RE: Anxiety/Depression/Mental Illness Support
June 1, 2012 at 2:02 pm
(This post was last modified: June 1, 2012 at 2:13 pm by Angrboda.)
I recently attended a presentation on critical thinking given by a colleague/acquaintance. In the course of his presentation he made several rather ignorant comments about mental illness. I needed to follow up with him on some references to the literature via email. I was soooo tempted to offer him the observation that speaking ignorantly about something he knows nothing about tends to undermine his credibility as an authority on the differences between good and bad thinking, but I didn't. Perhaps this is an example of Goebbels' observation that one shouldn't willingly give up one's secrets as one never knows when one will need them again.
I'm rather free with information about my condition, in general, because my strength does not depend on the secrecy of it. After a meeting with a philosophy group in which I used the fact that I was psychotic to undermine the point of another philosopher, my friend jokingly told me that if I'm in a job interview, I should probably leave that part out. The simple fact is, at least in America, despite enormous efforts at public education, the myths and stereotypes about mental illness still persist. And like being gay before Stonewall, one shares such information at one's peril. Stupid people with ignorant ideas about mental illness do not wear yellow stars to help us single them out for exclusion. So, silence, or at least a cautious pre-disclosure investigation, is often warranted. I'm grateful for the internet, where the layer of anonymity is sufficiently thick as to make such measures unnecessary. But real life can be a different matter. When and how do you tell a new lover? It's different each time. Do you tell your landlord? Business relations? People you network with? When and what do you tell your family? A new friend? Your neighbor?