"The desperate and the dead" could be a name from any past century, including the time when the public could buy tickets to walk through mental hospitals as if they were circuses. The entire focus of Spotlight's series about mental illness seems to be on the danger to the public of The Mentally Ill.
Have you interviewed people who are diagnosed with mental illness, who are not violent, and who are attempting to live normal lives despite the public's hatred and fear of The Mentally Ill? Have you heard of the term "psychiatric survivor"? I almost never read the words "stigma" or "discrimination" in your articles, nor is there acknowledgement of the emotional, physical and sexual abuse for which people who are diagnosed with mental illness are at a higher risk than the rest of the public, no matter what their level of functioning is.
When people know that someone has a psychiatric history, they do not treat that person the way they they treat other people. A mental illness diagnosis of a victim is accepted as an excuse for abuse perpetrated against that victim everywhere, from the poorest places in the world to the richest. "A living death" would be an accurate name for a series about what it's like.
You can't medicate stigma and discrimination. Also, have you asked people who take psychiatric medication what it's like or done even rudimentary research about it? There are discussions all over the Internet about how horrible psychiatric medication is; the weight gain, the sexual dysfunction, the neurological problems.
Have you asked people who are diagnosed with mental illness if they get told to take medication when other people are upset with them, even if the people who are saying "You need medication" or "You need more medication" are the ones who are doing all the yelling and hitting? What about the subtler ways in which almost everyone uses the mental illness diagnosis of another person to win a nonphysical conflict with that person?
Stigma and discrimination against people who are diagnosed with mental illness are so pervasive that they are unrecognized by most of society, including the Spotlight team. You are writing from the midst of your prejudice.
That's a picture of part of your article that was published today. I am writing this page as I'm reading the article; I hadn't seen that picture before writing everything before it at this blog page.
Before that picture, the Spotlight article has printed the words "medicine," "medication" or "prescription" numerous times. The phrases "mental illness" or "mentally ill" are also printed numerous times, and that's not including phrases such as "mental health issues," "mental health problems" and the word "symptom."
The word "stigma" is not printed even once. Not having read the rest of the article yet, I don't know if it's there at all.
This is a picture of the paragraph in the article that is immediately after the picture of the person whose privacy the Boston Globe has violated to ridicule me and to promote voyeurism and involuntary pornography:
Psychiatric medication is so incredible that everybody wants it? Is that what Spotlight is saying? Patients who don't want to take medication that other people want them to take are irresponsible or too mentally impaired to know that they need it, while patients who ask for medication are druggies? Do you know how often those two definitions of behavior are cast over The Mentally Ill?
The previous paragraphs of the article talk about how desperate patients get for mental health treatment, desperate enough to hurt themselves as a cry for help, and how important Spotlight thinks medication is. Then, this section talks about patients "faking symptoms to get pills."
Has it occurred to Spotlight that eradicating societal stigma about The Mentally Ill would help a lot of Mentally Ill people to be less desperate and even less Mentally Ill?
This is the next picture in the article:
These are pictures of noncontiguous parts of the next paragraphs:
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What was wrong with the marriage? What's wrong with the psychiatric hospital? What's wrong with the school? What's wrong with the medication for ADD? What's wrong with diagnosing children as having mental illnesses?
Why aren't those questions being asked, instead of what's wrong with the kid? I'll tell you why; because it's easier to blame the kid, especially when you can continue to avoid your responsibility for the kid by denying that you're blaming the kid because of course you'd never blame someone for being Mentally Ill, only for not doing what you think he ought to be doing to stop being Mentally Ill.
I have never done weed and am not a fan of it; if I were, what's turning into the average street corner in Boston and Cambridge on a weekend night would have far more attractions for me than it does. Perhaps supermarkets will soon be carrying home deodorizing products featuring names such as "Chill," and "Ganja Glam," to be advertised at YouTube and during commercial breaks for children's television programs.
