Relating to Truly Mentally Ill People(Aspies vs. NTs)

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All the stuff I've described is from personal experience, not even remotely intended to be "PC".

I just seem to have

(a) had a wider range of personal experience than most people (i.e. not unendingly negative), and

(b) possibly because I don't use "mentally ill" as a synonym for "scary, irrational and mean," I know a lot of people who are willing admit to me experiences and diagnoses that they would never, ever admit to most people who view "mentally ill" as meaning "scary, irrational, and mean". They know I won't judge them for it. Some of them accept psychiatric diagnoses and others do not, but they're very aware that most people would be afraid of them and judge them likely to hurt them.

Also, I had the experience, while (mis)diagnosed as mentally ill, of no longer being allowed to be around people's children (including relatives who ought to have known better) unsupervised because they thought I would hurt them, even though I never showed the slightest sign of hurting children. Some people thought I was possessed and tried to exorcise me. Some thought I was contagious. Some people wouldn't let me near them even though I never showed any sign of hurting them in any way. A friend of mine, because of such diagnoses, was never allowed alone with her sibling's children because her sibling also thought similar thoughts. And some people still hate me even for having had that history.

I don't understand how, after having had that experience, I could just turn around and accuse everyone else who was in my position of being dangerous as well. Most of the people I knew in the psych system were absolutely not a danger to anyone but themselves. In fact, at one place I was at, the people labeled schizophrenic were never a problem to anyone.

The people who were the most problem? They had no psychiatric labels at all. Their parents had put them in the system because they were unruly teenagers, and the place was strapped for money and accepted them as patients even though they knew there was nothing "wrong" with them in any traditional psychiatric sense.

I saw some such people sneak by the room of a girl who heard voices and pretend they were additional voices. If she told the staff, these kids said the girl was hallucinating. The girl herself was totally and utterly harmless. They also used to threaten a girl who had problems with paranoia, but if she reported them for it it was "oh she's just paranoid". They pretended in front of me to have killed the cat because they knew I loved cats.

They were ordinary teenage bullies, there is no psychiatric diagnosis for that. They were also, unlike the people who were there for actual psych or developmental conditions, totally irresponsible. The rest of us did all the work we were supposed to do. These people would say "who cares if the cat starves, not my problem, and anyway we know you'll do this if we don't because you don't want the cat to starve, do you?" And we did that because we knew these people wouldn't lift a finger otherwise, they knew totally how to manipulate us. And they knew that (a) we wouldn't be believed, (b) many of us had less capacity to tell anyone even if we would be believed, and (c) we were often naive and easy to manipulate. There was one staff person who believed us over them and took steps to protect us. I heard them talking one day (since they didn't realize how good my hearing is -- I was in another room) about how they needed to start saying how uncomfortable that guy made them, and act like he was coming on to people sexually, to try to get him fired. Later, I heard them putting on the act of being uncomfortable around him, to other staff. Eventually he was fired.

So my experience there was that those of us who had diagnoses like psychosis, bipolar, PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, whatever... we might have problems and bad judgment and huge fears and the occasional outburst and who knows what else, but we were the ones who cared about people regardless. You could tell the ones without a psych label there because they clustered by themselves in a group of their own (maybe they were afraid of us?), manipulated us, and relentlessly bullied the rest of us, and used our diagnoses against us to avoid being caught. Many parents of the rest of us were not happy that parents were being allowed to put their child there for being an unruly nuisance, because it basically amounted to putting bullies in with easy victims. There have been sociological writings about this problem, because it is relatively common.

I don't actually believe that "normal" means "mean" or anything like that. But if I used the logic some other people here are, I could certainly conclude that, because some of the cruelest people I have ever known, have never been labeled with any kind of psychiatric condition or disability of any kind whatsoever. I have also known, since then, some people who are also highly cruel and are diagnosed with a psychiatric condition, some even diagnosed with autism. But I have certainly not seen anything to confirm the stereotype that people with various psych labels are more cruel than others, and I have certainly seen situations where clearly it was the reverse.

