This post started life as a comment:
The only way to get past the stigma against Mental Illness is for we who must live with it to get angry and speak out.
We are not criminals, many of us would not be homeless if we were not systematically reduced to poverty, we are not “behaviors,” and we are not parasites, laggards, lazy, and malingering.
In fact, many of the shootings by people with a euphemistic “history” would not have happened if we had a fully funded mental health system that treated people when they need it instead of placing obstacles in their way and reducing the pain of mental illness to the shame of not thinking nice thoughts.
As for the “horror” of imposing treatment on people who are too sick to know how sick they are my thoughts are these: I am sorry that rich families produced selfish bastards that abused the earlier system by trying to have their parents and grannies locked up to get their money.
However, shutting down the hospitals and making it impossible for the genuinely ill to get treatment is idiotic, if not evil.
There are worse things than a short imposed hospitalization, especially when the illness affects insight, judgment and impulse control.
There is waking up to realize that in your delusions you have tossed your babies into the San Francisco Bay because you thought God told you to.
There is decapitating your wife because you are psychotic and violently paranoid.
If I am destructively ill and unable to see that I am ill then I say hospitalize me.
The idea of making me homeless to “protect” my civil rights is insufferably stupid, unless my death is the goal.
There are far worse things than a month in the hospital and mandatory medications that will bring me back to sanity.
One of them is life in prison.
RG 2015
