America's Mental Health Crisis and Schiavo Protesters..

[wickywom]

Is it just me or are some of these folks scaring the pants off mainstream America?

The attitude towards treating mental illness in this country will hopefully get more attention now--
It has now become painfully obvious that running to God to fix your mind ain't gonna cut it.

[DELUSIONAL]

1. I doubt anything would scare off the bush cult members

And yes the fanatical idiots attending the "death" of an already dead woman shows that a whole lot of people are mentally ill. But I doubt that medication would help those cult members shown on TV. Thankfully I don't watch TV -- merely reading about their frantic, illogical behavior is quite enough. Mass cult deprogramming via the TV would be the only way to reach these nut cases.

I can ignore most of the crap --

Americas may be unaware that the WHOLE WORLD is watching this spectacle of the nut cases screaming and chanting and lying about the condition of this -- spinal fluid for brains -- woman.

Meanwhile the rest of the world sees the video and photos of the dead Iraqi children and the fact that these same nut cases don't give a GOD damned what is happening to the children in Iraq. A whole lot of children in the world could have been fed on the money used to keep this dead woman's body artificially alive.

[undergroundpanther]

2. Problem is

Psychiatry to be honest has a troubling failure rate.
Therapy and medicine for serious mental illness does not cure it.
Medicine can suppress symptoms and tranquilize them away but it does not remove the pain inside.
Lithium may "balance" manic depression...

But in reality therapy is not effective as it should be for 80-150 bucks a session.
It can help people with minor issues like erection problems,grief,minor stress.It can be a place to vent and talk without having others hear and judge.
But...Therapy doesn't cure or stop mental illness.

For me the thing that helped me get better most was a long term relationship.Knowing someone loved ME,and would be there,who was going to tell me who to be to please them self. Also alot of problems are caused by child abuse and sociopaths.People who are sadistic,abusive,callous ,cruel and self absorbed can teach you the world is hostile to you and condition you to hate your own life..

Seeing your way out of childhood abuse and betrayal takes many years.

Yet our culture is elitist..one that supports abusers and'sucesss'.It excuses the exploitative and rationalizes their domination for them. Our culture hates different, sensitive,vulnerable,weak or outcast people in it's midst.Every bully needs a poison container,every dominator needs a population around him to submit to him without the people conditioned to suffer or submit these"alpha types" learn to become sensitive,to reign themselves in,or they die..


Our culture reinforces an arbitrary unequal social pecking order. This is what creates some of our mental illnesses. Mental stress manifests a million ways. We need to learn to give up notions of worthiness,or more than or lesser when it comes to human beings and care about each others quality of life instead of creating strife and competing against each other to survive and win a quality life on the back of another person's despair.Being forced to live like a sociopath to"get ahead" and"survive when one HAS a conscience is deeply painful.Some people can numb it out,others cannot.
I posit one of the reasons therapy does not help individuals as it should is mental illness is not just an individual problem.

It is caused by our culture, It is caused by how our top-down,strife based dynamics interacts within human relationships.
The interpersonal/ social abuse dynamic is cultural and it touches every one of us in varying ways and degrees.Sadly is pervasive,amorphous, hard to see, and very toxic..and considered"normal"..In reality it is Very sick.
Some people cannot live their lives as this culture demands they must.
And when they try to do it it hurts them. There are no places for people who cannot live as society demands.There are no havens in this culture for spiritual explorers,artists, the gentle hearted , cultural rebels and authority questioners..And because learned helplessness and Stockholm syndrome also pervades our culture,which greatly benefits certain few people,the different than the status quo may crack under the pressure to be something they aren't and to live in a way they can't.

Our culture is very sick it's inhuman. The mentally ill are a symptom of how painful our human condition is,when mental illness becomes more prevalent it is IMHO a rise in this abusive cultural sickness making the human condition too painful for some to exist in so they have problems participating in the very culture that is toxic to them.

Not being loved, not feeling accepted by the world, feeling like an outcast,feeling all alone with your pain it can drive you to suicide if it does not get resolved.
Like cells in the body die when they get wounded,old or they are"neglected" they instigate their own inner suicide programs,apoptasis happens.


Our culture in some ways functions similar to a body's systems do ..
I think it also imitates a body when some people suicide. In a culture of inequality where some people grow up feeling unwanted, sometimes they feel hated,abused,rejected,neglected and feeling totally alone with their pain,and nobody cares,nobody notices it's like they don't exist.Our culture sends them a signal DON'T EXIST ANYMORE .A depressed or traumatized person begins to feel damaged,like their existence is a drag on everyone else around them. So suicide at that time looks like a relief rather than going on days in a psychologically wounded state, living in a stasis,helplessly bound in your own mind states,or a bad situation alone with no one to relate to..no one helping,no one listening and loving them back to life..they die.

This is why I think sometimes religious conversions that evangelists use like love bombing..can hook some lonely,isolated, desperate people stuck in new living arrangements,or in abuse situations, in unfamiliar towns easier than happy people,in familiar places surrounded by family and Friends who care..

Something to think about.

[stillcool]

3. Great post....

..a society so caught up in form nobodys functioning very well. Howard Dean once said he knew a school teacher who would tell him she knew which of her 3rd grade students would end up in jail. Others can see symptoms but until the afflicted become aware they continue to spread their warped view to those in their surroundings. It is interesting how unconscious some are of what their own truth really is...sans what they have been spoon-fed. There is so much in our make-up that we didn't put there, and it continues to shade the view.