Stigma Free

Today, let us face the epidemic of mental illness together, with some clarity.  In countless ways, some subtle, some not so, our society actively engages in the dehumanization of people who do not operate within a “normal” (i.e. socially convenient) range of behavior.  While we’ve increasingly buried our heads in our phones and TV screens over the past couple decades, our country has slowly gone to hell around us — primarily because we have neglected to attend to one another’s suffering and isolation.  Worse than that, we’ve managed to allow the development of a for-profit trade in the mass-incarceration of human beings, a majority of whom have an untreated medical condition (addictions, mental illnesses, and neurological impairments), at the hands of a morally-bankrupt “justice” system that denies all but a few “due process” and “equal protection of the law,” much less genuine avenues for tangible rehabilitative support.

We’ve allowed the justice system to ensnare hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people, whom have not had a genuine capacity to advocate for themselves or press their incompetent public defenders to do a better job.  In an era of the “rocket docket” assembly line of defendants being processed like cattle and public defenders literally only having a few minutes to review each case, we cannot afford to ignore the festering problem of inadequate "behavioral health” care for the tens of millions of people who are one “bad day” away from being trapped within the blackhole of the prison-industrial complex.  Put bluntly, we cannot ignore, any longer, the fact that our jails and prisons have become convenient (money-making) garbage piles for “unproductive citizens.”  Yet, every one of us knows someone actively suffering from a mental malady, someone we care about — whether suffering on the surface, or in silence, they are all around us.  So how do we begin to solve the problem?

We begin by facing reality as a culture, admitting to ourselves that when a person suffers from a serious mental illness or impairment, the impact that that has on their behavior is inherently beyond their ability to self-regulate.  We begin by recognizing people’s behavior is constrained and distorted by environmental conditions (such as poverty, abuse, and neglect) and brain neurobiology (also beyond their control).  We begin by appreciating the fact that we are, as a society, directly responsible for all the social conditions currently prevailing to permit the psychological abuse and neglect of millions of children and vulnerable adults, and directly responsible all the more for the furtherance of those injuries through a cultural stigmatization of the people who suffer the effects of that abuse and neglect.  The onus for change rests with the society, not those abused and abandoned by it.  The lens through which we’ve been perceiving the problem has been the fundamental condition providing for the problem's perpetuation and growth.  Thus, we most readily begin, truly, by dissolving the chains of stigma imposed on ourselves and our bruised and broken brothers and sisters.

In order to effect this, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) started the #StigmaFree campaign to foster greater understanding and compassion in our approach to the largely ignored problem of mental illness and addiction in this country.  I encourage you to take the pledge.  I also strongly encourage you to consider helping support NAMI [www.nami.org], especially since they are actively engaged in such work as the Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) [http://www.nami.org/cit] for law enforcement (emphasizing de-escalation of situations involving a person suffering from a mental health problem).  Direct participation of community members in their local NAMI and CIT programs is sorely needed, but please at least spread the word.

It’s never too late to make a difference, to save future lives through the noble teachings and compassion of today.