AIBU to feel upset by my parents' views on mental illness

[SeaGlassSoul]

I feel quite upset today after overhearing my parents having a conversation about mental health. They were saying that people with mental illness should be “locked up,” and I found it really difficult to listen to. They said that they shouldn’t be in the community. Especially if they have psychosis or schizophrenia or similar.

It made me realise how much stigma still exists. Mental illness covers such a huge range of conditions, and the overwhelming majority of people living with them are not dangerous. They’re just ordinary people trying to navigate life while dealing with challenges that often aren’t visible to others.

Hearing those comments from my own parents was particularly hurtful. It left me feeling quite triggered and sad, and it made me wonder how many people hear views like this from those closest to them.

Has anyone else experienced family members making comments like this? How did you deal with it? Did you challenge them, or did you decide it was better to stay quiet? I’d really appreciate hearing how others have handled similar situations.

I think it was brought here and then you continued it. Nobody who isnt obsessed would think that picture looks anything like a man. Anyone who leaves their fucking house would know there are plenty of extremely distressed, very unwell people around at the moment and a lot of them are women.

Just last week at Walthamstow station there was a fairly big incident because a mentally ill woman physically attacked someone at the bus station. Guess what happened to her? Nothing! People calmed her down, the guy she attacked left, and then I saw her again on the market a few days later. In a few days, she may well have a knife instead of just hitting him with her shopping bags.

I think we're finally starting to realise that the telling people to "educate themselves" approach has it's limits. You can't expect the average person on the streets to know how to safely manage someone with a mental illness acting out in a more extreme way.

When i started my mental health nurse training in the early 90s
The long stay wards were being closed downi
I dont disagree that some peoole will never be able to live indpedently
But there were so many people who had been locked up for years that didnt need to have been
But at this point they were institutoonalised and couldnt care for themselves

. Guess what happened to her? Nothing! People calmed her down, the guy she attacked left, and then I saw her again on the market a few days later. In a few days, she may well have a knife instead of just hitting him with her shopping bags.

Her victim could have had her arrested for common assault but presumably he didn't want to.

What do you think should have happened to her?

Agree, and yes while people are always saying “those with mh are more vulnerable from others than they are dangerous”. That’s not what’s visible in the media, especially in recent times.
There was a thread recently where a poster asked for advice after being told by a member of staff that they had frequent thoughts of violence towards and of harming colleagues because of OCD. The posts of “you are terrible and hateful and need to educate yourself!!” Drowned out any actual relevant advice sadly.

This woman was homeless.

I have worked for homeless charities and you will find that many people who are homeless have undiagnosed or untreated mental health issues.

So you should also be blaming the poor state of our mental health support services due to lack of funding and the sad fact that in a rich country we still have a high homeless population.

The man in the alligator incident was with several carers who failed to prevent the incident. As long as we paid peanuts for carers then the profession will continue to rely on poorly trained and demotivated staff and such incidents will happen.

Basically it is very simplistic to just blame the mentally ill person themselves without looking at the wider context and how society constantly fails people with mental health issues.

In some instances people absolutely would need to be institutionalised but again the 'care in the community' thing was all about saving money rather than protecting the welfare of both the mentally ill person and the general public.

Well- having had a parent with schizophrenia I agree with them to be frank. People get very ill before they are hospitalised. The threshold is so high that there will be people walking about who really shouldn’t be. I remember one particular evening when my mum was waving a knife around because she was convinced the IRA were coming to attack us. Still didn’t get sectioned until the next day and the medical professionals in their infinite wisdom thought it was a good idea to leave her at home with me overnight as a 12 year old.

People in acute psychosis are not really safe to manage in the community. That is very different to managing people who can function.

It is a fairly common opinion that care in the community isn’t working.

many people have experience of family members/friends not being able to access the support they should have and desperately need and it can be quite scary being in a situation where you are pretty sure they’ll harm someone.

Don't attack me, there was no blame whatsoever in my post. It was simply a list of incidents.

There is absolutely a need for a modern day equivalent of what used to be called an asylum. Care in the community does not work and time and time again mentally ill people are committing horrific crimes.

What exactly the place would be like I have no idea. But we are in desperate need of somewhere to house people who are not safe to be out in society.

