I wonder if there will ever come a time when mental patients won’t be less than.

I just finished taking a peek at some bloggers who blog about celebrity stuff, curious to see who they chose as best and worst dressed. Fashion is fluffy fun and I enjoy snarky comments about kooky dresses and hair.

The bloggers are all gay and were overcome by the dude who wrote the screenplay for Milk, his acceptance speech. He used the term less than, saying to GLBT youth that they are not less than.

That’s all fine and good, but mental patients are. It wasn’t all that long ago when Lou Reed was electroshocked (the brain kind, not tasers) to shock him out of being gay. (Didn’t work.) I’ve heard from a number of people who were shocked for the same; I know people today who were shocked for it. It never cured the gay.

But that’s not the point. (For the record, I’m strongly pro-gay rights, although I’m on the fence about marriage. None of my many gay friends ever cared about that until it became a political agenda. Now all of a sudden, everybody wants a piece of paper.)

The point is that the mental patients’ union has somehow missed the boat.

We are less than, and I do not believe I’ll see a day when we aren’t.

I always go back to a conversation I had online a few years ago. The Hartford Courant had done a great series on unreported deaths in mental wards in Connecticut. The patients had all died while under restraints, some suffocating, some choking, and so on. It was a great piece of investigative reporting (a genre that seems to have evaporated).

Nobody cared that these people died, other than the reporter and people like me, mental health activists. What was finally said in the conversation was this: so what if these people died? They were mental patients and a few elderly folks. So what.

I’ve never gotten over that. The people who said this were not bad people. They weren’t raving maniacs; they were articulate and intelligent people. And it was okay that people died cruel deaths while being chained to beds, because they were mental patients.

They were less than.

I’m certain that’s the opinion of many folks out there. While everyone is patting themselves on the back because they voted for a black man, and they’re salivating over the fact that they aren’t racist, many of them - maybe most of them, believe that mental patients are less than. Less important, less than human.

Consider the mental patients who have been recruited as homicide bombers. It barely received a mention in the mainstream press. It was more important to whine about Gitmo and compare Bush to Hitler. As I recall, the only people who expressed any outrage were Michelle Malkin and Robert Spencer.

I once chatted with the guy who founded Act Up, the group that has used civil disobedience to bring about real change regarding AIDS issues. I had hoped that we (the psychiatric rights movement) could model ourselves after them and possibly affect some real change.

But we just can’t seem to organize correctly. There are wonderful coalitions of good people, and people are doing good works. But our agendas are so vast, and even opinions differ so widely.

I don’t know what the answer is. From time to time, I really lose heart.

Somehow all the kudos for this guy who wrote “Milk” and his wonderful speech pissed me off. Gays have a long history of being treated as crazy, losing their rights as any person with a psych history can, having “treatments” forced upon them.

Real issues. Bad things that have happened to gays under the guise of treatments. They were killed, along with the Jews, the gypsies and mental defectives in the camps.

And yet all that matters to their movement is being able to get a legal marriage certificate. I guess that’s what bothers me the most - there is still genuine mistreatment, genuine discrimination, every bad thing that has happened to marginalized groups in history still happens to psych patients.

There’s a bit of jealousy, too, if I’m being honest. I’m jealous that the GLBT community has been so successful in organizing, so successful in gaining public support, and the crazy community (with many gays and lesbians as well) can’t seem to get anything at all.

It’s okay if we die under bad conditions because…we’re less than.

I can’t imagine Hollywood wearing little ribbons to show solidarity with mental patients.

We need some kind of cool factor, but drooling, shaky hands, and sitting in a stupor after shock therapy isn’t very sexy, is it?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 3:10 am and is filed under A Nutter's Prattle, Mental Health Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.