AccidentalAcademic
Well-known member
I remember that. The person in question has bipolar disorder and had debilitating episodes of mania and psychosis that nearly killed him. He wasn't able to eat, drink, or sleep while manic, and he also jumped off the roof of his house in the grip of a delusional belief that he was immortal. He was lucky not to end up permanently paralysed. He also had the grace to apologise unreservedly and remove his tweet. Jess could learn something from that.
She could have learnt a few other things too if she cared about trauma or was curious about the ways schizophrenia and other severe mental illness can impact on people's lives. If she had even a glimmer of curiosity and empathy, she might have asked herself why someone with SMI found it so painful to have her making grand pronouncements about his experiences that aren't based on fact, all for the sake of clicks and likes and backpats from social media stans who are equally detached from the terrifying reality of hurling yourself from a roof, or almost dehydrating to death. It didn't occur to her that maybe people with SMI have enough to deal with already, without having to contend with the tidal wave of myth and misinformation that she's so happily contributing to. Instead, without any sense of the hypocrisy involved, she presented a disabled person who has legitimate reasons to feel angry and frustrated as a predator who made an actual concrete threat to her.
What made her response feel especially disturbing to me was the high rate of sexual abuse suffered by people with SMI. According to data from Rape Crisis, 1 in 18 men will experience sexual abuse as adults. For men with schizophrenia and other SMI, that figure skyrockets. It's 1 in 7 (and that's just in adulthood - the number is much higher when childhood prevalence is factored in too). There are many possible reasons why this might be, but one bleak possibility is that perpetrators single them out because their illness affects their ability to communicate clearly (so they can't easily report it) and the diagnosis also makes them less credible in other people's eyes. In other words, perpetrators expect that these men won't be believed. Jess's twisting of the situation feels especially callous and self-serving in light of this information, as on the basis of statistical probability this man whom she's been painting as a violent threat is much more likely than the average Joe to have been a victim of such violence himself. How retraumatising might her reaction have been for him if this was the case? In clinical training we are advised to always to be mindful of the statistical picture when meeting patients with SMI, and without jumping to any conclusions about what an individual patient might have experienced, to make sure we're sensitive to the possibility - arranging the furniture in the therapy room so no one is sitting boxed into a corner, for example. It should be a no-brainer to also keep it in mind when interacting with someone on Twitter who tells you they have bipolar disorder and that they are exhausted and upset, but then Jessica wouldn't know what trauma-informed meant if the definition jumped out of a textbook and bit her on the arse.
