It's actually a serious question - I really NEED to hear that it's not an automatic thing - and all of the people I ask that question to actually do a fine job of NOT actually answering it.

It usually goes something like this:

Me - Does being mentally ill make you a bad person? Is it a character flaw or moral failing?

Them (Pdoc, T, whoever) - It's a disease like anything else. Like diabetes. It can be treated and managed.

I guess I was raised to believe that being mentally ill was "shameful" or "disgraceful" and that people afflicted with it were somehow "lesser" than "good people of the world" or "weak" or "immoral" or whatever.

I think one of the reasons I have struggled SO MUCH with this is because I took in that message - which I think is all a part of the whole WASP philsophy that ran this society for 300 plus years, the whole Puritan thing - and believed it myself to a great extent. I mean, sure, it's the 21st century, and I believe I'm pretty enlightened about a LOT of things, and I know a LOT of the other crap that came out of that old WASP/Puritan mindset was total crap, but this belief about mental illness and the mentally ill "stuck".

I know that being African American or Asian or Hispanic or whatever is ... just that, nothing more. It has no reflection on intelligence, ability, or anything. It's about as significant as eye color.

I know that being gay is ... being gay. It's an innate state, not a lifestyle choice or a sign of mental illness or any of the other crap that was once dumped on gay people.

I know that there is nothing inherently superior about White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Males. Despite what the "good old boys" used to think and say back in the bad old days.

So, when I myself was confronted with suddenly being "some crazy guy" with not only a mental illness diagnosis, but a pretty significant one, bipolar, it really threw me into a total crisis of identity, of self-worth, of self-image.

It almost killed me - well, it got me to about a second away, literally, from suicide - because I couldn't live with being "some crazy guy". It was too much for me to bear. It made me so profoundly sad that I can't even now really verbalize the way it made me feel in my core - I guess the best words I can come up with are "damned" and "lost".

All of this toxic brew about the mentally ill that I just kind of absorbed as background in my life, and also reinforced because of my own hatred of my father and grandmother for THEIR crazy really came back to bite me in the ***.

Was there ever an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits where some racist, say a Klansman about to lynch a black guy in 1950s Mississippi, was suddenly tranformed into said black guy and hunted down by the rest of his Klan group? A parable of comeuppance and new understanding? If there wasn't, there should have been.

Because, it's a lot like, well, kinda like, anyway, that for me. I wasn't ACTIVELY biggotted or anything, I just carried with me a lot of the stigma that the "general public" feels towards the mentally ill.

Suddenly, I WAS the "crazy guy" -shoe on other foot, and I freaked out.

I NEED to hear confirmation of what I so desperately WANT to be true - that being "mentally ill" doesn't do what I feard it did: It doesn't change who you are in your core, it doesn't change your morality, it doesn't change your self-worth, it doesn't change your value as a person, it doesn't make you no longer be you.

I guess, actually, it almost does come full circle - "they" may not state it expliticitly, but the "it's an illness" answer does kind of answer, without answering, my question - it's an illness, like diabetes. Diabetes doesn't change or alter people's sense of self about who they are, nor what others think of them.

Why should it be any different with MI?