I agree though that autistic people are less likely to be innately put off by people who are considered mentally ill. That has been my experience as well. My experience of getting to know such people (because of not being put off by them) has resulted in knowing a lot of really nice people and a lot of really awful people with most people being in between. Sort of like the rest of the world.

I certainly have bad enough social judgment as well, that I often get involved with people who are very cruel. That is separate, though, from often getting involved with people who are mentally ill. Of the people who have done the worst things to me in my life, only some have had any psychiatric diagnosis at all. And the worst things ever done to me have been extremely bad, so I am not unaware remotely of how bad things can get.

I am just afraid that many of the opinions on this thread will contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy. I wonder, if anyone who comes to this forum has ever had problems with hallucinations or delusions (and I know there are several, who have not posted to this thread, but they did post in the past)... how likely are they to admit it? And if they don't admit it, how will you ever know that they're not awful?

How many people have posted to this thread to admit to being among those considered mentally ill? I could certainly fall under that category with PTSD, and I have past experience with misdiagnoses of other conditions that, while I don't know what it is like to have them innately, I know what it is like to be considered to have them, and it is not pleasant (you get a lot of ugly stereotypes dumped on you, and it's just as bad if you have the "real" schizophrenia or bipolar or whatever, as if you don't, some of us make the mistake of thinking the way we were treated was only bad because we didn't have it, but that's not true). I have also in the past been severely, suicidally depressed. And while not an innate "mental illness", I have experienced something mania-like a few times (one pretty prolonged because I was on it for a year and a half, most short) because of medications I was given. Others on this forum have diagnoses of both autism and various forms of psychosis, bipolar, personality disorders, etc. Anyone wonder why only one person has posted anything saying they themselves have a mental illness, and that was Fogman who said he has depression (among the least stigmatized of any of them, although people still judge people for it a lot -- I usually hate the word stigma but it fits here)?

I have seen many people post about personal experiences that are positive, with relatives, friends, etc., with mental illness diagnoses, schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. I have seen many people also post about mixed experiences. I have not seen any of us who say that we have had good or mixed experiences, relying on philosophy over personal experience. And there are a lot of us on this thread who have that experience. It is no less real than anyone else's, given that these are people we know, care about, often love, that we have had prolonged experiences knowing, living with, etc.

I mean, I can list those of us who've said that:

lioness has a good friend diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Callista has had a lot of experiences (good bad and neutral) with a lot of people with various psych labels.

Aurore's brother is dxed with schizophrenia, and fiance with bipolar.

nightbender's best friend is "prone to mania".

Fogman has had assorted mixed experiences, and has depression himself.

liloleme and sinsboldly have both enjoyed working with people with Alzheimer's.

earthmonkey has had several friends with psych labels (didn't specify which).

And I've given my experiences (and spent a long time with "mentally ill" as the only explanation I knew of why I was different -- even though, like someone else on this thread, people could tell I was different from many of the other patients in terms of how I was different).

Those are all real experiences too. The people who say their bad experiences have put them off interacting with "mentally ill" people... it reminds me of someone I know who said that he didn't interact with gay men because a gay man had fondled him without consent once when thinking him to be asleep. By those standards of course, I would have to avoid all "non mentally ill" people (since they have been among the very cruel people), and all heterosexual men (because they're the ones who abused me sexually). Of course that doesn't happen as often that way around. Because prejudice formation tends to work like, "I met some people from an out-group who did awful and/or scary things, so people from that out-group are scary" (and it is generally seen as less pathological to have generalized fear of people from an out-group than of people from a more dominant group). Basically, everyone who has a negative viewpoint about a whole group of people, will believe that it is real personal experience that validly led them to that belief, and will find their beliefs often reinforced by the society they live in.

