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When I first entered the world of peer counseling I was taken aback at the civil rights side of the movement. I’ve had schizoaffective disorder for seventeen years however, my experiences with psychiatry have been good and psychiatry has definitely saved and restored my life to its full potential which I’m forever grateful for. During peer specialist training I couldn’t figure out why there was such a strong stance in opposition to psychiatry especially when most of the trainers had psychiatrists and therapists of their own.
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As I’ve worked in the field more it’s taken me time but I’ve deconstructed my own self-stigma. This was a process of working with my psychiatrist but also working with my manager who is a social worker. We talked a lot about things that should and shouldn’t be happening and as time progressed I began breaking down all the ways I had been discriminating against myself and referring to myself as an “other”. The process of breaking down stigma was seeing myself as a person first who had just experienced trauma. The trauma was affecting the way I socialized and the way my brain functioned but I had to learn I’m still equal to everyone and I’m deserving of the same human rights.
When I first heard people joking and laughing about people on our units I tried to get along with them. It didn’t anger me at all and I initially used to align myself with “the clinical team” and with people who were healthier. The thing I came to learn was that it didn’t matter where someone’s level of health was and that I needed to align myself with good character. Aligning myself with good character has been a moment to moment decision process but it’s helped me to see things more clearly. The people on our units need someone who can advocate for them and I’m realizing increasingly more that’s what I need to do. There are universal human characteristics that get overlooked when you have a psychiatric disorder; things about who you are and your personhood that need to be addressed, recognized, and honored in terms of equality and this was not always happening.
When I talked to my manager about micro aggressions I told her that I let them go because I need to get along with the team. I felt that creating a rift in the team was going to cause problems and distance me from good people who are working at the hospital for the right reasons. My first stance against micro aggression was to vote with silence. I simply just wouldn’t respond within the conversation and hopefully allow my vote of silence to say as much as it needed to.
Sometimes silence brought a lot of noise into the conversation and it helped create a shift. However, over time, I realized that these silences weren’t entirely helping create any change. My initial response to stigma and poor treatment of people staying on our units was anger. I had to learn to recognize my anger but also to let it pass. My doctor mentioned to me that no one is going to change out of hatred and that the only way you can fight hatred is with love. This really resonated with me.
I learned in order to still have kindness and compassion for others I needed to have forgiveness for them. I learned that in order to change someone’s mind I need to make a connection to them. Blaming people for where they’re at in their knowledge base wasn’t helpful. Pushing aside negative emotions has helped to eliminate potential additional problems within the social dynamics of helping people to recognize my personhood first and then to see that I sometimes just have moments of distress where schizoaffective disorder is troubling me. I learned I still very much like the people who have unintentionally micro aggressed against me at times and even the ones who have done so intentionally and I’ve learned that they like me too. The onus is on education and togetherness and not creating a rift between people who “get it” and “don’t get it”.
There are many forces beyond our comprehension that play upon myself and everyone that need to be broken down. The most major of these forces is definitely pop culture stigma. The news, media, movies, and television have entire business models centered around using experiences with psychosis stigmatically to entertain people and to get money from advertisements and movie tickets. I wonder why these movies are even created with the incredible skill these writers have. It’s been proven they can put up just about anything on the screen and it’s going to sell if it’s written well enough. Why not write movies that humanize psychotic disorders and give a true and honest representation of what life is like with psychosis?
I know sometimes people’s initial responses are that “It’s fun, it’s entertainment, it’s just in good humor”. For example, sometimes at work and in life people think it’s cool to joke about lobotomies. Why is there humor and a positive aura around cutting open someone’s skull, taking out a piece of their brain, and this being a cure for schizophrenia and other psychiatric ailments especially when in my life I’m living proof that enough talk therapy, a little medication, and psychoanalytics and philosophy have restored my life to its full potential?
The movie and media industries have created a culture around this being socially acceptable because there’s money to be made from it. They utilize subliminal messaging visually and verbally, phonic referencing, and every other tool of writing to keep viewers hooked and spending money on their product. Why not use the same tools with the aim of humanizing the ailments when this is being done in so many different ways on broadcasts, commercials, TV, movies, for so many other mental health issues?
However, in a country where we stand for freedom and there are civil rights movements with every other psychiatric condition why is there not even a conversation around humanizing people who have had and are still having experiences with psychosis? Why is the media not humanizing me as I work full time, I’m a successful author, I have a lot of friends, I’m a homeowner, I’m a godfather to my niece, I’m dating, and I’m a really good person who has a lot of love, kindness, and wisdom. I teach and help people every day through the hardest times in their lives and there are no conversations around de-stigmatizing what I’ve been through? The idea of this was perplexing at first, and once again I had to reach for forgiveness to navigate these waters.
Beyond just living with the dehumanizing language that I hear at work, home, TV, movies, and everywhere I go it’s not even socially acceptable to have a conversation about it. The social norm right now in this world is to laugh at and stigmatize psychosis. This is damaging people who are living with psychosis even further because of self-stigma and having to live a secret life where you can’t share what you’ve been through because when you do people’s perception of you immediately changes even though you’re still the same person; a good person who’s as human as anyone. At what point do thoughts develop, the conversation starts, and change begins to happen?
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
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