Category: Violence

Age 16, 1988

Auditory Hallucinations, My Schiz Life, Poetry, Psychosis, Sexual Assault, Stigma, Violence, Visual Hallucinations

Age 16, 1988

For me my mental illness came crashing into my life in full force when I was sixteen.

That was the year I first started hearing voices,

started to believe people could read my mind and insert thoughts into my head,

was the first time I was truly suicidal,

was the year I started to self harm,

dragging a razor blade across my left arm and watching my blood flow,

the first time I was dissociative,

when the world became vague, dreamlike, less real,

as I observed events as if from outside my body like a movie in slow motion,

the year the panic attacks began.

This was also the year I suffered as a survivor of sexual assault,

the most difficult event of my life as a biker held a knife to my throat and raped me,

beating me severely.

From then on I carried a knife in case I am in a similar situation,

not so I could defend myself, but so I could slit my wrists.

To this day the sound of a Harley Davidson makes me physically cringe.

That was when the night terrors began reliving my trauma every time I closed my eyes.

That was the year the negative coping mechanisms developed: cutting, isolating, alcohol, drugs.

That was when the abyss of depression swallowed me up whole,

and I wanted to die or crawl in a hole forever,

because I was worthless, pathetic, weak, and most importantly,

I was to blame for being raped,

I should have been able to stop it as a sixteen year old boy.

This is not how it should be at sixteen.

Stop Blaming Mental Illness For Mass Shootings

Mental Health, My Schiz Life, Politics, Stigma, Violence

STOP BLAMING MENTAL ILLNESS FOR MASS SHOOTINGS:

“If you were to suddenly cure schizophrenia, bipolar, and depression overnight, violent crime in the US would fall by only 4 percent.”
~ Jeffrey Swanson, Duke University professor, a sociologist and psychiatric epidemiologist who studies the relationship between violence and mental illness.

What they found was that mentally ill people who didn’t have substance abuse issues, who weren’t maltreated as children, and who didn’t live in adverse environments have a lower risk of violence than the general population.

(According to a Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) study, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health the share of overall violence explained by serious mental illness — was between 3 percent and 5.3 percent, for a midpoint estimate of about 4 percent. That’s where the idea that if you wiped out serious mental illness overnight, violence would fall 4 percent comes from.)

Here’s the never ending pattern:

1) Mass Shooting

2) Advocates of gun control point out that taking guns off the streets and limiting who can buy them will save lives.

3) Opponents of gun control argue that there are no regulations that can stop a determined shooter and that what we really need is to address mental health.

Examples:

“This is also a mental illness problem. These are people that are very, very seriously mentally ill.”
~ President Trump said, following the script, after shootings in Dayton and El Paso.

“Mental health is a large contributor to any type of violence or shooting violence.”
~ Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

The convenient cries of “mental health” after mass shootings are worse than hypocritical. They’re factually wrong and stigmatizing to millions of completely nonviolent Americans living with severe mental illness.

The share of America’s violence problem (excluding suicide) that is explainable by diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is tiny. Being male or having a substance abuse issue are both bigger risk factors.

At the very least if you’re going to scapegoat mental illness then increase its funding dramatically which the government is unwilling to do, as a matter of fact they do the opposite.

Hate and anger aren’t a mental illness!

Stop stigmatizing innocent nonviolent people.

Women in Mental Health Need

Mental Health, Stigma, Violence, Women

A 2017 Kaiser survey of women’s health indicated that 49% of uninsured women either did not seek out or delayed care due to the costs.

34% of women reported going without or delaying care because they could not take time off of work compared to higher-income women (19%).

Approximately 60% of caregivers are women.

Caregivers have 63% higher mortality than noncaregivers.

16% to 50% of women will experience a violent episode over the course of their lives.

1 out of 5 According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 1 out of 5 women have experienced rape or an attempted rape in their lifetime.

Sources:

The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Women’s coverage, access, and affordability: key findings from the 2017 Kaiser Women’s Health Survey. Issue Brief. 2018. http://files.kff.org/attachment/Issue-Brief-Womens-Coverage-Access-and-Affordability-Key-Findings-from-the-2017-Kaiser-Womens-Health-Survey.

National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and the AARP Public Policy Institute. Caregiving in the U.S. 2015 Report. https://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/2015/caregiving-in-the-united-states-2015-report-revised.pdf.

Schultz R, Beach SR. Caregiving as a risk factor for mortality: the Caregiver Health Effects Study. JAMA. 1999;282(23):2215-2219.

World Health Organization. Gender and women’s mental health. 2019. https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/.

Child Mind Institute. 2016 Child Mind Institute Children’s Mental Health Report. 2016. https://childmind.org/report/2016-childrens-mental-health-report/.

National Alliance on Mental Illness. Jailing people with mental illness. 2019. https://www.nami.org/learn-more/public-policy/jailing-people-with-mental-illness. Accessed: February 12, 2020.