Bonkersfest for all of us
08:26PM May 16, 2008 in category 
by George Frink
Mention of attending a bonkersfest frightens some of my friends into silence and flight.
FYI, I think their discomfort at the mention of attending a bonkersfest and being seen with real, live, celebrating mad pride advocates is as ignoble as failure to stand up against racial discrimination and as fundamentally irrational as a reluctance to advocate heart-healthy diets.
That's why you see my picture at right, with the "I am human" declaration.
Because I am, as are you.
We all are.
Everyone is.
Eliminating the kind of reflexive irrationality I see in some of my friends was made a national health priority by the First U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Mental Illness in 1999. That report and associated studies found that mad prejudice is a both persistent and profoundly destructive:
Stigmatization of people with mental disorders has persisted throughout history. It is manifested by bias, distrust, stereotyping, fear, embarrassment, anger, and/or avoidance. Stigma leads others to avoid living, socializing or working with, renting to, or employing people with mental disorders, especially severe disorders such as schizophrenia (Penn & Martin, 1998; Corrigan & Penn, 1999). It reduces patients? access to resources and opportunities (e.g., housing, jobs) and leads to low self-esteem, isolation, and hopelessness.
Neither this prejudiced insanity-of-the-so-called-sane nor its consequences have substantially abated in the years since 1999. Instead, public mental health care in North Carolina and other states had deteriorated. Discrimination and even shunning continues.
Thus the afflicted, if that is the right term, have been left with no worthwhile alternative but to confront the prejudice, very much as other groups confront the discrimination they face.
Although it originated in England, the mad pride movement in the United States is, then, a natural and healthy response to our collective national failure to put aside prejudice in favor of reason, humanity and sound public health policy.
The alternative was silence, concealment and being crushed when discovered.
As Molly Sprengelmeyer of the Asheville Radical Mental Health Collective put it to the New York Times:
It used to be you were labeled with your diagnosis and that was it; you were marginalized. If people found out, it was a death sentence, professionally and socially.
We are hoping to change all that by talking.
The "low self-esteem, isolation and hopelessness" which are the fruit or prejudice against mental illness are excruciatingly painful to the already besieged, and are exacerbated by self-enforced, societally encouraged silence. The combination can in fact make the "death sentence" Sprengelmeyer mention more than a metaphor. One such suicide was the genesis of Active Minds. Even absent recourse to other literature or experience, a close reading of the CDC suicide prevention materials shows that the combined effects of prejudice, kill.
It is no surprise then that there are 80 percent more suicides than homicides in this country each year, with more than 32,000 people taking their own lives annually. According to the "The Surgeon General's Call To Action
To Prevent Suicide," this makes suicide the 8th-leading cause of death (third for Americans 15-24).
We can no more prevent every suicide than we can cure every disease, but we can through honorable action driven by the force of individual will mark the beginning of the end of the malevolent prejudice.
Let us all join mad pride and declare together that we are now or without further notice may soon be crazy, psycho, sicko, whacko, a nut case and that we will not tolerate anything less than unprejudiced acceptance of those who are given to such altered states.
Because that is the truth.
It means, after all, that each of us has a living, neuroplastic, organic brain which changes with experience, which is prey to illnesses and which is given to the unexpected emergence of gifts. It means we understand the obvious -- that reflexive assignment of stigma to mental illness is illogical and inhumane.
Through your declaration, like mine here, you acknowledge that the emergence of illnesses or gifts does not reduce anyone's humanity and is no more a source of shame for them and those around them than diabetes or, for that matter, red hair.
We can all acknowledge that those who do experience altered states deserve to be treated with unreduced respect.
That they deserved to loved, not shunned.
That they deserve to be cared for, not abandoned.
Absent a real, well-demonstrated, public necessity of confinement or restraint, those given to altered mental states also have a right to freely pursue their lives, like everyone else. They have much to give and we are all deprived by the dark-ages mentality which proclaims them automatically defective and unable to contribute.
How we have treated them and how we treat them/you/us in the future is one, true measure of our individual and collective humanity.
Let us make right together that which has for so long been wrong.
Frink
