(A loving reminder and warning I offer out of heartfelt concern and genuine compassion for you all.)
The society we have known thus far is unraveling and failing for many reasons, but let me try to briefly identify one particularly fundamental cause based on the behavior I have noticed people actively engaging in lately: namely, disconnecting from others who challenge us to grow and learn and be invested in one another. People have generally forgotten or were denied the gift of knowing how to truly listen to each other with genuine presence and emotional investment. Many have forgotten how to respect others by giving them their full, open-minded attention and appreciation, denying the dignity and invalidating the existence of the other person. We do this quite commonly while failing to recognize that such treatment is a major source of our own suffering, loneliness, and despair when the tables are turned.
When there is a society-wide culture that promotes a disrespect for and avoidance of different points of view, that society is inevitably doomed, because society is a system and all healthy systems require healthy feedback loops. We all need to be heard and have our concerns acknowledged and our fears validated, or we start to go a little crazy inside because suffering must be transformed for it to not consume and corrupt us. Although transforming our suffering requires personal courage and personal effort, we all need our pain to be acknowledged and validated along the way, and we need others to help guide us through the difficulty. Through truly listening to one another, we can see that all misbehavior stems from ignorance or a place of deep suffering. When we recognize this, we lose our instinct to be fearful and mistrustful of others by default.
The potential destruction of civilized society will, ultimately, be a result of this behavior of willful avoidance generating a huge buildup of anger, resentment, fear, and despair in us all. Why deny others the kind of attention and appreciation you want others to pay you, and that you need in order to be sane and happy? Being truly emotionally invested and involved in the wellbeing of others, as well as in their hopes and doubts, dreams and nightmares, staves off disaster for us all.
– With Love, Respect, & Gratitude for You All
Showing posts with label marginalization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marginalization. Show all posts
January 22, 2017
July 12, 2016
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.
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.
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