A PSA Regarding Mental Illness

Context is important!

I'm going to say something and I want you to repeat it after I say (well, type) it:

A person is NOT his/her illness.

I am, of course, speaking of mental illness. I am not Anxiety. I am not Depression. I am Jade and I am a human being like you. I deserve no less than to be treated with love and respect by my boyfriend, friends, and family. It is inexcusable for anyone to treat me as somehow less worthy of an equal, loving partnership with another human being because of something I have no control over.

My boyfriend is not my caretaker; he is my equal. My illness does not make me incapable of living an independent life, does not make me dependent on others in order to live. I am in a relationship because I choose to be. It does not make me unfit to be a mother, girlfriend, friend, daughter, niece, etc. No one in my life "puts up" with me. They want me in their life because they care for me, the person.

To reduce me to my illness, to say that my boyfriend is dating my illness and not me, is to dehumanize me. Dehumanization is what makes it easier for abusers to excuse their abuse. If you aren't a person, it doesn't matter how poorly someone else treats you. You should just be happy someone wants you around at all. I should know. I have been told this by others and told it to myself for years. As a result, I stayed in harmful and toxic relationships for years, romantic and otherwise. That's why it's important for me that it doesn't happen to someone else, it's why it's so important to remove the stigma of mental illness and why it's important to battle ableism whenever it rears its ugly head.

P.S.: Do not comment if you want to talk about how ~hard~ it is to be in a relationship with someone who has a mental illness. I was raised by a mentally ill parent so I know exactly what it's like when someone you love has a mental illness, probably way better than you. This post isn't about that, it's about treating someone with a mental illness diagnosis as a person and not reducing them to their illness. Besides, however difficult you think your life is for being with someone who just happens to have an illness or disorder, it's that much harder for that person to live in a world where they're constantly dehumanized, stigmatized, and treated as less than everyone else.

P.P.S: It's only Monday and already I'm sick of mental health wank.

In cheerier news...

Scott Adams is at it again. Fortunately, this time he's not sharing his illuminating theories on how women are children, but he is using a sockpuppet to declare himself a genius.

It started with a thread on link-sharing community MetaFilter about Adams' Wall Street Journal op-ed on how awesome and successful he is even though he didn't get straight-As in school. Some people said mean things about the article, suggesting Scott Adams wrote like someone who has "actually convinced himself… that he's the smartest guy in the room."

That's when "PlannedChaos" weighed in, furiously defending Adams:

As far as Adams' ego goes, maybe you don't understand what a writer does for a living. No one writes unless he believes that what he writes will be interesting to someone. Everyone on this page is talking about him, researching him, and obsessing about him. His job is to be interesting, not loved. As someone mentioned, he has a certified genius I.Q., and that's hard to hide.

Suddenly I'm hearing "Wile E. Coyote, Super genius" in my head.

And I just want to add this in for kicks:

This wasn't Adams' first time pretending to be his own fan. For months, he's been commenting on threads about himself posted to link-sharing site Reddit under the same handle. Sample comment:

If an idiot and a genius disagree, the idiot generally thinks the genius is wrong. He also has lots of idiot reasons to back his idiot belief. That's how the idiot mind is wired.

It's fair to say you disagree with Adams. But you can't rule out the hypothesis that you're too dumb to understand what he's saying.

And he's a certified genius. Just sayin'.

If you'll recall the "You just don't understand my genius!" is the same argument he used when commenting on a feminist blog which dared to take him to task for being a misogynistic douchebag. At least there he used his own name and not a sockpuppet.

Yes, sir, Wile E. Coyote. Suuuuper genius.

"That's Bouquet. B-U-C-K-E-T. Yes, it's French."

Dear Netflix,

I would very much love to watch more of Keeping Up Appearances since I loved watching the show on PBS back in the day. However, it seems that only the first two episodes are able to be viewed, all the others do not display properly and are unwatchable. I reported this to you a month ago and am about to see if there's another way to report issues because I'm really eager to see it fixed.

Thanks in advance,

Jade

P.S.: Could you maybe see about putting Are You Being Served? on instant play instead of DVD only? I'd love you to itty bitty bits if you did.