At the outset, I wish to thank all my friends, relatives, and acquaintances who still accept me as a human being worthy of their love, affection, care, and attention and who, for all they know and possibly do not understand about my living with a mental health issue, still treat me with dignity.
Thank you for not labelling me a mad woman, having problems, being mental, psycho, and many of the cold-hearted things to which others relegate me disregarding the fact that God and the United Nations declared me as free and equal as everyone else.
I'm especially grateful for those very few who love me sufficiently to accept me in any mood–my disquiets and my warmth–and still plan and have extended stay with me. You remind me there're people who know mental illness is a condition affecting just one part of a person's reality. Thank you for not wrongly equating me with violence, unpredictability, and or needing to be restrained.
To my private humiliation, I live in T&T, an educated but especially uniformed society, nasty towards anything it doesn't accept or understand, bigoted, prejudiced, reckless, and not given to sufficient contemplation so nobility and compassion can evolve in our daily existence. Here, I am a reject by the standard of many people.
Each of us knows the feelings associated with people rejecting us. We all understand the gut-wrenching hurt of being mistreated, neglected, and badmouthed.
There therefore should be no reason for us to not exhibit compassion for the feelings of others and for treating others with dignity. The very fact that we're all vulnerable to emotional injury and that we share the human desire to be treated as invaluable and precious should be sufficient for us to take a step back before we inflict hurt on another.
Indeed, if we remained conscious of our feelings as recipient of undignified behaviour from others, my simple reasoning tells me we wouldn't be so ready to inflict or reciprocate hurt. It amazes me however, how easily we "lose sight of (our) inherent vulnerability."
It's inhumane what people are made to suffer for their beliefs, sexual orientation, race, colour and more that we should be able to accept or overlook in others if we remember that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" according to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
Of course, to begin with, such a declaration would only have become necessary because someone recognised that there existed inequality, indignity, and infringed rights, inflicted on some by others who perceive or hold greater power and privilege.
Recognising the deficit in dignity towards persons living with mental health issues (PMIs), this year's World Mental Health Day in October is designated Dignity in Mental Health.
Dignity here runs the gamut of issues relating to stigma and prejudice towards PMIs, all the way to what is called psychiatric criminality.
In over 35 years of thriving/living as a PMI, my experience includes an ex-boyfriend jokingly exclaiming about his "being saved from me", to relatives and friends dismissing me with "she's mental", and people conspiring with others in their circle to have nothing to do with me.
What I do for the progress of mental health/illness is so much bigger than what one relative labelled as "the family bacchanal" as I chronicle my life and the effects on me and the impact on others during my years of living with a mental health issue to teach something... anything to a still uncaring public.
Stigma, discrimination, prejudice and lack of education have all caused people to react so vehemently to a work that is meant to bring about healing intervention for those like me and change for families, community, T&T, and the world over where my work is read and appreciated.
And as I contemplated this short series to mark World Mental Health Day 2015, I found myself in such a situation of ignorance which saw an (educated) individual shedding his humanity to maliciously accuse me of wrongdoing.
The owner of a landscaping company in South, which promises quality service, defaulted on a debt owed to me which has serious implications for me. Unable to convince him that he had a responsibility to pay me I felt very threatened emotionally for a meltdown.
I told him of the stress he was causing me, and that for my enduring struggles with mental illness I'd like to ask someone to intervene because I did not want to jeopardise my health.
Without any communication from him, one week later I faced the indignity of his prejudice or ignorance when his business partner called saying he claimed "he was scared of me because I told him I was mental and he feared for his safety since he did not know what I could do."
He had been landscaping my yard for over five months before this incident which caused me, in defense of my health, to disclose to him my best told secret. �2 To be continued