Schizophrenia is a serious illness, and often misunderstood as "split personality." It is a constellation of delusions, hallucinations, and scrambled thoughts that is often (though not always) pretty devastating to work, school, relationships, etc. For some reason, because we have no blood test or genetic test for it, the diagnosis is still met with skepticism from many in the public
I'm glad you posted this.
These diseases (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, PTSD) are challenging and can be horrible but I feel like the stigma makes them a lot worse. It's like many natural disasters in which the human malfeasance after the event causes more harm than the thing itself.
The way people treat people who are afflicted by these diseases is, in many cases, an aggravating factor. Instead of helping them, plenty of people (especially in the corporate world, and in society at large after 1980 or so) kick them when they're down. It's pretty disheartening.
The stigma is absolutely the biggest problem with the treatment of mental illness.
It would be as if you went to someone with cancer and said, "Well, if you really wanted to, you could just shrink that tumor right now. You just don't want to commit to changing your life. It is your fault."
I never believed this until my sister died. Now I realize just how broken the system is.
Unfortunately, that stigma exists elsewhere in medicine, too.
I'm a quadriplegic. My father has the overwhelming opinion that since my condition is 'incomplete' (meaning that I have some movement in affected regions), that it's up to me to recover, and that I can't walk because I don't put my mind to the task at hand.
A shocking thing to say to someone, but his opinion has been echoed to me by various healthcare professionals and therapists throughout the course of my care, that the mind simply will not allow the body to recover without ample hope and work towards such a recovery.
I have encountered a set of people in life that , while seemingly uninfluenced by religion or mysticism, believe that certain parts of the body (the brain, especially) work on principles and ideas that we're completely uninformed about. Consequently, those people suggest and use themselves methods derived from mysticism, without a solid scientific backing(not to say that hope and patient mental well-being aren't important for recovery, they are, but you can't 'hope' a spinal cord back together as some seem to think).
Hopefully as we document more and more quantifiable physical changes associated to disorders which we know little about this trend will slow. It's important to consider the mental aspects behind a problem, but it's a waste of time and potentially destructive to put the recovery solely in the hands of the inflicted and their mental state.
And worse yet, the cause is wildly misunderstood. One person's debilitating depressing might be resolved spectacularly via light therapy, another via a single medication, another yet only moderated by a constellation of medications, and others who have undergone a variety of treatments for a decade with little improvement.
Compare that to, say, a broken leg, which is much easier to understand.
There's a huge stigma attached to certain cancers, too, like lung cancer not caused by smoking.
You are, as I recall, too young to know about times before 1980 by personal experience. I'm not sure what you are referring to here, but if you are referring to deinstitutionalization, that happened MUCH earlier, with considerable impetus from the personal experience of President Kennedy.
In the old days of Freudianism, stigma was worse and the affliction of people with mental illness was worse. (Basis of knowledge: much specific reading on these topics, including reading about the history of diagnosis and treatment of major mental disorders, and having lived through all the years mentioned in this reply.)
Under Reagan there was a national de-institutionalization of mentally ill people, who largely ended up as the multitude of homeless vagrants who occupy urban scenes across the country.
No, no, a thousand times no. A vicious libel, connected to the "fact" that the homeless are an issue when the President is a Republican, and almost entirely disappear when he's a Democrat (I don't remember it happening to Nixon, but per the timeline below this wouldn't be contributing; the 60's judicial nullification of anti-vagrancy laws also obviously contributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy_(people)#United_State...).
As mentioned by tokenadult, who's an older type like myself, this really got into action with JFK's Community Mental Health Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act) and had a medical basis in effective treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that required the institutionalization of "hopeless" patients (something my mother witnessed as an RN in the 1950s; note that the study/studies behind this started in the mid-50s). It was pretty much finished by the time he became president.
There's also no way the institutions could have been closed down so fast as to create the "Reaganomics creates homelessness!" headlines et. al., which happened rather quickly.
Yes, it began with the CMHA, but it was under Reagan's presidency that the people who really should not have been de-institutionalized (ie, not the older people with dementia/etc who were returned to their homes and families during the first wave of CMHA, and instead the younger people with very serious mental illness and no support system), were. This is very well documented in the book American Psychosis by Torrey if you're interested in the facts.
As I mentioned above, between my mother and myself, we were there, we lived through the whole period in which the existing system was systematically dismantled and we know the facts from following "current events". My mom's something of a junkie for that, more than a bit of which rubbed off on me; while this was not a major focus of her's, it got her interest when a while after 3 months of residency in a psych ward, she returned to work as an RN Nurse Anesthetist and saw one of her "hopeless" cases doing janitorial or orderly work there. After thousands of years of hopelessness, this was an earthshaking thing.
