Call me crazy

As a former mental patient, I find being asked to ‘embrace my diagnosis’ far more offensive than words like ‘bonkers’

Mentally ill people can be troublesome but at least the rest of the population does not have to think about them much. The system is effective in that respect. No one need know, for example, that 10 per cent of adults in Scotland are on antidepressants. The disturbed do not spread their disturbance.

Whenever the subject of mental health surfaces in the media, progress is reported, unless there’s been a murder. While ‘bipolar’ has become a fashionable term to describe one’s own interesting self, and celebrities lay claim to mental difficulties without fearing loss of face or income, the main thrust of the psychiatric profession’s publicity wing is the fight against ‘stigma’. The message is that the psychiatrists understand the predicaments — bipolar affective disorder, schizophrenia and so on — and are treating them correctly. The only snag is that some people, including some sufferers, still think that they should be ashamed of being thus ‘ill’.

Yet the people who are best placed to comment on the system are precisely the people who least want to think about it ever again. Former mental patients, released back into society, in general want to forget their unhappy experiences, make a new start, avoid the subject. They — we (Peter Smith is a pseudonym) — might have railed at our treatment while confined against our will in a hospital, but when released, pale and mumbling and shaky, we have nothing more to say. I am only able to make any sort of comment here because, seven years after my last sectioning (marvellously expressive term), and four years since my last pill, I finally feel free of the psychiatric profession in whose clutches I had been wriggling since 1989.