Shoot Me If I Scare You?: A Response to Barbara McKee

Posted on December 13, 2005 in Crosstalk Stigma

One of my two support groups met tonight. People with names I cannot mention, faces that I cannot describe, sat around a square table. Each of us rated ourselves on a scale of one to ten: One meaning that we are so depressed that we should be in the hospital. Ten meaning that we are so manic that we should be in the hospital. Five meaning “an even keel”. I feel that anything in the range of four to six is nothing to panic about.

We listened to each other and shared our own experiences, giving each other encouragement and hope. Each of us knew how hard it was to be bipolar. In that room at the end of a hospital hallway, people gathered who knew how this illness worked.

When it came time for me to speak, I mentioned my fears about “the others”, especially large mouths like that of columnist Barbara McKee who justifies Alpizar’s shooting last week by saying “mental illness frightens people.” Group members shivered when they heard me quote her words. McKee derives mileage from the fact that she is “a wheelchair user [and] a freelance writer and producer.” Therefore, I suppose, she thinks she understands all disabilities. Her sanctimonious lecture about using medications, however, suggest to me that she is ignorant about the nature and the impact of this disease that I and my friends have.

I am a staunch advocate of taking your medications. But that does not explain why Alpizar was shot last week. He was not carrying a gun. Only the federal marshals seemed to hear him say that he had a bomb in his fanny pack. He was inside an area which had been swept for guns, bombs, hand grenades, scissors, X-Acto knives, and razor blades. There was no rational reason to assume that Alpizar was a danger.

But McKee comes up with an irrational one: he scared people. McKee scares me — she’s hung a target on my back and a sign that says “‘Shoot me if I scare you” — but I am not about to drive to Albuqueque or wherever she lives, dump her from her wheelchair, and shoot her for my safety because she scares me with her wild ideas and misinformation about my disease. That would be irrational and, in my experience, most irrational acts of this sort are committed by the sane, who have carefully worked out a scheme for justifying their insanity.

Elsewhere, I have written about the fallacy of making people pay with their lives for the mistake of not taking their medication. No one stops or forgets or runs out of medication with the intention of doing harm to other people. McKee disingenuously assumes that fear is the same as actual threat. Which is irrational and untrue. Ask any bipolar who has experienced paranoia about this.

You can still be paranoid if you don’t have an organic brain dysfunction. It’s called Paranoid Personality Disorder. Unfortunately — unlike the paranoia which is associated with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression — there’s no pill to end the reign of erroneous terror in your head. You cling to your views because they comfort you. Therapists have a very hard time treating this disorder because these patients truly want to keep thinking destructively.

Those who fear the mentally ill, I dare say, suffer from willful paranoia. When they do not take the time to understand the reality of living with this disease, they draw up plans which are downright life-threatening. They aren’t the ones who die, of course: it’s people like me who must wait for our bullet.

But it doesn’t have to end like that.

I said to the others that the good thing about McKee is that her chauvinism will spur a few bipolars to come out and say “I have this disease. And I find people like you downright frightening. Should I shoot you for that? I don’t think so.”

No one disputed me as I spoke. Which did not surprise me. Every one of us felt McKee’s target hanging on her or his back. Though we all religiously took our meds, we also knew of the other pitfalls that faced us every day, any one of which could shove us into a mania faster than you can say “Rio Grande”. We were ~born~ with this disease and we know that it can be confusing. We don’t blame our spouses or our friends or ill-educated pundits for our episodes. We are accountable for our actions but we do not cede to McKee or any other law enforcement the right to shoot when scared.

The percentage of people who will come out and say “I am bipolar. This is what it means” will be small. Unlike McKee, we can hide. Isolation can wreak a terrific cost on those who partake of it. You lose friends. You lose contact with the world. You lose the wonder of feeling the nearness of human skin. Yet the disease remains inside of us. Isolation can lead to denial that we have it, the belief that we no longer need to take our meds or the disgust with having to take them because of the stigma that seems to be attached to them.

There are many reasons why people take that step off the top of the ladder and go manic. The focus on medication obfuscates the danger of the shoot to kill policy. You can go manic because you’re changing meds, because you are moving, because a family member or friend died, because you took a trip to Las Vegas, or because your sleep was disrupted on a transcontinental flight. You may not know about your triggers until you actually face them and no amount of listening to the experience of others may prepare you for them because your experience is unique. Focusing on the meds is a way of doing nothing to end the shoot to kill policy of the federal sky marshals. It’s lazy thinking, driven not by compassion and the good of all, but on fear and stigma.

I’ve had enough of putting up with this. McKee, if you’ve got a gun, maybe you’d like to take your best shot? I’m unarmed….and a Five.

If you are Bipolar and want to give McKee a piece of your mind, her address is chairgrrl@chairgrrl.com. Note that I pulled this off her page at the Albuqueque Tribune.