And to get on the topic of this thread -- from having seen that throughout this thread, I think we're certainly not much (if any) less likely to form prejudices about people designated as mentally ill. However, we might be less initially likely to judge them in some ways. And some of us do use our outsider status as a way to understand other outsiders who are outsiders for different reasons than us.

And those of us who have posted things other than pure negative experiences on this thread are just as much working from our personal experiences as anyone else. I just think how surreal this thread would get if it were about a group of people it is less acceptable to view as all-negative. And I wonder how many people on this forum are now less likely to post their unusual and non-autism-related experiences such as hallucinations and the like. And if anyone else who has noticed those posts, wonders why nobody is posting about them here.

At any rate, I have been judged alongside this group of people just as I have been judged alongside people with intellectual disabilities and I am not going to promote the same fear (or in some cases even hatred, although I don't know if anyone on this thread really hates them -- it does happen though) of them that I have experienced as fear and hatred of myself. It's an easy move to make -- to distance, to say "It was bad because I wasn't really one of them, it'd be okay if I really had been." But sociologically I have been treated as "one of" both groups of people and refuse to say that the fear/hate/stigma/etc are okay when put on them but not okay when put on me.

I am glad to see that a few others on this thread have similarly refused to do that, but wish that this was not being made into a place where people with the actual experiences are probably often quite afraid of posting saying they have them, after what people have said about people like them. Most people with diagnoses of mental illness can read, after all, and are quite aware what we are seeing. I am glad also that one person has at least partly recognized this and apologized.

If that post was addressed to me I have no intention of reading anything of such time consuming length. It's an imposition. You need to write more concisely.

Okay, sorry. Had no intention of imposing, it's just that if I don't give examples it's way easier for someone to accuse me of doing some kind of "PC philosophy". I'm willing to write more concisely when possible for people who need me to do that, but I'm not willing to do it across the board, because many people find abstract statements with few to no concrete supporting details just as much an imposition as you find long posts (and have said so many, many times on this board).

Short version:

1. The rest of us are talking from our personal experiences too, and have been pretty explicit about that. Have seen no "PC philosophy".

2. I was at a place at one point, in fact, where they took people with psych labels, and they also took people whose parents wanted them off their hands. The second set of people was very cruel and nasty nasty to the first set of people, almost across the board, with just about no nastiness in return.

3. I listed everyone on this thread who had mentioned positive or mixed direct experiences with people who were considered mentally ill.

4. I noted that nobody has come to this thread and said they've experienced psychosis or anything like it firsthand. And that saying people "like that" are dangerous can be a self-fulfilling prophecy because then fewer people will admit to being "like that" around you.

5. I noted that just about everyone who forms an overarching view of an entire group of people believes that it's their personal experience, that it's correct, and that people who don't believe them are in one way or another denying reality (whether through being "PC" or not is a different matter). Doesn't make it accurate.

anbuend, I very much like your long and detailed messages. I agree wholeheartedly with what you have written on this thread.

About 15 years my youngest brother had a nervous breakdown and was severely depressed. He was in a psychiatric hospital - for two or three weeks if I remember rightly. I have had suicidal thoughts and onetime was a patient in a psychiatric hospital for about six weeks. I have to fight against the belief that people can read my thoughts. I have feared that I would become schizophrenic. I believe that I am empathetic towards mentally ill people.

A report published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2002 found that 8% of those diagnosed only with schizophrenia are violent compared with 2% of the general population. Misuse of drugs is a key risk factors with 30% of schizophrenics who abuse drugs behaving violently. Annually 99.7% of schizophrenics will not be convicted of a violent crime. A summary of the report is here: http://www.mentalhealthcare.org.uk/rese ... nded/?id=6 . Some of this violence is self-harming.

Here is an article entitled Schizophrenia and Poverty, Crime and Violence: http://www.schizophrenia.com/poverty.htm .

Because most of the news reports which refer to schizophrenia are about people with schizophrenia committing violent crimes, the general public gets a distorted picture of this illness.

