The Stigma of Mental Illness is Alive and Well
Some 25% of us untermenschen walk among you. The mentally ill. You probably speak of their depression or anxiety in whispered terms to mutual friends or family. You may even know one or two of the 2% or so of us who have ‘serious mental illness’ and may find yourself saying very unkind things about them behind their back. Or am I just being ‘paranoid’?
In this tale I will discuss recent events that show how appalled and hurt we ‘nutters/fruit loops/schizos’ are when we have to face such stigma. I will reflect them in my own career and life story.
The Day I Decided to be a Journalist
It was a sunny day in December 1986 in HQ British Forces Falkland Islands when I was visiting my father on his posting out there. I remember looking across Stanley Harbour and seeing the Union Jack flying over what was recently one of the hardest fought battlegrounds of British military history. I’d seen the foxholes and collected souvenirs from where men on both sides had fought and died for their despotic leaders’ grace.
Home for me was where I hung my hat. I’d by that stage lived in the USA, Belgium and three or four places in the UK. I was about to be expelled from my North Devon prep school for removing a friend’s front tooth after he’d wound me up. I’d been there for a few years, initially commuting from the USA. We’d taken the posting late as Mr Galtieri and Mrs Thatcher had a tiff over the South Atlantic islands and Dad had to sail out on the QE2, full of Paras, as far as Ascension Island where he spent the bulk of the war.
I was sent to the Royal Hospital School where bigger boys attempted dental treatment on me for six years – at least I wasn’t raped as a few other young kids experienced. My own such experience was from a prefect at the prep school who had been interfered with by the headmaster but that’s a different story…
To Sea to Become a Writer
From RHS I flew out to the USA again (again refusing citizenship) to sail on a replica of an 18th Century Royal Navy frigate. A year of drinking, smoking weed, chasing women and living the life of an unhinged square rigger sailor. There I learned my eyesight was too bad to get any professional sailing qualifications and instead, in chasing women across the USA by letter, I soon learned I was a fair hand with written expression. This would serve me well in future.
A Degree That Served Me Well
They say you shouldn’t be a writer without life experience. My degree in maritime business and consuming psychedelics has served me well. I was also a Greenpeace activist and amongst other things, broke into Chequers to welcome French President Jacques Chirac when he was visiting John Major and busily blowing up Mururoa Atoll with a nuclear weapon.
The acid, stress of undiagnosed autism and genetics took their toll and by the time I graduated I was hallucinating, suicidal but somehow functioning nonetheless.
Deciding not to jump off the Clifton Suspension Bridge was a good move. My oldest friend knows why I didn’t. I told Dad and soon after encountered a well funded, well resourced mental health system that nowadays doesn’t exist at all.
Masters Degree and Career Begins…
Five years after my choice not to end my life on the bottom of the Avon Gorge, I began a Masters Degree in broadcast journalism. Went sober and soon encountered the stigma of mental illness when firstly CNN and then the BBC refused to take me on on that basis.
Can’t join them? Beat them. I became a regular contributor to several national magazines, then an international sailing journalist and national tabloid journalist. From there I met the future mother of my child, fought and won a 10 month court case to keep the child from being forcibly adopted, inherited a large pile in Poundbury, fell off the wagon and lost my family before selling the hovel and buying a beautiful house in West Dorset.
I became a feared and loathed union bruiser and left wing activist – if I didn’t become that I’d be a psychopath as I’d lack a conscience. (Many would call me a psychopath but for all the mess in my medical records, you can’t call me one of those…)
Soon after I moved, I was given a full explanation for my paranoid schizophrenia – it turns out I was autistic, something that wasn’t ‘invented’ in my childhood, certainly for brighter kids.
Oh, But You’re a Schizophrenic
Given my story (and hopefully way of telling it), if I stripped my mental illness and learning difficulty out of it, it would be a pretty cool one wouldn’t it? I could forge a Churchillian or Boris Johnsonian aura of derring doo! Churchill slurred after too much brandy one day, “History will remember me well because I shall be writing it!”
But no. Lately I have dated a few lasses – one, 18 dates – only to find that the most important part of my story is not my career or life experience but two words – paranoid schizophrenia. It’s almost as if I invented all my portfolio, PDF by PDF, link by link, thousand word article by thousand word article. That I fake my tax returns to the HMRC to pay vast sums to a government I don’t want to fund (or its likely successor). My Trust will cover it, and what left I’ll top up with disability benefits?
I haven’t performed dental work on anyone since school, and anyway boys do that. You see, the tales you read in the media about unmedicated schizos eating their partner’s liver (with a glass of chianti) are largely not the case. Those of us who were lucky enough to encounter the NHS in the 1990s generally did go onto lead quite normal lives, especially those who take our meds and retain contact with the mental health system. Another schizophrenic I know is a PR officer for an NHS Trust. Another still, an antique bookseller and academic. I only got an MA – I know a few of my kin with PhDs.
Admittedly, few got to do the stuff I have done but that’s the point – identity is not two words written in your medical records when you were 25 is it? But for me, this isn’t easily shaken. I live in fear of what those new in my life will think of my disabilities. Autism is shaken off – I hide it well they say. I hide the parallel realities I monitor constantly even deeper. To walk among ‘normal people’ yet expect to be treated differently when I reveal that I swallow two pills a night because I need to to control my symptoms is difficult. It forms a deep seated paranoia that I will once again be rejected.
That paranoia? All too often confirmed. Your story, no matter how fantastic, evaporates the moment you say those two words. You desist being a swaggering journalist/media/union bruiser type and instead become something best described in the pejorative Nazi term, ‘untermensch’ – under person. Something less than. Why does this need to be the case?
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