And so the headlines continue…continue to stigmatize what mental health even is, & how we come to erroneously understand it as a society.
First & foremost, the loss of life at such a tragic young age is just awful. Only 40…talented…performer of two of the biggest plays in the world…young family.
No cause of death revealed, so what do the papers do – they focus on the DIAGNOSIS, & make us believe this is a disease state, & the disease caused something tragic, ending a life, like – a suicide or overdose. If someone reads headlines like this differently – I’m totally open to the interpretation…but I’m not sure how these types of headlines can be interpreted differently.
On the flip side, this man had to go off stage because of SYMPTOMS of paranoia. He had a Go Fund Me set up for his mental health treatments – bc he didn’t have insurance in the US.
Go w me here: our takeaway from headlines & even the full articles like these set us back in so many ways: 1) “The people who die of things like overdose & suicide, those are the mentally ill people, w ‘it’ & I dont have ‘it’ so I’m not susceptible.” 2) These disorders are disease states – they are not nervous system dysregulation. The DISEASE caused the death.”
This continues to hammer home there is an “us” the affected, who are susceptible – group, & a “them” group who don’t have “it.” It 1) destroys help seeking for the 4 in 5 people in society who don’t believe they have “it”…& 2) it causes people who’ve been diagnosed to believe – that’s likely what can/will happen to me, bc I too have “it.” That destroys positive outlooks, & hope.
We ALL have MH. It’s shifts on a continuum for ALL of us. We all are dysregulated at times. Some for longer times than others. Some more so than others. But we are ALL susceptible. There is no disease in the body…the labels are ways to classify similar clusters of symptoms. If we continue in this disease model, we continue to be a dog chasing our tail as a society & these awful tragedies continue to pile up. It’s heartbreaking.