It's a Mental Healthcare Issue, Too

*Warning: This post will be political as well as personal. Discussion of Roe v Wade. 

Mentally ill people are considered a vulnerable population. People with mental health conditions are more likely than people without mental health conditions to be victims of crime, including domestic violence and sexual crimes. In addition to that, many people with mental illness live in poverty because their mental health condition prevents them from getting and keeping a steady job. Many people with mental illness are on disability for their mental illness, and they can barely survive on that small monthly check when they have to pay rent, food, and utilities costs. Never mind about paying for medications that aren't covered by insurance if they even have insurance, a car with car insurance, or a cellphone. Many mentally ill people are so unwell that they can barely take care of themselves, let alone another human being.

I am a mentally ill person. For the rest of my life, I will be a mentally ill person. Now, I may have reached a point in my treatment that I can live alongside my mental illness without fighting it every day of my life, but I do still have some periods in which my mental illness severely affects my ability to function at my usual level. Keeping my mental health in a place where I have more good days than bad days is like a full-time job for me, and it's the kind of full-time job that I can't really slack off of or take a vacation from. 

I am also a person that does not want children...at all...ever...even under "ideal" circumstances for a lot of reasons that I won't go into detail about in this post. I did not make that decision lightly. I did not make that decision because I'm irresponsible, immature, selfish, lying to myself, too feminist, or any other stereotype that seems to be tossed at people who choose not to have children. I made the decision because being childfree is the best choice for me, my life, and my mental health.

Not only would having children be bad for my mental health because I would be trying to make myself fill a role that I felt I wasn't meant for, but I also already live with two clinically diagnosed mental health conditions. Treating, managing, and living healthily with those conditions takes a significant chunk of my internal resources. Parenting a child properly takes practically all of a person's internal (and in many cases all of a person's external) resources as well. So, when I consider the resources that I have and my mental health in thinking about whether I could adequately parent a child without my mental health or the child suffering, my answer is: NO, I COULD NOT DO IT. Yet, I could end up being forced to since I live in state with very strict abortion laws.

I know my story isn't unique. Plenty of people list mental illness as a reason that they have for choosing not to have children. Many people recognize that they don't have the internal and/or external resources to properly care for a child AND themselves. Many people don't want a child to suffer through growing up with a parent that has a mental illness that would interfere with parenting and/or don't want to subject a child to a genetic predisposition to a mental illness that would make life more difficult for them. In addition, many psychotropic medications (the medications used to treat mental health conditions) can cause birth defects, which can make babies unable to survive outside the womb or, if they do survive, they may be a child that needs expensive care or surgeries that someone who lives in poverty because of their mental illness wouldn't be able to afford. 

Since Roe v Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, many states, including the state that I live in, have laws that will go into effect banning abortions in almost all cases. There are no exceptions for rape or incest in my state's ban. There are also no exceptions for birth defects in the fetus in my state. There IS an exception for the health of the mother, but it only applies if the mother's life is in danger or if a major bodily function would be irreversibly damaged. As you can guess, mental health is not included under the exception for the health of the mother. 

States like the one where I live already don't think of abortion as healthcare unless the person who is pregnant is teetering on the edge of death. So, of course, they completely ignore that abortion is a part of mental healthcare as well. For me, it doesn't seem that farfetched to be concerned that many people with mental health conditions will be forced to stop taking the psychotropic medications that literally save their lives once it's medically confirmed that they are pregnant because the fetus is already considered more important than the person carrying it, according to the coming law in my state.

With laws like these, we'll likely see an increase in suicide among mentally ill people who find themselves pregnant and can't access abortion and can no longer take their medications because they don't want to cause damage to the child they'll now have to raise. We'll see more children neglected and some actively harmed because they live with a parent who can't care for them because of a mental illness. We'll see more children who had the misfortune to be born with a genetic predisposition to mental illness left in foster care until they age out of the system because people don't want to adopt children with "red flags" like a family history of mental illness or possible birth defects. Those "unadoptable" children will grow up to be traumatized adults who will also need access to mental health services because the foster care system isn't actually the kid-friendly system people think it is. 

Forcing more children to be born to people who don't have the ability or the resources to care for them isn't saving children. It's creating more children that will end up suffering. (And no, having a child more than likely won't be the thing that saves a mentally ill person from their illness. It doesn't work like that.) It'll actually create yet another crisis in mental health and even more of a strain for agencies like the Department of Human Services and Child Protective Services.

I'll end with this: Safe, legal and easy access to abortion isn't just healthcare, for many people it's also mental healthcare. If people with mental health conditions are barely surviving to care for themselves, expecting them to care for another human being that is completely dependent on them for survival is only going to be a stress that can exacerbate their mental illness. In fact, forcing anyone to live a life that they feel they can't sustain and be healthy, or that they feel isn't true to who they are, is going to have mental health consequences for them and the child they're going to be forced to care for.

What's the Point?

