Allright. Here we are. Hanging around PC helping others and getting help ourselves. Good. That's a good thing. Can we go beyond that? Are there any projects a bunch of us could get involved in that would improve the situation of people like us in the wider society?

Uh-uh. I have no magic answers. That question is by no means a mask for some intense suggestions I have lurking in the wings. I know no more than you do. I'm just wondering. We've lived for so many centuries and millenia as outcasts and freaks, but as you know and as I know we're nothing of the kind. We're real, regular people with a variety of different illnesses, same as all other kinds of illnesses, but who are still looked on as weirdos of some kind, which, of course, we're not.

There are a lot of nice, kind, highly educated people who've been talking on our behalf over the past hundred years, trying to convince the majority that we're like people with TB, or herpes, or whatever, not some kind of demons or whatever. And maybe they have made some progress. Maybe. I don't know. I'm not really sure.

No one's freaked out by people with leprosy any more. EVERYONE knows (now) that leprosy is just another skin disease that's curable, not a life sentence or a death sentence. We're not quite there yet with regard to curability, but we're in a similar situation. We're quite harmless, despite the tiny, tiny number who get so frightened they do bad things.

But I AM sure that people on the outside STILL don't have a good idea of who we are, what we go through, the way life looks to us. I could well be wrong, but I do have the hope that if they REALLY knew what life looks like to us on the inside that THEY wouldn't be so scared and so rejecting. We're just people, people who are their sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers. Not frightening outsiders who threaten them.

When my Dad was a boy, age 9 (probably around 1922), he had a schizophrenic aunt pass through their apartment on her way to life in a mental hospital in Ohio. He said she screamed and howled all night and terrified him. And then the next day she was ferried by another relative on her long way to Ohio, where she spent her whole life in one of those old-fashioned mental asylums that were abolished thirty-forty years ago. And he remembered her forever after as an object of fear and terror, someone he never wanted to see or deal with again.

Is that right? I really don't think so. I think that if we made our voices heard, if we familiarized normal people with the not-terribly-dramatic normal, everyday interior lives of mentally ill people then those normal people wouldn't be so frightened, wouldn't be scared of "catching" mental illness, would understand that we're just people like them with some bad chemicals in our brains or whatever.

I'm no big deal at all. I have no more ideas than you have. But if we're going to make any progress in the world, I suggest to you that at the very least we have to hang together, pool our ideas, and work together to the best of our abilities. So I'm just asking for your ideas. What can we do? What should we do? I'm kind of tending toward the idea that we ought to get together and publish a book with many of us describing just what we go through every day with our diagnoses and our pain and misery. Not being overly dramatic, mind you. Not at all. Being sober and realistic and not exaggerating. The truth is bad enough. We don't have to embroider it in any way. I think. What about you?

Take care!