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From the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy
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To Be a Mental Patient
To be a mental patient is to be stigmatized, ostracized,
socialized, patronized, psychiatrized.
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To be a mental patient is to have everyone controlling
your life but you. You're watched by your shrink, your
social worker, your friends, your family. And then you're
diagnosed as paranoid.
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To be a mental patient is to live with the constant
threat and possibility of being locked up at any time,
for almost any reason.
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To be a mental patient is to live on $82 a month in
food stamps, which won't let you buy Kleenex to dry
your tears. And to watch your shrink come back to his
office from lunch, driving a Mercedes Benz.
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To be a mental patient is to take drugs that dull your
mind, deaden your senses, make you jitter and drool
and then you take more drugs to lessen the "side
effects."
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To be a mental patient is to apply for jobs and lie
about the last few months or years, because you've
been in the hospital, and then you don't get the job
anyway because you're a mental patient. To be a
mental patient is not to matter.
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To be a mental patient is never to be taken seriously.
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To be a mental patient is to be a resident of a ghetto,
surrounded by other mental patients who are as
scared and hungry and bored and broke as you are.
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To be a mental patient is to watch TV and see how
violent and dangerous and dumb and incompetent
and crazy you are.
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To be a mental patient is to be a statistic.
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To be a mental patient is to wear a label, and that
label never goes away, a label that says little about
what you are and even less about who you are.
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To be a mental patient is to never to say what you
mean, but to sound like you mean what you say.
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To be a mental patient is to tell your psychiatrist he's
helping you , even if he is not.
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To be a mental patient is to act glad when you're sad
and calm when you're mad, and to always be "appropriate."
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To be a mental patient is to participate in stupid
groups that call themselves therapy. Music isn't music,
its therapy; volleyball isn't sport, it's therapy; sewing is
therapy; washing dishes is therapy. Even the air you
breathe is therapy and that's called "the milieu."
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To be a mental patient is not to die, even if you want to -
- and not cry, and not hurt, and not be scared, and not
be angry, and not be vulnerable, and not to laugh to
loud -- because, if you do, you only prove that you are a
mental patient even if you are not.
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And so you become a no-thing, in a no-world, and you
are not.
Rae Unzicker © 1984
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