parenting tip: talk to your kids about mental illness. tell them they might have a hard time. tell them they can ask for therapy and medication. tell them they aren’t alone. tell them if your family has a history of mental illnesses and which ones. just fucking talk to your kids and be there for them.
This would push through so many barriers
Tell your kids about disability, too. My dad KNOWS about mental illness. He went online and “educated” himself with shit from like Nami.org, before I was officially diagnosed. He has not ever accepted that I’m disabled and his denial has endangered my life.
Also teach your kids about choice.
Teach your kids that the psychiatric system and programs coming from it can be dangerous, especially if you’re severely mentally ill and not getting better from the treatments.
(i.e. you’re not what I used to call the “three-day depressives”, who never saw how bad the institution was because they’d come in for three days, get put on medication, feel fine, leave, and never come back, and would talk about how wonderful the place was while I was tied down in the next room being tortured for staff amusement)
I was severely psychiatrically disabled (although I still maintain there was no diagnosis that fit what was going on, so I just got a lot of random diagnoses ranging from psychosis to adjustment disorder… but I was definitely not one of the more valued types of mentally ill people) and I got treated like crap by a system that couldn’t fix me. They blamed me. It was awful.
And they need to know that the system is not their last hope.
I know someone who almost decided to do a school shooting, in the seventies. Why? She’d been horribly depressed, suicidal even. They put her in a psych ward where she was tortured to the point she still has the physical scars on her body. (Which is not about bad apples, it’s about an environment that creates abusive people even if they weren’t to begin with.) And to her, the psych ward had been presented as her last resort, the last hope that she had of leading a happier life. When that didn’t work, she was willing to commit suicide and take out as many people that she blamed for her problems (bullies, teachers, etc.) as she could. Luckily she was stopped by her conscience in time, but not until after she’d acquired a gun and made plans.
And that is just one of the most extreme examples of what I’ve heard happening when the psych system is presented as your only hope. In my case, I had no homocidal tendencies, but I did try to kill myself many times because the psych system didn’t remove my urge to kill myself no matter how much therapy I got, how many meds I got, it just got worse.
Kids need to be taught there are other choices. They don’t have to take meds. They don’t have to see a shrink. They don’t have to go inpatient. There are risks to doing all of those things, and kids need to be taught that, too. They don’t need to be taught the shiny utopian view of the psych system with magical powers to make us all better.
And I hate NAMI with a passion, and have ever since I first heard of it. It was my first experience with an organization about a group of people, run only by family members and professionals of that group of people, and treating actual psychiatrically disabled people like shit when they weren’t tokenizing them in some way. I know some psychiatrically disabled people who work within NAMI trying to change it, and I wish them luck, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope. I really hate NAMI. NAMI is not a good source of information about anything at all.
And they think calling them “brain disorders” or “neurobiological disorders” or “NBDs” for short, will actually fix anything. Ha! I remember NAMI touting a book called ”Don’t Call Me Crazy”. One of my favorite books is “Call Me Crazy” by Irit Shimrat, who is (by the labels of the psych system) schizophrenic and has been very active in the mad pride and ex-patient movement. And she’s one of the people who uses crazy, mad, lunatic, and insane as descriptions of her experience because she feels they capture them better than a clinical label. Her book was amazing to me when I read it.
Teach your kid self-advocacy; it's not activism, it's standing up for yourself and your choices. That's why on my website I insist on not calling myself a self-advocate. Self-advocacy is personal, it's what I do for myself, and honestly, sometimes I gotta drag in a case worker or a friend. Sometimes my friends are advocates for each other. But we all know when I say "no" and "yes", that's what goes. If a shrink starts to argue with me about my diagnosis, which is annoying as hell cause I got inch-thick paperwork and I really don't think I have to be bringing it each time I get a new shrink to prove my dx; but if they argue with me, they don't get a second visit, never mind if I don't just walk out on them. Well, that's assuming I'll see a shrink. I haven't seen one in about four years.