

The people who attended last weekend’s conference were, for the most part, a lucky bunch when it came to being able to afford the meds they needed to function. We had good insurance or enough money of our own to cover it. Despite this, we remembered those who the system did not help, the ones who it locked away in “treatment facilities” like the Los Angeles County Jail which is the largest repository of the mentally ill in the world, where the mentally ill prisoners get to wear banana colored suits emblazoned with the yellow letter M. The lucky ones did not like what has been happening to the working class and the poor.

This is just one way that the police “misdiagnose” and mistreat sufferers of brain dysfunction. People in mania are often mistaken for meth addicts. Not a few are beaten. Many end up in jail where the System refuses to recognize or even check their claims. A few get to county hospitals where they might be misdiagnosed. Or else they are released by the courts into the hands of predators who either dump them on the street or attempt to exploit them.

I have a friend who went through just about all of this recently. During her mania, she stole a pair of shoes. Or rather walked out of a store wearing said pair of shoes. At her trial, she produced papers which showed that she’d spent the following weeks in a hospital. The cold eye of the law as fashioned by Retrogrades chose to ignore this fact and threw a $300 penalty at her. Not much if you are cared for by a spouse, but a lot of money if you’re scraping by on Social Security.

Hearing about the danger of “lunatics” running around on our streets makes me laugh blackly. True, I have seen one or two people who have hurt others in rampant manias, but these rages are hardly organized — unlike the methodical actions of sociopaths (who do not suffer from brain dysfunctions for the most part), gangs, religious zealots, parents, spouses, law enforcement, and politicians who draft laws to contain us. If you want to understand the obstinancy of bipolars and schizophrenics who do not want to take their pills, then you need only reflect on how many people around them want to run their lives for them; an ambition of power that is often accompanied by violence.

I do take my medications as do most of the DBSAers I know. Looking back at the era when mania and depression wrestled like Jacob and the Angel for my brain, I can also understand the origins of the paranoia. I need only read a news story which has to identify a criminal as “suffering from bipolar disorder” (do they ever say “And the culprit showed no signs of any mental illness?”) ; or hear about how hard the baton of an uneducated cop can be when it is cracked across the hips or over the skull; or listen to a clueless pulp blogger call someone else “bipolar” or schizophrenic — to know what they fear. They don’t want to give their minds over to the ignorant and I only half-blame them.

These represent the Magnetos of the mental health clientel, the ones who rage rage rage against the curing light. I would number myself among the X-Men, ones who have good reason not to trust “the normies” but who continue to try. All our lives we have been told to get along with them. We do our best. Those who live around us owe us a return favor: learn to get along with us. Statistics show that the “well” are the dangerous ones. Don’t lock us up for crimes we do not commit or let those who assault us go free.