Freedom: “Silence Has Killed” (Chapter. 1)

Written by Andi Bazaar, Scott Wynné Schofield, Gryffen Seth, Yevhn Gertz | Dec 1, 2023

"Cognitive dissonance is wanting social change in other countries and recognizing privilege in their society while ignoring what is going on in your/our society because it will make us look uncomfortable, social justice and dismantling privilege is needed pretty much everywhere."

Hugo-licharré Freimann Schofield / Photographed by Timothée-freimann Schofield / MHMTID© 2023

As someone who has both mental and physical illnesses, I need mental health advocates to stop saying "we need to take mental health as serious as physical health."

What world are they living in where chronic physical health issues are taken seriously? Because it's not this one.

The idea that our physical health is taken seriously is honestly laughable and it shows you've never put one iota of thought or research into learning about our experiences, start listening to chronically illness people particularly those of us who are also mentally illness.

This is an anecdote and not necessarily true for all chronically illness and mentally illness people, but people and providers actually take my chronic physical illnesses and issues significantly less seriously than they take my mental illnesses.

YOU KNOW WHAT I'M NEVER GOING TO SAY?

I’m never going to tell people "we should take physical health as seriously as we do mental health" because THAT’S BULLSHIT! and I’m not trying to drag down other marginalized people in order in order to pull myself to the top.

I went through a several year period where I successfully hid all my mental health diagnoses and they honestly just dismissed everything as being based on mental illness, thinking I had zero history of mental illness just as much as they did when they knew I had mental illnesses.

"People are missing that mental illness is not analogous to acute, temporary physical health problems."

• You don't just catch a case of PTSD for a couple weeks before it clears right up after a round of antibiotics, my main point is that you need to stop acting like this is some sort of us (vs) them.
• You don’t need to spread false narratives about physical health and chronic illness in order to say that mental health needs to be taken seriously.
• You can talk about your issue and why it matters without disparaging other groups of people you're clearly not a part of.

Any time you want to say "if they did X to Y people, there would outrage" you're almost invariably wrong, because X does happen to us and there's no outrage.

In light of some of the misinformation that has been circulating from big accounts, I wanted to take time to talk about the origins of mental health and touch on substance abuse a little bit as well. It is crucial to remember that anyone can be impacted psychologically!

There are biological, psychological, social and environmental factors that impact each other to form our mental health. When the conditions are right, it creates vulnerabilities that can lead to mental illness. For example, someone may have lost a loved one and work is hard, it can create the ideal ground for depression to set in.

Home is also where a lot of mental health issues start with pressure from parents, conditional love, weight shaming and a host of other issues that clearly lead to helplessness and hopelessness and therefore depression!

To say that drugs create mental illness is simply untrue. Usually, it is the other way around. Drugs are used as a way to self medicate from our mental illnesses, which is why they tend to be abused. They are an escape when other things don’t work as well.

Of course, certain drugs tend to bring a temporary relief but also worsen our mental health in the long term but they do not create it out of thin air even with people whose psychosis is drug induced, it is because they were susceptible to it already.

The drug may trigger the first episode but will not actually create it. If it is not drugs, a big stressor or traumatic event can also trigger that first episode. I hope that this small thread made it a little clearer.

I thought I would also write something educational in the hopes that some people would read it and learn about clinical psychology in a more factual way, I am still a bit angry about these harmful negative feedback getting tens of thousands of likes.

The worst is that those who like them and absorb that information will spread it around and diminish mental health experiences of people around them, making us a less empathetic society which hurts us all.

DID YOU KNOW?

By 2020, mental illness is expected to be the second biggest health problem that occur among Malaysians after heart diseases. What is the reaction of society toward people diagnosed with mental illness? Reaction of society toward mentally illness person.

WHAT IS MENTAL ILLNESS?

Mental Illness or Mental Health Disorders are major disturbance in a person thinking, feeling or behavior that reflect a problem in mental function. This mean that mental illness can make a person become miserable and cause problems in daily life, such as at work, school or during family gathering.

According to science, brain chemistry plays an important role in mental illness. Neurotransmitters is a brain chemical, that carry signal to other parts of human brain and body and changes in this chemical can cause mental disorder.

“People suffer from mental illness not only struggle to cope with the symptoms of the disease but also the misunderstandings of society about various mental disorders.”

Some persons who manage their mental illness well still have difficulties finding a job because employers discriminate them. Thus, mental illness not only results in difficulties coping up with the symptoms but also in disadvantages through society reaction that result in stigma.

STIGMA, A NEGATIVE BELIEF OF SOCIETY TOWARD CERTAIN THING.

