It is a stigma that is accepted at every level of society in ways that similar stigmas about other groups have not continued to be.
People say and do things to people whom they believe to be mentally ill that they wouldn't say and do to people whom they don't believe to be mentally ill, even when the people whom they don't believe to be mentally ill behave the same or much worse than the people who are categorized as mentally ill.
You can kill a mentally ill person and get away with it. That's how bad the stigma is.
Those are pictures from today of messages that people have sent to my current YouTube blog, "Please don't kill me." People have sent thousands of messages like them to my blogs, for years.
I set the settings at that YouTube blog so that people couldn't write messages to me. I don't know how they're able to write to me anyway, let alone get the messages published without my approval. When I think that it could be educational for people who read my blogs to read messages like these, I take pictures of them, write about them and publish them at this blog. Then I erase them from my YouTube blog.
Many people have written to me over these years that I have had blogs, telling me that I'm mentally ill. Some of them probably know that the conglomerate is not a delusion; however, most of them probably think that it is a delusion.
Although they think that an illness that I didn't choose is causing me to think the way that I think, they say all sorts of horrible things to me. They are not worried about how they will be perceived by me or by other people who read their messages. Many of them have public, written conversations with each other about me, continuing to say horrible things, without any recognition of the fact that they are guests at my blog who are using my blog to bully me together.
They are not anomalies. They are indicative of how pervasive stigma and abuse about mental illness are. Although not everyone takes the time to write those horrible things, the people who do write them know that the stigma is so bad and so socially accepted that few people will object to the way that these online abusers are writing about me at my blog.
These are pictures from today of messages that people sent to one of my past YouTube blogs, "Lena Kochman Boston":
Even the people who think that they're trying to be nice are usually totally condescending: "I know it's hard to understand when your mind works completely differently to people like me." That's a quote from one of the messages that I'm publishing on this page.
A lot of people write things like that; they think that I'm incapable of understanding what they're saying. Of course I understand what they're saying. They think that the conglomerate is my delusion and I know that it isn't, and the conglomerate also knows that it isn't, although the conglomerate has no problem with my being the target of online and nonvirtual abuse by people who think that I'm delusional. The conglomerate has encouraged those people, and has encouraged other stalkers and abusers who say that they think that I'm delusional although other things that they say show that they know that I'm not. There is no form of abuse to which the conglomerate objects to my being subjected; all of the abuse works toward making my life more difficult and more painful, and the conglomerate likes that.
If you are ever diagnosed with a mental illness, you will quickly learn that the tone of voice that you'll hear the most often after that will be a condescending one. Whether the person talking to you is screaming at you or "trying to be nice," you are never again treated like a person worthy of respect.
The stigma of mental illness causes more suicide than mental illness does. It's a stigma that you can't erase from your life, and it makes you vulnerable to abuse everywhere, from the people closest to you to total strangers.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, November 20, 2015 @ 1:48 p.m.
