2&2 Slider To Leyritz
Well-known member
Jesus, I'm not sure where to begin with all the stupid in this post.
We still need to be tolerant and accepting of people with mental health problems. That's not politically correct, that's basic human decency. Mental illness is still an enormous taboo in this country. An analogy I heard recently is, which would you rather tell your friends/family: "I had a hard time getting out of bed this morning because I hurt my back" or "I had a hard time getting out of bed this morning because of my depression"?
Mental health is absolutely a facet of physical health, and it's something that most people, clearly 2&2 included, are grossly misinformed, undereducated, or simply ignorant about.
There is a level of nuance between saying "dude is a nut" about someone, and expressing genuine concern for their well-being, and alerting proper authorities if you think someone poses a real threat to others because of a mental health problem.
Like most things, this starts at home. For a long time, we didn't have a good medical grasp on mental health problems (to a large extent we still don't), and we'd dismiss depression as people being sad or hysterical, and anxiety attacks as fainting. People tend to think that nowadays because SSRIs and benzodiazepines (for anxiety and depression) and amphetamines (for ADD/ADHD) are overprescribed that the national issue of mental health is overblown; it has become a real boy-who-cried-wolf for people with very real mental health problems.
Then, there are people like 2&2, who clearly think we still need to be marginalizing those with mental health problems, treating them as subhuman. Mental health is a spectrum; it can change over time, develop overnight, be affected by events in life, and be treated and managed.
You missed my point completely, it has nothing to do with marginalizing anyone. It has to do with the fact that most most mentally ill people would not self-report themselves as mentally ill (either because of their illness or otherwise). So in order to start the treatment, someone else has to do it for them. Which is increasingly harder when there is no baseline "normal" behavior from which the other person can measure. Is someone mentally ill or just "unique" or eccentric? How does the layman make that call, especially with the fear or being labeled an intollerant bigot (currently the worst of our societal sins) for a variety of reasons if they get it wrong?