Can be divided into public stigma and self-stigma. Public stigma refers to negative attitudes and beliefs that motivate individual to reject, avoid and discriminate people with mental illness.

Public stigma normally caused by less knowledge related to mental health care. Meanwhile, self-stigma refers to the reactions of an individuals who belong to stigmatized group and turn stigmatizing attitudes against themselves because of their self-prejudices, persons with mental illness may fail to pursue their goal or be independent. Let’s take a looks on what are the consequences of stigma:

1. LIFE DISCRIMINATION

People diagnosed with this problem are likely to encountered discrimination due to stereotypes and negative image of mental illness in media, some of them also accuse that mentally ill people are violent and frightening.

2. STRUCTURAL DISCRIMINATION

Example of structural discrimination is allocation of fewer financial resources into mental health system compared to other medical system. For example, people with schizophrenia may be treated in a discriminatory way because of this stereotype.

Despite all this negativity, there is always a way to reduce stigma towards mental illness. Some of the way include:

1. Protest, which is often applied against stigmatizing public statements, media reports and advertisements.

For example, in German there is protest intervention called "BASTA – the alliance for mentally illness people" that uses email to alert members about stigmatizing advertisement. About 80% of discriminating cases that BASTA took actions against were successful.

2. Education also can be used to lessen stigma by providing different information, brief educational courses on mental illness has proved to reduce stigmatizing attitudes among variety of participants.

3. Contact with people with mental illness may help to increase the effects of education on reducing stigma. Research shows that individual that met mental ill person are less likely to be stigmatize. Hence, contact may be an important strategy to decrease stereotypes and stigma.

"Cognitive dissonance is wanting social change in other countries and recognizing privilege in their society while ignoring what is going on in your/our society because it will make us look uncomfortable. Social justice and dismantling privilege is needed pretty much everywhere."

So many of us question ourselves when we have depression and anxiety, we think we may be exaggerating or faking it even when it deeply affects our quality of life. We internalize that gaslighting from parents and society to the point that we fight ourselves for that validity.

We praise people for their resilience and how they pulled themselves out of their trauma/depression/anxiety but we need to stop and ask ourselves whether this was necessary. By having better parents, support system or a safer society this resilience wouldn’t even be needed.

When you see people who have gone through a lot and persevered, it also means that they have gone through really hard times and while sometimes it is inevitable, most of the time it can easily be prevented. So many systems that seek to continue this status quo have to be replaced

"most of society’s problems would be solved with just more empathy and less immediate judgment without all the info. i am sure of that."

One of the most frustrating by-product of the society we live in is that we are taught to tie our self-esteem with external factors, whether it is education or what contributions we make to a group or our families.

I often hear from parents in sessions: “why should they feel good about themselves? They don’t do chores and their marks are low."

• We tend to forget that self-esteem has nothing to do with what we can do for others, our intelligence or work ability, it is an internal process that is unconditional. Then, we have adults who hate themselves and burnout because their job performance dipped or their marks got lower. A normal process (we all burnout from time to time) turns into a mental health crisis that shatters our self-esteem.
• We often underestimate how hard depression can be, not being able to even get out of bed/shower. Yet, we have no society structure in terms of paid days off/free services we can access for treatment. We shouldn’t expect people with mental health issues to bear that burden alone.

For every experience of abuse of any kind that comes to light, more than a dozen are silent despite having evidence. From being scared of being the target of family or society, to safety concerns there are just so many who can’t come forward.

These things are way more prevalent than we can ever believe or imagine, whenever I start to think that society (and men) are learning I am shocked by what happens behind the scenes.

I truly have hope for our culture and society, there are many people working tirelessly to break stigma on mental health and no longer continue the cycles of trauma and control. It is an uphill battle but I am fully confident that we will get there.

to be continued...

A SPECIAL THANKS TO:

• Andi Bazaar (Writer)
• Mark J. Levstein (Co-Editor)
• Yevhn Gertz (Director Photography/Co-writer)
• dr Oliver Schofield, MD (Consulting)
• dr Seth Gryffen, MD (Consulting/Co-writer)
• dr Khaan, MD (Consulting)
• Timothée Freimann schofield (Photographed)
• Clayton Euridicé Schofield (Editor/Journalist)
• Scott Wynné Schofield (Publicist/Co-writer)
• Henrie Louis Friedrich (Analyst)
• Jwan Höffler Conwall (Art Interior Design)
• Hugo-licharré Freimann (Ass Director)
• Shot at GQ’s Studios by José Schenkkan and Benjamin Schenkkan Joseph
• In appearance by "Hugo-licharré Freimann" (Model)
• In collaboration with "The Me You Can’t See UK" (TMYCSUK) / @tmycsuk