Psychiatrically Challenged

I am diagnosed as one with a Bi-Polar mental health condition. To some, I’m crazy, nuts, insane, sick, and a burden or threat to society, perhaps even a menace, and they didn’t hesitate to tell me or talk about me in such terms, or I read jokes using those derogatory word. It is not uncommon for a person with a mental health condition to be sent to a state asylum or to jail where they may never be released. People who think that is ok are lacking reasonable expectations of a basic mental health education and awareness. They are being unkind, if not rude and insulting, either directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly. Their behavior may mask their fears because mental health is a serious problem in American and the World Health Organization representing the world around us.

This afternoon, I was chatting with some friends who have much higher reasoning ability of the mental health in America problem and proper standards of conduct than many I have known, and one said I was a psychiatric survivor. I can live with that, it is not verbally abusive. I now realize that before I was a psychiatric survivor, I was ‘psychiatrically challenged’ (PC).  

To not add injury to insult, and in the interest of mental health education and awareness sensitivities, the labels that are verbally abusive to the psychiatrically challenged DO need to be changed. It requires a change in thinking also about the problems of mental health (the lack of it). When someone refers to a person whose mental health is not up to par, or their behavior is unacceptable socially, it is better to refer to the person as psychiatrically challenged. We use terms such as physically or mentally challenged for persons trying to overcome special difficulties in their life as best they can in order to live more fully and normally as possible, hence the additional term ‘psychiatrically challenged’ seems to be an improvement in language. Continuing to think or be verbally abusive to anyone with special challenges is a form of bullying and is not an acceptable social conduct.

 Everyone experiences some level of psychiatric challenge in their life, and for some, it is so overwhelming they succumb and are lost forever. To the level the psychiatric challenge is severe, it is important to alleviate, prevent, and correct a life threatening danger to that person or to others. If positive help is needed, no psychiatrically challenged individual should have to be subjected to ugly stereotypes of worse case imaginable propaganda stories or suffer verbal indignities disrespecting their rights as a person at any point in summoning professional help or any time afterwards. Americans and their mental health quality will improve if and when our language and our thoughts about psychiatrically challenged persons improve and are focused on positive mental health and not its negative. It shouldn't be called mental illness because that term reinforces a negative focus but if their is absence of good mental health then I would suggest referring to his "mental health condition" which focuses on a positive goal of health direction during the condition even if life long. Mental health is a concept that is linear with points on the line of negative infinity, zero, positive infinity and persons are on at some point on that sliding scale of mental health. It can not be stressed too much that verbally reinforcing health for mental health conditions is the ideal and not its negative (using the word 'ill'.... unless additional abusive punishment and suffering is the objective).