Nobody who wrote or edited the article thought that "showed him the ropes (in prison)" might be a poor choice of words?
This is a picture of part of the article that talks about the protagonist of the article when he was transferred from prison to a hospital for a while:
"Disgusted by abuse and filth."
This is someone for whom a sense of right and wrong is not absent.
"Not sick enough to stay."
There are usually a lot of people working in mental hospitals who like violence; what they really like is committing violence against people who can't fight back and who are not able to articulate their thoughts about the hospitals' routine failures at being humane.
"That's when the prison's treatment of him changed...His mental health became a matter of concern."
"Not sick enough to stay" at a hospital, but in need of some sort of treatment; that was the prison's perception of him after the hospital sent him back. His verbally asking for mental health support before he was sent to the hospital didn't give the prison that perception of him; someone else had to say it. That happens all the time, not only in prison.
The medications that he was prescribed probably had less to do with his improved mental health than that the health care providers at the prison were nicer when he got back from the hospital. He's not going to say that, because it's sacrilege in mental health care to say that medication isn't the answer to everything, and saying that you think the medication helps is the 21st century equivalent of repenting for your sins. Fundamental decency, treating someone like a person, listening and caring; you can't administer that in a pill. Also, the prison could continue to treat him as if he were crazy and therefore deserving of abuse before the prison sent him to the hospital; for the hospital to say that he wasn't that crazy meant that the prison then had to take some responsibility for what happened to him when he got back, or continue to file incident reports that would indicate that the prison was failing to provide an appropriate environment for someone who had inflicted enough self-harm to have gotten sent to the hospital.
These are not quotes from the article:
"Were you crying in therapy today, little girl? Were you talkin' 'bout your mommy and your daddy, or about that bad, bad priest?"
"I heard you tell shrinky what happened to you; I bet you liked it, huh? Want me to do it to you like that?"
For other people in the prison to watch and hear the therapy of inmates is to broadcast to the prison what the most effective ways of psychologically and physically tormenting those inmates are.
I have no reason to think that the article's protagonist was an abused child or teenager; I have every reason to think that a lot of people in jail were abused children and teenagers, and that being abused from birth causes people to be abusive more often than it causes them to be empathetic.
These are pictures of part of the article describing what happened when the article's protagonist got out of prison:
One of the first things that you figure out when you get into the mental health care system is that you have two options for the rest of your life; that of a victim whom everyone pushes around because You Are Mentally Ill or that of an aggressor whom people are afraid of because You Are Mentally Ill. To try to be anything else is emotionally excruciating; every day is a minefield of prejudice, exploitation and fear. The stigma is that bad. You are not allowed to think or talk about yourself as someone who got over a mental illness; it is presumed that you will have it forever, and everything positive that you do will be seen as a time of higher functioning between episodes, or between an episode and a hypothetical future episode. However free from illness you might be, you are never free from the stigma.
It is also really difficult to stop taking psychiatric medications if you have taken them for several months or years. It's physically and emotionally difficult, and there's no support or encouragement for doing it like there is for trying to be sober of illegal drugs and alcohol. The most you'll get is the tentative hope from other people that you won't be destabilized without it, and everything that you do is evaluated according to that idea. Someone else can have a bad day or be in a bad mood and decide that you shouldn't have stopped taking medication, even if you're the one who went to work that day. The process of detoxing from psychiatric medications is unrelentingly anxiety-ridden.
I have read the rest of the article. The word "stigma" is not there.
That's the address of the article.
While reading the rest of the article, I was dreading that perhaps the protagonist was back in jail because he had killed someone. He hasn't, which means that his main problems now are stigma and the stigma-induced path of despair that he's had instead of a life.
The Boston Globe's series about mental illness hasn't talked about this:
That's the address of the first page of results for a Google search of the term "lives of quiet desperation."
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, November 25, 2016 @ 12:07 p.m./I will publish my preliminary page and similar pages again soon.
