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Being someone who has had schizophrenia for fifteen years, there are countless times where people have been talking about mental illness in negative ways without knowing I’ve dealt with it for years and that I’m still working through it. Navigating this has been challenging and has tested my emotions.
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Having a diagnosis of schizophrenia is an invisible condition and with that there have been some privileges and challenges. One of the privileges is that the majority of people who I interact with don’t know I have had any mental health conditions unless I tell them. I feel fortunate that I’m able to meet new people and just exist in the world with some level of invisibility and that people aren’t aware of my condition unless I tell them about it.
One of the greatest benefits to this has been that I’ve been able to allow people to get to know me for who I am before telling them the diagnosis. I also have the option of not telling them the diagnosis which has helped me to make friends and to avoid being discriminated against in situations where people have expressed their stigma. I know with some people that if my diagnosis was stated up front it could have definitely affected our interactions in a negative way and ruined friendships before they started just due to the stigma that comes along with the diagnostic labels.
This has been helpful and has afforded me opportunities such as being hired for different employment opportunities, making new friends, and at least not having to divulge my diagnosis when I’m out on first dates or even when I’ve been dating someone for a while. It’s given me more control over who knows and who doesn’t know my diagnosis, although even that is something I still don’t fully control given there are a number of people in my life who know about it at this point.
However, there are many times where people are openly discriminating against me, thinking that I don’t have any sort of mental health condition and they’re not able to imagine that possibility, and they make disparaging remarks. These moments are hard and they’ve happened consistently throughout my life. When they’re making these remarks they are assuming I’m within their group of people in the world, whereas I’m not and it puts me in an immediately divided position. This has been very commonplace for me having had an invisible condition.
Within these situations I can stand up for the right thing and make a remark back but I run the risk of divulging that I’ve had a mental health condition myself. When people are being discriminatory it makes having a diagnosis feel risky and that if I divulged it this could take away my membership from the group. Within these situations there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to lose any friends but there’s also a part of me that feels averse to the people being discriminatory. At times it forces me to be friends with people whom I know are discriminatory towards some of my life experiences which also makes it difficult to make connections and to genuinely like these people and still see their good qualities.
It can feel isolating at times to be the one who is misunderstood and it makes me wonder if they truly knew my condition would they still like me for who I am. I used to be incredibly afraid of people knowing my condition and I felt like people would just abandon me as soon as they heard the words schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or bipolar which has happened on several occasions within my life. At times this fear has prevented me from saying anything in response and there have been many times I was completely silent just hoping the topic would change.
This being said there’s always been this side of me that realizes any time I go along with these kinds of conversations I’m making it harder for anyone with schizophrenia or a mental health condition including myself to exist in the world and to be seen for who we are and treated as equals. Another component to this as well is that I don’t want to openly discriminate against myself whereas I still have to try to find a way to meet someone halfway within these conversations.
The halfway point is basically just making a remark that mentions I heard what someone said and that I’m not entirely upset with them but to make a remark that also doesn’t cause me to contribute to saying things that are negative about mental health conditions. For me, this has been the origins of a lot of self-stigma. Trying to nod or affirm in conjunction to what they are saying to advance the conversation has felt like I am agreeing with what they are saying and allowing it to be acceptable. Hearing their negativity towards mental health conditions without repudiating their words feels like I’m sometimes internalizing it and making their pejorative thoughts and emotions towards the conditions a part of my being, thus discriminating against myself.
It’s a fine line to walk but there’s another element to these situations where if there are a number of people in the conversation and they outnumber me it’s hard to stand up to everyone especially when it’s a group of people whom I’m also wanting to be friends with and to be included within. Many times people are just making jokes and punchlines to jokes and if we’re in a jovial conversation or a humorous and lighthearted interaction it feels like a hard place to just immediately turn the conversation in a negative direction thus expressing to someone how prejudice and discriminatory they’re being and usually it just doesn’t work.
It makes me look like the bad guy because people see it more so that someone was just joking and I shouldn’t have shut down the joke. Along with this most people usually assume I don’t have a mental health condition and I’m just giving them a hard time which is the last thing they’re looking for within these conversations, and again it makes me look like the bad guy. Usually in these situations I vote with silence and I just choose to not laugh and to not express anything and fade into the background of the conversation. Especially within friends groups, conflict in general can be seen as distancing and can make me further distanced from others and there are many friend groups where people just don’t expect any conflict whatsoever and these can be difficult dynamics to navigate.
While working at a past job, there were many times where people would refer to those with mental health conditions as a psycho or a schizo and there were many times I wasn’t able to stand up for myself. Being in a workplace with people who had an openly negative stance towards mental illness caused me a number of issues.
For one, I didn’t want to work there and it immediately distanced me from the people who consistently made these kinds of remarks. The distancing came in the form of me holding hidden anger and negative emotions towards these people that I couldn’t express. Another part of this as well was that these ruptures that were created within our dynamic couldn’t be repaired due to me not wanting to risk divulging my diagnosis or to have conversations with people about how discriminatory they were being.
Another issue was that I didn’t want people to know about my mental health condition and start outwardly discriminating against me. This part is the most challenging because in the moment it’s been incredibly emotional internally when I’m having these kinds of conversations with others. It hurts and it’s painful to hear their discriminatory remarks but simultaneously I’ve had trouble standing up for myself because I have been afraid that doing so would divulge my diagnosis. Having an invisible condition does afford me many privileges, however in these situations it feels pressurized and intense and I’ve felt that any false move I make conversationally is going to lead to others knowing my condition and that it could have effects on my employment or within friend groups as previously mentioned.
In these situations the invisibility of the condition works against me because it forces me to bottle up intense emotions due to trying to maintain my invisibility to maintain the privileges that I have. The invisibility of the diagnosis is also the reason why people make these remarks outwardly; they just don’t know I have had a mental health condition as well and they think they’re joking with someone who is within their own group. While employed here my general manager knew about my mental health condition but it still felt stressful having the fear that if everyone I worked with knew about it I wouldn’t be able to continue working there just due to the intensity of being with people who were openly discriminatory towards me.
Interacting with people while they are actively discriminating against me has usually made me fairly averse to them and less inclined to want to talk and interact with them. Within the moment that someone makes these kinds of comments it’s felt incredibly challenging in many ways and painful as well. This is an ongoing dilemma that I’ll probably navigate throughout my life, and it’s one in which I don’t have definitive ways of combatting but it’s going to be something I need to keep learning about and improving at to maintain my friendships, maintain my invisibility, and to prevent people from discriminating against me as much as I can.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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