Lose the Labels- End the Stigma

The containment of psychiatric labelling, the reductionism, the psycho-spiritual isolation, and the social pressure placed on those who are so labelled IS the “stigma” and it always has been. Being defined in this way changes the people defined and it also changes all the people around that one, who accept the definition and then make the person “fit” into it.  Even people who actually KNEW you BL (before labelling ) change the way they see you, hear you and relate to you for now you are a disease process, not a regular person, and experts have made it so.

Labelling human beings as “less than” or inherently “inferior” to the “normal” humans sends a clear message to those who are so “glad” that “we” aren't defective like “them.”

It is also like waving a red flag for the “Bulls”(ies) in society which signals to the ass-holes of the world; “we can feel free to abuse this defective person just as much as we like since no one is going to believe someone who has been labelled as defective and crazy for “believing' she has been harmed by others.”

Though the psychiatrized may well have been the targets of group abuse before labelling, it will pale by comparison to the level of abuse generated BY the official labelling of the individual's experience of life from his/her OWN point of view, now understood by others as irrelevant, imaginary and nothing but the product of a bad brain chemistry or defective genes.

Label = Stigma

If you pay attention you will notice that there are TWO types of labelled people who still promote the label while fighting the “stigma.” Those who don't promote the labelling, and there are MANY of us, are mostly ignored by the system for our dissenting opinion based on our own experience. We are often labelled “non-compliant” as I was, for refusing to deny our own reality and co-operate with the diagnostic pigeon holing which tells us, and others, that we “just have no insight into our own condition” for if we DID, then surely we would be embracing our labels with gratitude and not worry about any “stigma.”

I have a question for Gordon Warme, M.D.

Warme tells us in one of his books that he has the same problem with those labelled schizophrenic as he does with the Jews of the Holocaust and that is; “the taking of a victim stance brought it all down on their own heads.”

This is all part of the ever popular, “we can't blame others” bit.

My question is: are YOU not, right there in that statement, “blaming others”? If so, and you really believe that “blaming others” is a “symptom” of mental illness, should you, and all those like you, be picked up and taken for a psych evaluation?

Or is it different when it is you doing the blaming?