This aint a schizophrenia support group.

it can work that way. In general, aspies are different from NTs in different ways and potentially more different from each other than they are from NTs because they are different from NTs in different directions.

I'd guess that with a lot of psychology training an aspie or autist could make a really good therapist for scitzophrenics-

In my experience i am capable of understanding them much better than even professionally trained NTs.

mostly because i don't reify language.

But without my knowledge of psychology, they would be baffling to me just like they are to most people. So theres a potential there but that potential also requires knowledge, experience, and skill.
----------------

General
1.Psychology is the study of the human mind. Most specifically the psyche, most generally All of human behavior.
2. The human Brain is composed of between 40 and 70 different organs, depending upon
how you define differences. These are called brodmanns brain areas. Each brain area
is responsible for specific types of brain processes and mental functions.
3. The human mind has four main operational conditions, they are beta brainwave states, alpha brainwave states, delta brainwave states, and theta brainwave states. Each of these might be further subdivided into waking or sleeping states of consciousness.
4. Beta brainwave states are those in which the dominant area of the brain is the frontal lobes. Alpha brainwave states are those in which the dominant area of the brain is the Mammalian brain or Occipital lobes, and Delta brainwaves states are those where the brain is dominated by the Reptilian Brain or brain stem. Theta brain wave states are
a second waking condition in which the body is healed, or, in which the normal flow of
dominance from top of brain to bottom of brain is reversed, and the bottom of the brain
loads information into the top, which is then experienced as dreams.
5. We have instincts which compel us to seek out gratification of our needs. All behavior is motivated by a conscious or unconscious belief that said behavior will get some need met.
6. Psychology involves first an instinct, which compels a thought process, and then a planning or strategizing session in which the individual uses their maps of reality and belief systems as well as learned knowledge and social conditioning to arrive at an end
product of doing something to get what you want. Schema are maps of reality which we
use as tools to meet our needs .Social Conditioning and personal experience and learning
play vital roles in helping the mind to think up tactics to meet needs.
7. Criminal behavior is behavior which that person believes will get their needs met. Punishment was well demonstrated to have little or no effect on learning curve. What is required for a person to change their behavior is a functional tactic that does work to get their needs met.
8. Groupthink is a social phenomenon of psychology where a group uses false
consensus process to end up behaving stupidly as a group. Groupthink occurs when
people cave into social pressures, where propaganda replaces knowledge or facts, and where group identity is created out of participation in group delusions, lies, codependency, or criminality. Groupthink is how a mob drifts to the lowest common denominator, and why a mob is potentially vicious, evil, and sociopathic. Group
authority ameliorates and dissolves personal conscience, and by having their emotions
manipulated and their social identity threatened, people give up their own better judgment and accept the judgment of the most psychopathic member of the group.
9. Pack Psychology is the psychology exhibited primarily by mammals in small groups
in which 3 primary roles are assumed by social participants. The roles are Alpha- the leader, Beta- the followers, and Delta- the orbiters. In human society that translates in a super-simplified way into bullies, cliques, and nerds.
10. Problem solving psychology must contend against groupthink and pack psychology in the arena of opinion. Problem solving psychology is emotionally neutral and uses the mind and logic to look at all aspects of a problem and try to come up with a viable problem solving process. Problem solving psychology is the worst enemy of both
Rightist and Leftist Dogmatists. True problem solving psychology comes from the place of the radical middle. It takes in all sides and all viewpoints, and it gives each its fair dues
And attention in creating a problem solving process that works from the big picture down through into the nano details.


