How to Help the Seriously Mentally Ill
We Need Empathy and Liberty, not Medicine and Confinement, or How to Truly Help Someone in Distress By DAVID T. OKORO In a few years, I'm going to be writing a book exposing the corruption and perverse incentives within the organized mental health system, including how psychiatric hospitals compound trauma and many mental health professionals reinforce socially discriminatory power dynamics. Please, if I tell you I'm thinking about, or I'm acting out through, suicide (attempts) or violence, or struggling with existential/general anxiety, and your only or primary solution is go to the hospital, back off and keep your mouth shut. You are not helping me recover, and though I may not tell or show you what I am thinking or feeling, it will instantly make me distrust you and push my feelings further inside. So what, then, can you do to help me, and other individuals with serious mental illness, or in severe emotional distress? 1. Treat us first and foremost as equal human beings...