#just because someone said psychotic people are not scary or violent it doesn't make them the target audience for this post

[the-master-of-disaster]

"Psychosis is neither good or bad"

"Psychosis is not a crisis, it can be a positive experience!"

"In some cultures, psychosis..."

NO. Nononono. Psychosis is bad. Psychosis is scary and requires treatment, even if some forms of it make you feel euphoric or enlightened or whatever.

I can't believe we have to perpetuate the narrative that psychosis is a misunderstood otherworldly experience just for people not to hate us. Hello? Can we just... not hate people with "scary" symptoms without having to make them digestible and relatable? Can we just do that instead?

[221bluescarf]

I don't usually talk a lot about history and stigma around mental illness but after listening to the latest episode of one of the mental health podcasts I like, I just found it so interesting that I want to mention it.

You're getting my breif version but you can find the episode yourself if you're interested and I recommend listening to the podcast (Inside Schizophrenia) if you're interested in learning about schizophrenia ⁠—the illness, treatment, and history. Be warned though, this 1 episode in particular has a tw for violence and very disturbing crimes.

Most people are familiar with the stereotype of schizophrenic serial killer or otherwise violent and demented portrails of people with schizophrenia and other mental illness. I've met a lot of people who believe in this stereotype about schizophrenia, and bipolar too. I've been asked if my medication keeps me from killing people. Even someone in the psych ward with me said "damn girl, you hurt people??" when they found out I take antipsychotics.

As the podcast pointed out, in the 1920s, there are sources that talk about people with schizophrenia being mostly harmless, to put it simply. But in the 60s, during all the civil rights stuff, the government started labeling people with schizophrenia and associating it with violence which was never the case previously. The government "diagnosed" a lot of people (a lot of black people) with schizophrenia. Along came a trend of both the government and the news outlets labeling people as an extremely dangerous schizophrenic or violent psychotic person. There was no correlation and no actual symptoms of schizophrenia (hallucinations, delusions, etc) It was simply something that sounded good (or rather, sounded bad. Bad and scary).

The idea is usually that in order to do something so violent and, well, "crazy", you'd have to be mentally ill ⁠—when that's really not the case. Criminologists in the past (70s I think) were looking for just that: the crazy people committing murder and assault. But they didn't find it. What they found was that the majority of these crimes were committed either by "regular people" or committed by people with other issues not considered mental illness.

Not every mentally ill person is completely harmless and non-violent, but that goes for the entire population. To use an example from the podcast, most serial killers have been white men, a much bigger percentage than of people with diagnosed mental illness, yet that doesn't make (most) people afraid of white men in general.

Interesting too, is that you have to take into account the fact that the violent murderer could be *lying* to try and get away with their crime. There are offenders including serial killers who gave stories of delusional thought and/or hearing commanding voices who later admitted that they'd actually made it all up. I can't remember the name but if I recall correctly one of them claimed a dog had commanded them to kill but later said that was a lie.

It's just so much easier to believe that the only danger comes from mentally ill people. Because believing *anyone* could be the culprit is much scarier and you can't protect yourself from them as easily as you can protect yourself from the image of a raving, crazy escaped mental patient.

But that belief doesn't actually protect you, and what's worse it comes at the expense of all of the innocent mentally ill people just trying to live.

I wish there was a short and simple way to say this to people.