Most of the American public probably equates mentally ill people with homeless people, with prisoners in orange jumpsuits, or with "deranged" people getting into and out of a van and living in an institution. That is a stereotype, and it usually lacks factual basis. Mentally ill people often live troubled lives, but this doesn't mean we are less than regular people.
I am 60 years old, and I have lived with a psychiatric condition my entire adult life. To begin with, it is probably better than average that a man diagnosed with schizophrenia (and that's my initial diagnosis) can even make it to this age and not suffer from dementia or be on his last legs of living. According to some sources, life expectancy for a schizophrenic man is age 59.
Over the years of living within the outpatient mental health treatment systems, I have seen many people with similar disorders to mine drop like flies before they reach this point. I have not heard of schizophrenic men being able to live independently at this age, in some cases at any age. I have subsidized housing, and I collect Social Security and some SSI. Beyond that, it is up to me to fend for myself. I maintain contact with mental health vendors, who keep me medicated and who provide emotional support. I have some family, and they are loyal and caring.
I am married. However, I moved out of the home I shared with my wife of twenty-seven years, because at the time my judgment was badly impaired and I was following a set of delusional thoughts, AKA, a "delusional system". My prescriber didn't believe it was safe to raise my antipsychotics to the level I wanted. Yet, if I make dumb decisions that impact my life circumstances because I'm delusional, that's really not safe. The prescriber seemed to dismiss or not think of the concept that I could make poor decisions that could impact on the course of my life.
I am a semiprofessional writer. And I believe this means I have been published, and I can make a little bit of money at it, yet I can't do this for a living. Writing is a very, very competitive field, and everyone wants to be a writer. Yet, I am a writer, and I've had a good degree of success.
My credibility in the writing field may not be acknowledged beyond the local street papers for which I write almost every month. The editors of the street papers are familiar with me and know who I am. However, it could be hard to convince many editors that I create this material on my own. The presumption could be that someone is fixing up the writing or perhaps doing all of it and putting my name on it.
Not so.
I can't read minds and I can't be a fly on someone else's wall. Thus, I don't know whether the above notion is merely my imagination or whether there is some truth to it. I can tell you that becoming a writer has been quite therapeutic and has yielded a lot of mental clarity to me, and I've needed that clarity. When dealing with newspaper editors, you would think you're dealing with some of the most intelligent and most grounded people. And they are. And it has rubbed off on me.
As a 60-year-old "mentally ill" man, I note with much unhappiness, the disrespect is everywhere. Those who work in the treatment systems frequently don't regard us as equals. Medical doctors don't give the same level of care. In retail situations, such as picking up medications at a pharmacy, some pharmacy workers are not sure I can pay the copay, and they behave accordingly. Other pharmacy workers are sharp and are aware that I have intelligence.
I was a patient of a circulatory specialist, and I was being sold a pair of compression socks. The physician's assistant flipped out when I pulled a Mastercard out of my wallet.
In a previous living situation, a recent one, I would go out to my car to smoke, and a few of the many people driving by would hurl insults out the window of their pickup trucks, directed at me. Years ago, in a group therapy setting, the task at hand was to bake a cake for members to eat. The counselor did not give me credit for being able to bake a cake from a cake mix without supervision.
Society's agenda for mentally ill people is to keep us maintained and to prevent us from being a nuisance to the greater society. The "powers that be" don't want to see mentally ill people have money and power because they are afraid of the consequences of misuse.
But we deserve to have good things in our lives as does anyone. And we don't have that. We live in supervised and institutionalized situations. This is no fun.
In short, mentally ill people are an unacknowledged minority. Yet we lack the stance of self-righteous anger when disrespected. And we haven't organized nearly as much as other groups. I attribute this to the impairment of psychiatric conditions and the disabling effect of medications.
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