Psychology;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology
http://psychology.about.com/
http://www.psychology.org/
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-psychlgy.html
http://www.socialpsychology.org/

Brodmanns brain areas and etc;
http://www.umich.edu/~cogneuro/jpg/Brodmann.html
http://spot.colorado.edu/~dubin/talks/b ... dmann.html
http://www.whale.to/b/brain.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodmann_area
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_re ... uman_brain
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsule ... une05.html
http://www.csuchico.edu/~pmccaff/syllab ... unit4.html
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/qa2.html

brainwaves;
http://www.brainwaves.com/brain.html
http://pages.prodigy.net/unohu/brainwaves.htm
http://brain.web-us.com/brainwavesfunction.htm
http://www.crossroadsinstitute.org/eeg.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwaves

Evolutionarily speaking, aspies and autists are a save the humans support group.

There's a fine line between Autism and Schizophrenia; the latter which can easily be called "Adult-onset Autism" (just as the former can be called Infantile Psychosis), with some acute periods of hallucinations/delusions thrown in for good measure. Adults with Asperger's are prone to having attacks of psychotic episodes, especially in the early-adult years (gee, doesn't that sound like Schizophrenia? It's just that the negative symptoms have been there since birth...).

Labels are funny and overlapping things.

Just what does the abbreviation PC stand for?

Edit:

Ah, I have it already. PC indeed standing for personal computer as a term for experiences on the Internet as opposed to experiences from a job and from friends.

Responses to two people:

PC means "politically correct", when used these days usually means someone is only saying something to be appropriate to their political views rather than because there's any evidence for it, also can be a reference to euphemisms like 'challenged' instead of 'disabled'.

Anyway, the reason I brought up the fact that people diagnosed with these conditions were not apparently posting on this thread, was because there are several WP members who currently have both autism/AS/PDD/whatever diagnoses and diagnoses of bipolar, schizophrenia, schizoaffective, psychosis, etc. As well as people who've described experiences like hearing voices, having delusional thinking patterns, etc. They have posted about this on less hostile threads on the matter. And I suspect if this thread didn't frequently refer to them as dangerous people who ought to be avoided, they'd be posting their own experiences on it more readily.

This is not a schizophrenia support group, it's true. It's not a support group for people with non-autism-related cognitive or physical disabilities in general. But there are autistic people who post here who are also diagnosed or diagnosable with either schizophrenia, non-autism cognitive disabilities, or physical disabilities, as well as autistic people with a wide range of other traits and conditions. These things are not mutually exclusive (in fact there are specific provisions in the schizophrenia criteria for how and how not to diagnose them in an autistic person).

As a wheelchair user I would think twice before saying much about it if I was somewhere where I heard people creating a thread about people like me then saying often that people like me were, say, a drain on society (very common view, including among some autistic people). And IMO if people are going to be treated like they're not welcome here (which includes having people repeatedly say bad things about them as a category of person), it'd better be over something they do wrong (like, say, hacking MemberSix's account to post racist remarks), not some way they are.

If this is too long, can someone else (woodpeace maybe? I've seen you summarize things concisely before) condense it into main points? I'm really bad at that, I'm sorry.

Oh, I was far off with my guess. Thanks for the answer!

Personally being Bipolar and possibly Aspie, I'm different enough that I don't get along with "normal" people very well at all. It is possible to pick out people with a mental state, I somehow guessed one of my co-workers had problems and she turned out schizoaffective. Personally I found out most people think I act either nerdy or autistic, at least my mental illness doesn't show.

This isn't a forum for schizophrenia, it's one for ASDs and ADHD (for those who want that listed seperately). I realize some here have had positive encounters with those suffering from schizophrenia I respect that.
But realize others are not so fortunate and have been quite traumatized by some of these people who can be extremely destructive IRL. So, it is hard to form an accepting, positive opinion.
And before someone mentions autism I want to add I have NEVER EVER had the same terrible encounters with ANYONE who has autism (that i know of) in real life there is just no comparing the two based on my own experience they are two entirely different things and those with schizophrenia have a much different basic mode of being ie, paranoia and a certain dysphoric meanness. That is what I have observed more than anything else in people I knew had schizophrenia. Sorry but that has been my experience.

I wasn't aware that a forum had to be for a specific group of people, in order not to make generalized negative statements about said people.

