I Lost a Friend to Mental Illness, But It’s Not What You Think
by Kartar Diamond
The title of my article would suggest I had a mentally ill friend who died. What I actually lost was a friendship, due to her attitude and ignorance about mental illness. Please allow me to explain.
I emailed the former friend a documentary on Youtube by Dr. Steven Seager, called “Shattered Families.” This eye-opening documentary lays out the history of how mentally ill people have been treated in the United States over more than a century and why we have the broken mental health care system we do today. Historically, mentally ill people have been treated horrifically, including severe physical and psychological abuse, even inside the very places where they were supposed to be protected: mental hospitals or “insane asylums,” as they were once referred to. I’m sure that not all asylums or mental institutions were awful, but some actually were. And unfortunately, generations have been influenced by the 1962 Ken Kesey novel, which became the 1975 Academy-award-winning movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Because of the movie, many people have this image in their heads of an abusive “Nurse Ratched” presiding over every locked facility, where patients are forced into over-medication or electroshock therapy.
Over time, laws changed and one of the last pieces of legislation signed by President John F. Kennedy…