Currently, no cure for mental illness exists, but mental illness is treatable and manageable. This means that once a mental illness shows up in a person's life, they'll likely be dealing with the symptoms of that mental illness for the rest of their life, even if they go to therapy, take their medications, and do everything they're supposed to do to manage it. This reality of mental illness can lead a lot of people to think, "If it's not even curable, and I'm going to continue to experience symptoms with treatment, then what's the point of getting treatment at all?"

I know, it's really hard to hear that an unpleasant condition is now going to be a thing that you have to make room for in your life instead of a thing that you can get rid of completely. I know it's discouraging to hear that you can do everything "right" and still experience symptoms that interfere with your life. I've been there, and I've felt all the emotions that go along with that realization. I will still tell you that treating and managing your mental illness is worth it, even though it won't be cured. 

Calling life with a mental illness, particularly an undiagnosed and/or untreated mental illness, unpleasant is an understatement. Life with an undiagnosed and/or untreated mental illness is a miserable existence for most of us, and the longer a mental illness goes untreated the worse it tends to get until we reach a point at which we're no longer actually living; we're just...here, drowning in an invisible ocean of misery and barely surviving hour by hour. 

So, what's the point of treating and managing your mental illness if it can't be cured? The point is simple: you deserve it. You deserve to live a life that is made up of more than drowning in the invisible ocean of misery that your mental illness has created. You deserve to live as fully, as healthily, and as happily as you possibly can alongside your mental illness. You deserve the healing that happens as you learn to manage your mental illness and live peacefully with it. You deserve the treatment to be able to get to that place. 

Yes, the mental illness and its unpleasant symptoms will still be there, but your relationship to it and the amount it affects your life will change over time with proper treatment. The treatment and the management techniques make the mental illness less difficult to carry so that you're aware of it but it's not a thing that you're drowning in ALL THE TIME anymore. Bad days will probably still happen, but with treatment and mental health management, the bad days can become more spaced out and a little easier to recover from when they do happen. Treating and learning to manage your mental illness makes life a little easier to live, even with the bad days. 

 

I'll end with this: The reality of mental illness is that it can't be cured. It can only be treated and managed, which means symptoms are going to come and go, even when someone does everything "right" to treat and manage the illness. This reality often leads people to wonder, "Well, what's the point of treatment if I'm just going to keep having symptoms anyway?" The point is that life with an untreated mental illness is miserable, and you deserve to live a life that is filled with more than the misery created by your mental illness. You deserve to heal and to live as fully, healthily, and happily as you can with your mental illness, and treatment and management can help you along that path.

Trending: Mental Health Stigma

Recently, I've noticed people on social media, especially Twitter, saying something that seems to be a sort of slang that goes a little too far, especially when I think about the fact that we're still dealing with a heavy layer of mental health stigma as a society. Lately, I've been seeing people mention a personality trait, habit, or behavior and then say, "that's mental illness" as a way to emphasize that they don't like whatever the trait, habit, or behavior is. Not only are statements like those judgmental and unkind, but they also keep the mental health stigma alive and well. 

The knee-jerk reaction to my assertion about the mental health stigma related to the above-mentioned statements might be to think that I'm just nit-picking. People might roll their eyes and think, "Oh, come on. It's just the newest trend in harmless Internet speak. It'll pass soon enough." You might be right that the trend will pass relatively quickly, but it probably won't pass before somebody in your friend group or family who quietly lives with a mental illness is negatively affected by it.

Statements like the ones I mentioned above turn neutral terms like "mental illness" and "mentally ill" into an insult. When terms like "mental illness" and "mentally ill" are used to convey a dislike of annoying habits or even some problematic behaviors, then being annoying or a "problematic person" can become another generalization about or even another stereotype of mental illness. Once a generalization like that becomes thought of as common knowledge and a stereotype like that makes its way through society, then all people with a mental health condition start being thought of as an annoying and/or problematic person just because they have a mental illness, which can make things like entering into and maintaining a relationship or even finding employment even more difficult when or if they disclose the mental health condition. This extra layer of difficulty can lead even more people to refuse to get a diagnosis and treatment because they don't want to have to deal with the negative assumptions that society will make about them.

Using terms like "mental illness" and "mentally ill" as an insult is hurtful on a deeper level as well. Calling something like a habit or a behavior a mental illness just because you don't like or agree with it trivializes the struggle and pain of living with an actual mental illness. When words like "mental illness" and "mentally ill" start getting thrown around to mean or describe anything less than the actual, diagnosable conditions that take people's lives, the whole concept of mental illness can be seen as less serious than it should be. The mental health stigma already tells society that mental health conditions aren't real health conditions; we don't need slang on the Internet to play up that idea and make it even harder to fight that piece of the stigma.

I'll end with this: I know trends and slang change quickly, especially on the Internet. However, just because things like that come and go relatively quickly doesn't mean that they don't hurt people even after the words and their "updated" meanings have changed or faded from use. The words we use and the way we speak to and about other people matter. Calling something a mental illness that you don't like or agree with isn't only judgmental and unkind; it also helps the mental health stigma maintain its hold in society and makes life that much more difficult for people with actual mental illness.