Replace "schizophrenic" with a number of other words, say it's based on your personal experiences with several of (whatever the other category is), and see if it sounds remotely acceptable.

If it doesn't, why not?

What would your response be to someone who said that about a group of people that you knew (from direct personal experience) were not all, not even most, like that?

What if they told you, then, that it was not a support group for (insert kind of people) so it was okay to say these things?

Or that you were just being politically correct, or that you were so fortunate not to have met the bad kind of (autistic people, gay people, black people, whatever)?

(Even if you told them that yes you had met very mean people in the category mentioned. Apparently that isn't good enough for them, they seem to desperately want to connect meanness to that category.)

Seriously. Think about it. Because that's how some of what's written on this thread comes across to anyone who actually knows a wide and varied enough group of people diagnosed with schizophrenia to know that meanness is not an inherent trait of the conditions that get them diagnosed that way.

Yeah, people with minds that work in certain ways will be mean in unique ways based on how their minds work.

Autistic people who are very mean, for instance, are often very obsessive and relentless about their meanness even after nearly anyone else would've given up on it due to social disapproval.

The location of Autreat is confidential because of an autistic person who used to stalk several members there absolutely obsessively as well as do incredibly, incredibly mean things to them that defy description in how mean they are (over a period of over a decade, maybe two). And his meanness is very plain even over the Internet, at least after his initial mask falls off, and he's not good at hiding it because his social skills aren't the greatest.

I imagine that the shape of his meanness and the way he expresses it is very related to autism. But what if someone had only met him and a couple other autistic people like him? What if they said "this is my experience with autistic people"? Would you not challenge what they said based on your experience of autistic people? What if lots of people had never met very mean autistic people like him? Lots haven't.

But some have and they form their opinion based on that. I even had a shrink once who told me he never met a person with Asperger's that he liked, and that they were just inherently nasty and unlikable. Doesn't make their opinion right.

Well, same is true of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, whether you can see it or not for having met only mean people with it. (Or rather, thinking you only have. I bet you've met tons more people diagnosed with schizophrenia than you think you have.)

It's not fair at all to make generalized statements about "these people" based only on having been traumatized by people in that category. If that were fair, then I could go on for quite a long time about the awful meanness and brutality of men, autistic people, straight people, manic people, white people, paranoid people, and people in a number of other categories, both valued and devalued. As a gay person I hear people all the time defending their choices to say bad things about gay people because a gay person sexually assaulted them, and it's really not-okay on many levels. (Personally, everyone who sexually assaulted me was straight, but several were neuro-atypical in various ways.)

And if this were not an autism forum I would still say it's wrong to make generalized statements about how uniquely mean autistic people are. It doesn't have to be a schizophrenia forum for some people on this thread to show a little respect to people here who have it or have loved ones with it or know people who have it and know that not only is not everyone with it like that, neither are most people with it like that. Nobody's saying there aren't mean people in every category of people, of course there are (unless the category is "nice people" ).

You have to remember schizophrenia is a mental disorder with a criteria for diagnosis so you cannot just exchange words here. It's very specific. It isn't generalizing.

And also remember I have never met an autistic person who acts like the persons with schizophrenia. Two completely different disorders here. I've had the worse experiences with the ones who have schizophrenia. I don't have them now because I no longer know these persons and my life is so much better now. People here complain about NTs but the persons I have known with schizophrenia make most NTs look pretty darn nice in comparison. The so called normal people might judge me wrongly by the way I look but they at least don't make up a bunch of strange stories about me, must be on constant guard with me, think I am out to get them, etc. This is what those with schizophrenia that I have known think and do. Imagine someone you know takes money out their bank account turns arounds and tells people you have been secretly taking money out of their account when you just saw them take the money out. Schizophrenics I have known do this kind of thing. It's part of the disorder.

This is the kind of confusion I am talking about and I do not compare this in to autism except that they are both disorders that make people who have them somewhat different and are genetic and affect the brain.