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It's my birthday!!!!!
I turn the big 2-2 today!! :D Thank you Lord for allowing me to see another year of life. May I be just as blessed to see...
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Challenging myself
I have decided to give myself a challenge. Since finishing my NAMI family-to-family education program and finding out such great...
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‘Superhero’ - A visual poem by Laura Burke
It is true that I no longer feel bereft
but without your reflection
of the person I could not... -
“My friend Ace, sent to prison for an entire decade for a victimless crime, told me that the U.S. economy would collapse if drugs were legalized. I...”
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The second in a two part series entitled why they never should have let me pass pre-clinical years. This is also why I’m a medical student and not...
Dr. Xavier Amador is a clinical psychologist who has written a book titled I Am Not Sick I Don’t Need Help! How to Help Someone with Mental Illness Accept Treatment. He has worked with adults, families, and couples for over 25 years and he himself actually has a brother that he says struggled…
What is PTSD?
NAMI’s page on PTSD
Another page that explains PTSD
What is Rape Culture?
Yes Means Yes’s post on Rape Culture
Rape Culture 101
What is Consent?
Consent Is Sexy
Navigating Consent
Hotlines
1-800-273-TALK
LJ Communities
Women Survivors
…
Sports psychiatry, now there’s something I could do. Or at least would enjoy doing.
Germany really is ahead of the game (haha, puns).
In the UK, Time to Change are offering free mental health training to coaches. It is funded by Mind and the RFL, originally targeted at Rugby League coaches and is now open to anyone.
This article analyzes an example of how tricky a case gets when rape involves mental illness. I’m coming at it from that angle too (cause that’s how *I* relate to it). But its also applicable to rape without mental illness.
Quotes of interest:
- “county attorneys can be reluctant to prosecute rape cases in which the victim has mental illness, due to concerns that the jury won’t see the victim as credible”
- “some rapists actually target people with mental illnesses or other disabilities, because they know victims with these conditions will have a harder time taking them to court”
- “women with disabilities are “at least 150%” as likely as women without to be sexually abused, and 1.5-10 times as likely to suffer any form of abuse.”
- “If a rape victim has “consensual”, or coerced but non-violent sex following the rape it makes it harder to prosecute.”
- “even if they report the crime and fight at every turn to be heard, all their painful efforts may come to nothing.”
- “[T]he other way to help victims get justice in rape cases is to scrutinize the past and present behavior of the perpetrator as closely as they do the victim. How did the perpetrator act before, during and after the attack? How has the perpetrator acted toward sexual partners in the past? How is the perpetrator’s lack of remorse, obsessive apologizing, stalking, blaming, shaming behaviors common for someone who has committed a rape?”
I know these issues. And address them -
- This is a slightly different excuse but sometimes mental illness & rape are tied up in the psych system, which kind of has a different legal system, the legal advocates are specialized in behavioral health issues. Also, the victim might be treated in therapy rather than getting closure via justice in court.
- Or the rapist might be mentally ill as well as the victim…
- I put myself in risky or dangerous situations when I’m crazy. That shouldn’t be misinterpreted as “asking for it” - you know, the slut shaming. I’m just saying it might contribute to this depressing statistic.
- I think this is the most important quote of the bunch. I cannot explain the reason behind why one might stay in an abusive situation. Or after being raped why would one might consent to further sexual activities? I can’t tell you the answer but the result is often terrible terrible guilt. Why didn’t you fight harder? Why did you consent later to sex with your rapist? Why didn’t you run away? You turn the blame from your rapist on to yourself.
- There are so many reasons why a victim may chose not to challenge the rapist in court. In this example you might not want to rehash super painful memories (this is also why a victim might not seek psychiatric help, either). You’d have to explain complex motives to a crowd that often cannot relate, in a court where reason trumps emotion. When you’re involved in such a traumatic you might not act logically and that’s not very convincing legally.
- Absolutely right. But the key phrase is “scrutinize the past and present behavior of the perpetrator as closely as they do the victim.” This can help and harm the victim (see #3)
Chime in! Discuss!
(This article is old. I had emailed it to myself and only just refound it while cleaning out my inbox.)
Once again law and its processes boggles me. It sort of makes me feel naive to say I really don’t understand why any rape wouldn’t be prosecuted. I quite like this:
If social workers and trauma psychologists were allowed to act as witnesses or experts on rape trials they could explain the complexities of PTSD and what are normal and common ways that victims respond to rape. They would explain how trauma effects memory, effects your freeze or flight response and seeps into the body.
And wonder why it doesn’t already happen. Surely these are the people best placed to explain to a jury how/why/what.
I’m angry at that account of hospitals. Very angry. Yes, they’re not…
Oh the annoyances of Tumblr. I really wanted the comments underneath to be seen, good discussion about mental illness and the media. Click back to mindovermatterzine’s post to see it in all it’s glory.
Not enough is said about the mania of bipolar disorder and more should be. It did, after all, put the manic into manic depression. There are many misconceptions about bipolar disorder and too few people talk in a personal way about mania. Someone has told me recently that they didn’t know that manic was about the upper range of moods, they thought it was about being wildly depressed. It’s hard not to see the link between misconception and misinformation so perhaps it’s time we started being brutally honest about mania in the same way we have become brutally honest about depression.
I was recently at a fundraising dinner for Mind, the leading mental health charity in the UK. One of the big themes for the evening (other than Stephen Fry’s investiture as president), was the idea of art as therapy. My only qualifications to write about therapy and mental illness are a rather lame 2:1 in psychology from UCL and around 9 months of in-patient care in various locked wards in 2006/7 (I add this disclaimer only because after a recent blog post on a similar subject I got enough hate mail to make the Dalai Lama feel depressed). But as an ex-inmate and artist of sorts, there is no question in my mind that in conjunction with other therapies, art or music can be a tremendous tool in dealing with various forms of mental illness from depression to Asperger’s, but I wonder whether throwing oneself into creativity in order to help defeat the demons is a solution or a hindrance.
Should psychiatrists be doing more to safeguard the physical health of those on anti-psychotics?
How eating with the hand you don’t usually eat with can help you eat less?
Interview with US Marine, discussing her role in Mortuary Affairs collecting remains and post traumatic stress disorder.
Chris writes honestly and humorously about his experiences of bipolar disorder and sex.
Sufferer’s opinion on the use of the term ‘borderline’ in describing Knoxx and the stigma attached.
“She is borderline. She likes alcohol, drugs and she likes hot, wild sex.”
The words of Mr Carlo Pacelli there, prosecution lawyer, describing Amanda Knox, defendant in the ongoing Meredith Kercher murder case. Pacelli also goes on to describe Knox as a ‘diabolical satanic she-devil’, amongst other unpleasant things. But the opening salvo, she is ‘borderline’, that is what sticks and what follows that statement is how he describes a ‘borderline’.
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I’ve never really heard the word ‘borderline’ being used so liberally, and certainly not in the context of describing who and what a person is. In my experience people do not really know and have mostly never heard of Borderline Personality Disorder. I am a person with Borderline Personality Disorder but I am not a ‘borderline’ person. It’s not who I am. It’s not how I define myself as a human. And what do they mean anyway? Borderline…on the edge? Neither this nor that? Almost okay but prone to not be? I don’t get it.
I’m worried that people will start picking up on ‘borderlines’ and forming an opinion based on the nastiest descriptions of how ‘we’ behave. The extreme actions and reactions, the risk taking, obsessive and ‘loony’ behaviour. But what does that even mean?
