Seeing a movement that I believed in so wholeheartedly, and still do believe in to an extent, advocate for stripping my human rights and those of other mentally ill people is heartbreaking. It feels like a personal betrayal, and I don’t really know where to go from here about it. I still absolutely believe that we need gun control, but I don’t know if I can support a movement that’s clearly now decided to be antagonistic to the human rights of mentally ill and disabled people. Because that’s me! I’m mentally ill and disabled. Most people I know and care about are mentally ill and/or disabled, too. I can pass as NT and abled fairly well as long as I put in a lot of effort, don’t encounter anything too upsetting, and don’t have to do too much physical activity. But I can’t keep that up constantly. And there are plenty of people who can’t do it at all. A mentally ill or disabled person’s rights should not be determined by our ability to fake being “normal,” or by our ability to avoid ever going to a fucking doctor so that we don’t get put into a police database. Not too long ago, like, within the memory of some of my followers probably, I was having even more serious trouble with my mental health than I am right now. I could not pass as “normal.” I was terrified that I might not even be able to pass as “sane enough to not get locked up” any more if things didn’t get better. Things did get better, and I’m not even really sure why. I was lucky. But I might not be lucky forever, you know? I’m not cured just because I’m relatively fine right now and not currently having fits of paranoia every single night. I still get that shit sometimes, and for all I know it might get just as bad as it had been a while ago again, like, whenever. And I already cannot seek treatment for it, because I’ve been flat out told by doctors who do not know the full extent of my issues that “if” I had some of my less pretty symptoms then I’d be forcibly medicated. Even without knowledge of my worse and more stigmatized symptoms, I’ve been threatened with institutionalization multiple times. One particularly exchange with a psychologist was so horrifying that I remember one of her statements almost word for word years later: “If you won’t take the medicine, I’ll have you sent to the psych ward out at the beaches, and they won’t be as nice as me. If you won’t take your medicine there, they’ll hold you down and force it down your throat.” You want to know what she was “treating” me for? What she thought was the full extent of my problems? Moderate depression, “OCP” (as she was of the opinion that I was too young to have OCPD, which my previous psychologist had diagnosed me with, at the time, but thought that it still fit better than OCD, which she incorrectly thought could not be comorbid with OCPD, and so she just decided that if she lopped off the D then it was OK) and anxiety. She did not know I was suicidal. She did not know that I was dealing with mild psychosis. She didn’t know I had intrusive thoughts, or that I dissociated. She didn’t know about my eating disorder. She didn’t even know I was autistic. The medicine was Zoloft, which I’d already had an incredibly bad reaction (so bad I had to drop out of school and have literally not completely recovered to this day) to in the very recent past. Like, within the year. I was very lucky that my family members who were also in the room would not tolerate that shit. I sobbed and threw a tissue box at the doctor’s head, my mom yelled at the doctor and never took me back. If my family had sided with the doctor, there’d have been nothing I could have done about it. The aforementioned problem with the Zoloft is a horrible story involving 2 other medicines as well, a total disregard for my wishes, lying to me and my family, and basically the complete destruction of my adolescence, so bad that it’s had far-reaching effects on not only my mental health but my physical health as well. I don’t want to discuss it in detail right now because I’d rather not spend my evening crying. I’ve experienced some of the horrors of the mental health system firsthand. I’ve also had some great experiences with better doctors, who’ve helped me a lot. But it only takes one shitty doctor to put someone in a database if a database is available. It already only takes one shitty doctor to ruin someone’s life, and there’s not really that much that all the other, better doctors can do about it aside from trying their best to help the victim heal. Creating a police database of mentally ill people would give shitty doctors, whether out of malice or incompetence, another opportunity to harm patients in their care. An opportunity that would impact not only the patient’s mental and physical health, an opportunity that would not only potentially burden the patient with outrageous medical bills to deal with the fallout of it, but an opportunity that would render a patient forever labeled in the eyes of the law as a lesser person, that would render them forever at risk of being murdered or institutionalized against their will for the mere crime of existing. An opportunity to cause damage that no future, better doctor could mitigate, that no amount of money could buy respite from. I really can’t overstate how horrific an idea it is, or how genuinely afraid I am. It hurts.
