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Yesterday I wrote a blog post about what schizophrenia is and what it is not. This post is similar but rather than look at the personal (stories about me) I am looking at how people view severe mental illness on a national level.

This election cycle was difficult for many people to get through. The things that we had to listen to on the nightly news were vulgar, intolerant and upsetting in so many ways. We experienced Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, mocking of the disabled, and then those of us who have a mental illness experienced something else: we experienced more insults and misunderstanding than I have encountered in the twenty plus years since I received a diagnosis.

Insulting language about mental illness was everywhere I looked. It filled up my Facebook feed: lunatic, unhinged, crazy, bat shit crazy, insane. It was in mainstream newspapers and used by pundits on the nightly news. Derogatory language about mental illness had become the norm for those who normally fight for marginalized people.

Seeing so much reference in a negative way about mental illness was startling and painful enough, but the reasons why people were using that language was even more alarming. People were confusing intolerance, hate speech, aggression, bigotry, misogyny, sexual assault and all manner of other disturbing things with symptoms of mental illness. None of those things have anything to do with mental illness.

I have symptoms like, depression, anxiety, auditory hallucinations, tactile hallucinations, visual hallucinations, social anxiety, lack of motivation, and isolating socially to name a few. As you can see, none of the things I mentioned as symptoms have to do with discriminating against, disliking, or being intolerant of other people. Also, none of them have to do with aggression.

What people did, millions of people, during this election is make being a racist, sexist, etc. into the definition of mentally ill and those things are not connected. This climate of inappropriate and inaccurate cause and effect impacted me so much I am only now able to write about it. Since the election, I have only seen this addressed once in an article on a news outlet like Huffington Post (I think that is where it was but I can’t be sure).

I felt as if all the social justice people completely abandoned the mentally ill and the nation decided that whatever unfavorable characteristic someone displayed it was due to mental illness. It was as if the title mental illness had become a dumping ground for all the things people find distasteful in others. We became not the trash collectors, but the trash.

Since so few people recognized that this was happening, and did nothing to change their language, I am sure that we will see much more of this over the next four years. The progress the mental health community achieved over the past few years in educating people about mental illness may very well be eroded by the current political climate. I hope the damage is not severe. Those of us who have once again been characterized by the media and the public as “bad” people will suffer the consequences of this latest wave of ignorance and misunderstanding.