I am starting an open discussion discussing among the mentally ill here the topic of reinstitutionalization.
If they could build a town for us to live in, where they stop being overly concerned about whether or not we are a danger to ourselves and others, a town in every nation where it is not dangerous for us to live in, would we accept it?
The reason I ask is simple.
When I was 22, I never even heard of mental illness. Today everyone talks about it thanks to the mass shootings in USA starting mostly in 2007. I was 26 then.
Now I am 39, as of 2020. I never thought this would happen, but I am stuck in an assisted living nursing home.
I came to find out that as we age with mental illness, depending on what you have, almost every time we get booted out of our careers (I was a programmer) with no hope back into the market. The loss of community and the things the community will put us through for having a mental illness (I agree, my voices, hearing God, angels, demons and satan are easy - itâs dealing with people that wonât accept me and hate me thatâs hard.) causes family issues too.
The hate that boils up just having mental illness and all the push-back, loss of career, loss of job opportunity, housing discrimination, nowhere to stay, at some point I got discriminated against by everyone, even family.
I wound up at an assisted living nursing home because there was no other place for me out in the free world, and this is not free. Iâm locked away in a building here, and itâs boring as hell.
I canât get an apartment because landlords will not rent to me now that they know I have schizophrenia up front.
I canât get a job for the same reason - nobody will hire me, let alone at 80k a year like I used to have in my career as a programmer.
I am out of money, and had to take disability - all of us wind up this same way.
Then, these case workers started in. Here in jefferson city, USA - everyone was winding up at this place called the Towers downtown around the federal buildings, not far from the old state prison, and also not far from the stateâs non metropolitan area projects. We would be expected to walk everywhere, long distance even for food.
Iâm not dumb. At transitional housing, where everyone was ending up due to the combination of homelessness and the hospital stay, they were shipping everyone off to the Towers. It is the only housing available for us unless you are over 55 years of age, then there are other assisted living facilities.
Those Towers wound up evicting almost anyone after a while. You donât ship off 25 people a year to a renovated old run down hotel unless you also evict 20 people a year, if that said Towers is supposed to last the rest of your life.
What this means is simple:
At some point in our schizophrenic lives, things get so discriminatory that we begin to cycle between homelessness (death - cured), prison (because of homelessness), and the nursing homes.
Why donât they just build us asylums then, so when we run out of opportunity to live out in the open, we just go there for the remainder?
The open question is simple. I know many of you right now are living free and have it good. But the ones you arenât hearing from are being driven in and out of prison as their asylum, and in time if you have schizophrenia, this stuff will happen to you, unless you just have a wonderful family and they let you live at home, which is the case for about 1% of us. But for the rest of us, I wish they would just create for us what I call, âcrazy townâ.
A crazy town where we still get to be free and all, we just canât leave.
Then they can pamper us with depriving us from all weapons and pointy objects all they want, plus they can force pills down our throats all they desire, so long as we stay in crazy town.
What do you think? They are never going to accept us in societyâŚ