That's a lie; this is a total guilt trip.
I have had so many psychiatric hospitalizations in my life that I lost track a few years ago. I don't feel the stigma of having a psychiatric history anymore; what I mean is that I understand that it's a negative and inaccurate social construct and I don't have shame about it. If people went to crisis units for a few days instead of binge drinking or doing other destructive things when they felt overwhelmed, the world would be a safer place. I've never been drunk or done a drug.
That I don't internalize the stigma doesn't mean that other people don't use it to abuse me; that's another story.
Since I've spent so much time in those places, I have had many conversations over the years with staff and patients. Not everyone who works in a psychiatric facility always worked in mental health care; some people started in other sectors.
One of the saddest conversations that I ever had in a psychiatric facility was with someone who was working in hospitals when people were first being stricken with AIDS in the United States. Since nobody knew what it was, nobody knew how it was transmitted, and everyone was scared. Some people were too scared to be empathetic.
Food service workers in the hospital where the woman who told me about it had worked didn't want to be in the rooms with the patients who were dying of this unknown disease. They put the trays of food on the floor outside the doors and kicked them into those patients' rooms.
Mr. President, I'm not going to tell you what to do. What I'm saying is that there are a few things for which your sensitivity needs some work. Stigmatized groups aren't only harmed by individual acts of overt discrimination; those individual acts are only crisis points in LIFETIMES that are full of unnecessary pain.
The Pulse shooting was one of the most lethal mass murders in American history. It only happened last year, and the entire world has already forgotten it, because the targets were of a marginalized group.
Copyright L. Kochman, July 27, 2017 @ 4:24 p.m./addition @ 7:02 p.m.