Sure, some was done after Reagan became president (heck, it continues today, my Missouri Democratic governor is shutting down an institution for the mentally retarded not too far north), but you're going to have to do better than a book published in 2013 that couldn't pass the gatekeepers without blaming it on that devil Reagan.
You're really going to claim that few of the latter, the very ones with the diseases we started effectively treating in the '50s, true miracles that prompted a Federal rethinking of our approach starting in that decade, somehow continued to be warehoused until 1980???
I think this is a case where Wikipedia is not a sufficient source (wonderful though the website is). While I respect you and your mother's experiences, I prefer published evidence over anecdotal. I'll refer you to the book rather than continue this thread: http://goo.gl/yjKGxj
You're confusing two things we're providing witness of:
My mother's anecdotal experience with the revolution of treatment of schizophrenia with anti-psychotics in the '50s, which merely dovetails with the Federal government also recognizing that this deserved a serious rethink of how we treat these formerly "hopeless" cases.
Our non-anecdotal watching of current events as this good impulse was totally botched over the next N decades.
E.g. I suppose it's an "anecdote" that I read not that long ago that the state is shutting down an institution for the mentally retarded a bit to the north of me, but that's not using the word in the way you mean.
Anyway, for us, "published 'evidence'" that per your statements contradicts the facts as we contemporaneously observed them, and for obvious political motives, is less than interesting. Especially when there are so many good, honest accounts of this out there.
You will find that most if not all of the homeless became that way after they became mentally ill and there was no or very little support available for them.
If you want to end homelessness you have to bring back a mental health system that supports the mentally ill, helps them make house payments, and can train them for new jobs when they lose them.
All of these public shootings done by mentally ill people represent less than 1% of the mentally ill population, but the news media takes delight in vilifying the mentally ill as all being violent. This is, of course, not true. But news media makes popular opinion out there. If something is popular, it does not make it true.
All of these public shootings done by mentally ill people represent less than 1% of the mentally ill population, but the news media takes delight in vilifying the mentally ill as all being violent.
If you factor out drug use, the mentally ill population isn't more dangerous than anyone else.
I don't think that the media intentionally vilifies the mentally ill. Instead, I think that people in general seek mental illness as a partial explanation for extreme violent behavior. "He must be one sick fuck." It's much easier to explain human badness in terms of illness than to confront the more complex truths: (a) sometimes good or average people do bad things, and (b) some people are just horrible.
If you start concluding that all extremely violent people are mentally ill (which is probably false) and use the flawed (A -> B) -> (B -> A) thinking that passes for logic among many people, you start thinking of mentally ill people as all potentially violent.
I think that people in general seek mental illness as a partial explanation for extreme violent behavior.
Arguably: someone who's violent has a psychological disorder.
However several of the psychological disorders most associated with extreme violence or antisocial tendencies also leave the subject in a very high-functioning state. They can also be frustratingly resistant to any sort of treatment (drug, talk, or other therapies).
Lack of empathy is often not nearly as debilitating as hearing voices and seeing visions.
Lack of empathy is usually when one is a sociopath not suffering from schizophrenia or autism.
The problem is some people on the autism or schizophrenia spectrums cannot express themselves, but they have empathy and compassion, but are misunderstood by society and the news media. They just lack social skills and people skills, but can be taught them by books and therapy. Most are even nonviolent and very good people if only they were understood.
Sort of like Sherlock Holmes, only Doctor Watson seemed to be able to understand him, everyone else misunderstood him and didn't want anything to do with him because they thought he was a mean jerk with no empathy. He had empathy but got rid of distractions to focus on solving crimes to save humanity from evils like Professor Moriarty and his gangs of sociopaths.
I always see people using 'sociopath' as different from 'psycopath', and I also see people claim they mean the same thing, and I also see people say that neither are used anymore, technically speaking (as in psychiatrists). Anyone with formal training on the area would be kind to briefly (or not) clear this up?
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_or_sociopathy and in general also note the WHO's International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), which could be a less intensely political artifact than the US DSM.
The story that gets portrayed in the media of mentally ill people being a major danger to the general public is just that - a story. The facts don't back it up.
Even if it were the case that the violent and dangerous criminals were suffering from mental illness, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to strive to provide access to treatment for mental illness than just villify those who suffer from it?
I'm glad you posted this.
These diseases (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, PTSD) are challenging and can be horrible but I feel like the stigma makes them a lot worse. It's like many natural disasters in which the human malfeasance after the event causes more harm than the thing itself.
The way people treat people who are afflicted by these diseases is, in many cases, an aggravating factor. Instead of helping them, plenty of people (especially in the corporate world, and in society at large after 1980 or so) kick them when they're down. It's pretty disheartening.