RIP Chester Bennington

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Cecily [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Oh he was mentally ill takes away from whatever shred of dignity remains to the person.

Does telling a cancer patient they have cancer take away their dignity? Mental illness has a stigma because it's "mental", but the reality is it's just another physical organ failure that people have no control over, and blaming them for an illness they can't control seems a lot more undignified to me.

Originally Posted by Cecily [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If you aren't suicidal and can't relate, pigeonholing someone as mentally ill makes sense, but that's crazy. Bunch of people with no idea what they aren't talking about.

I've been checked in to a hospital mental ward ... twice. It wasn't my fault, it wasn't because I made bad decisions, it was because some chemicals in my brain decided to go haywire out of the blue one day. Once I got some medicine from a doctor to balance out the chemicals I got my life back ... exactly the same as sufferers of other (non-mental) diseases.

So yeah, I know a little bit about having your body turn on you in a way that makes you act crazy (or, in particular, suicidal). And I know that pretending someone has agency when they don't is as cruel as blaming someone who dies of thirst because they were too weak from malaria to go get water. People suffering from any disease, physical or mental, deserve compassion ... it just might take a bit more empathy to have that same compassion for crazy people.