a forest of hatred (here I go on my soap box again....)

So the other night I was watching the show "The Closer" with Kyra Sedgwick on TNT, and, as so often happens on shows about crime and the police, there was a character with Schizophrenia. Of course, unlike most people with Schizophrenia in real life, this character appeared to be mentally retarded. He spoke with an odd, puzzling manner and described his "friends" which were his visual hallucinations. This boy (and one can only call this person a boy since he behaved like a young child below the age of seven even though he looked to be around 25), was being accused of murder, since, for reasons that made no sense, he confessed to killing a man who he did not actually kill. He rambled about how he killed the person, telling the Kyra Sedgwick character (who's the police chief), about the murder as she looked at him as if he were a specimen in a petri dish. To "test" this guy's honesty, a young woman was sitting on the other side of a window where he could see her. She was real, but the police had put her there to confuse the boy with Schizophrenia and test whether or not he knew if she was real!! Unbelievable? Of course. Like most media representations of people with mental illness, this was insulting and idiotic.

I see things like this so often - these "wacko", "crazy" "lunatics" and "nutjobs" in books, on television, and in movies, that I don't write about them all here as doing so would take up a great deal of my time and result in making me seriously annoyed on a regular basis. But I am annoyed already. This is not right.

I have this illness. Therefore, I have a real reason to care about how this illness is portrayed in the media. But more than that, I think that all people in this world have a reason to care about how people with mental illnesses are portrayed in the media, because if 1 in 4 people is affected by a mental illness (as some statistics indicate), chances are that you, or a member of your family, or a friend of yours, has a mental illness. And if you don't care about it for that fact, you might care because of the sheer immorality in portraying people with psychiatric disorders as if they are stupid, unkempt, and intellectually disordered.

As Pastor Martin Niemoller once wrote (or is thought to have written), "First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

In other words, when discrimination takes place, there is a reason for everyone to care. Not just people immediately affected, but the people, all the people, who can potentially be discriminated against. In a society that allows for mental illness to be cast into a wasteland of ugly stereotypes, it is only a matter of time before racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of hatred are prevalent and widely accepted. Oh. Wait. That's right, those already are prevalent and widely accepted. I was thinking of my future life in Utopia.

But seriously, people. Why do we allow this blatant hatred to exist? Why is the term "stigma" even a necessary part of the English language? How long do we wait before we start complaining? This is a question every person must ask herself. I asked myself this as I sat on the couch getting ticked off the other night. And the only answer I could come up with is, every time. We have to care every time. I have to care. I do care. And I should say something about these incidents more often. It's not just enough to get the NAMI Stigma Busters emails as I already do - though that is an excellent starting point if you are not already subscribed to that email list. I also need to make a point of mentioning these incidents here. Because every time a person with a mental illness is displayed as a freakish, stupid, foolish, unkempt, dirty, criminal, evil, disturbing person on television, or in a movie, or in a book, it affects society, and that seed of hatred is planted once again. Pretty soon after that you get another hatred tree. We have a whole Amazon full of hate as it is. We really don't need to add to that global pandemic by making things worse!

I don't mean to sound too dramatic, but seriously - prejudice is a major problem within the human race and it's a problem that we can fix. People need to keep that in mind. I think the main reason people don't stop making fun of certain other groups of people is that they don't understand the effects of their words. People don't easily spot the link between a depraved "Schizophrenic" serial killer on a TV show like Law and Order, and, say, the Holocaust. But there is a connection. Hatred breeds more hatred, like a tree growing branches. It has to be stopped. And, I might add, a lot of people with mental illnesses were slaughtered in the Holocaust.

I am vowing to myself that I will speak up more frequently about the portrayals of people with mental illnesses in mass media that are ridiculous and insulting. I have written letters in the past to advertisers about this, but I need to write more. I am glad that there are a number of people, including some of you reading this, who are also aware and keeping track of this problem in our society. It's not right or fair, and it must be stopped.

And here's the page where you can sign up for the NAMI Stigma Busters email list.