Mentally ill suffer in sick health system.

[HereSince1628]

PART 1: Nowhere to go
As states eliminate services for the mentally ill, many fall through the cracks, landing in emergency rooms, jails, city streets or the morgue. States cut $5 billion from mental health services from 2009 to 2012, along with 10% of psychiatric hospital beds.
40% of people with severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, received no treatment in the past year.

A USATODAY exploration into "Cost of not caring: Stigma set in stone"

http://www.usatoday.com/longform/news/nation/2014/06/25/stigma-of-mental-illness/9875351/

[cbayer]

1. It just gets worse and worse and worse.

After 100's if not thousands of article like this, nothing changes.

It all feels so hopeless.

[HereSince1628]

2. I feel most hopeless in the presence of stigma related to "activist privilege"

Last edited Wed Sep 3, 2014, 06:26 AM - Edit history (1)

You know, that protect prejudice ...when activists for one or another group fighting prejudice and discrimination decide that the best way to communicate for their cause is to use stigmatizing language about the mentally ill for their struggle.

For whatever reason, -THAT- usually leaves me feeling pressed into the bottom of an unrelenting dominance hierarchy.

[cbayer]

3. Can you give me an example of what you mean?

This is an unfamiliar concept to me.

[HereSince1628]

4. Oh it's like yesterday

when Idabiggs in a post calling for DU to have a automatic detector of prejudicial words uses prejudicial stigmatizing language against the mentally ill as an adjective.

It's like when people posting avatars of LGBT pride colors post headlines with stigmatizing language against the mentally ill. It's like when activist blogs like ALTERNET use stigmatizing language about the mentally ill to make their headline colorful and edgy... and everyone posting replies on DU cheers.

It's like all the cases when an activist group takes the liberty (aka privilege) to use stigmatizing language to construct statements (we good...them bad--like the mentally ill) to demonstrate membership, solidarity and support within their in-group at the cost of others on the outside.

It's a pretty common phenomenon in which groups claiming to seek social equality actually rely upon existing social hierarchy to demean a second party who oppress them via a comparison to a third group that is perceived as obviously worse in some dimension than the first group.

In a sense it's activist ableism and chauvinism that has special privilege in that it is excused of being seen as the use of prejudice and promotion of discrimination that it actually is.

You know it's because -obviously- good people in good causes can NEVER do bad things.

[cbayer]

5. I understand what you are saying.

I read your post in the IdaBriggs thread and that really helped me understand it as well.

This has been a huge and ongoing problem in the religion group. There are several members who take the position that religious people are delusional. It's very wrong when they use it in a clinical way, but it's also wrong when they use it in a colloquial way, imo.

Because the stigma is so ingrained, it is often difficult to get otherwise good people to understand why using terms connected with psychiatric illness in this way is wrong.

I finally got my kids to stop saying "retarded", but it took a lot of effort.