I don't think that you have to blame the people with mental illnesses themselves to think that this approach isn't working. I agree that it's those people who are more vulnerable to harm. The members of the public that they encounter won't all just be nice people that don't know what to do.

Care in the community is missing

mothers are picking up the burden of caring for younger people with no support and no advice

i dont think we - anyone - actually knows how to help some people

I can quite see why “locking up” is back on the agenda given the chronic failures of the current system. I can quite believe that residential care done well may be the best for lots of people but it’s very expensive especially to do with care and intent to help people

no one wants to pay. This is a horrible situation for so many

A lot of people are clueless about things like this and they like to look for broad stereotypes and automatically apply them to everybody. They clearly mean those who have severe MH issues which take over their minds and make them behave dangerously - and I do agree that these people should not be left to roam free in the community - but they're too dim to be able to differentiate.

Racists do the same thing, when they talk broadly about "these people coming over here", when referring to those who commit horrendous crimes; but when you ask them about all the non-UK-born doctors and nurses without whom the NHS couldn't function, and those who run businesses in the community, and virtually every single immigrant... and they'll look at you as though you are the stupid one, as "Of course I don't mean THOSE immigrants!"

So many people are completely uneducated when it comes to MH. How many people do you hear saying "I/he/she has mental health" as a shorthand for mental illness? Nobody would ever say "I have legs" to indicate that they have broken or otherwise injured legs.

You wrote 'they have a point'...

which means you support the OP's parent views that people with mental health issues should be 'locked up''.

I consider that to be a totally inappropriate blanket statement.

It is not 'attacking you' either to point out on a discussion forum that holding the blanket view that people with mental health issues should be 'locked up' is simplistic and offensive because it fails to take into account the fact that we have poor mental health support provision and that people would not reach crisis point if they were properly diagnosed, medicated, supported and if so many of them did not end up living in the streets.

It is not those who are ill who are to blame for their illness, but care for those suffering from poor mental health is now SO bad that mistakes are being made. You only have to read these boards for a few weeks to hear from women whose husbands are psychotic and behaving very erratically (and often life-damagingly) and who are being fobbed off.

We need more money poured into mental health services. Much much more.

I think she needs to be held under strict supervision in an institution. She's physically attacking people in the street just for being there!.

I listed 4 incidents of people where there would, in 3 cases, be multiple people alive today who are dead and many injured who wouldn't have been, some of them with life changing injuries, if those 4 people with mental health issues had been locked up. One of those should certainly have been sectioned but wasn't, as confirmed by an enquiry.

We aren't stupid, we all know it isn't all people with mental health problems and we all know that mental health issues are caused by all sorts of things.

There are layers of complexity and clearly a spectrum of severity. There are many thousands of people who function very well with medication. They absolutely should not be ‘locked up’. But when things go wrong there must be more support available for crisis management and inpatient capacity. There is a whole other question re how you manage homeless people with severe mental illness

You want her locked up for swinging a handbag at a man who does not want to press charges?

Yes, for physically attacking a stranger with shopping bags. They could have tins, glass, anything. But generally speaking, if you arw so mentally ill that you hit strangers, then you probably need to be locked away. Even if you have a vagina

yeah it’s really suspicious because she had short hair rather than flowing hair extensions and must have forgotten to wear her stilettos and dress that day. Ergo she must be a man.

Anyone with eyes can clearly see it’s a woman. But gotta get that anti trans stuff in there.

Haven’t the last 5/6 terror incidents been classified as a “mental health episode”?

There are also people who have periods of being very unwell but also long periods of stability back in the 90s the mental health trust i worked for had far more acute beds , a rehab ward ,a day hospital
But from the late 90s these were all gradually closed down

It’s funny isn’t it how where you come from or your background shapes one’s reaction to a news story. When I heard it , my initial reaction was a group of homeless people/people on drugs having a row between themselves over some perceived slight as that’s something I’ve witnessed loads of times. I am very rarely exposed to a man pretending to be a woman (although very much aware of it and the eroding of women’s rights) so it’s not my first thought. Perhaps it should be I don’t know but there was something in the report about it being a contained incident so I assumed not someone on a rampage .

as an aside I’ve just seen some footage and it does look like a woman. Way she goes down she doesn’t seem to have a man’s strength.

And how would you decide someone is not fit to be living in society, lock them up just in case?
How would they even be assessed if they were like so many ‘flying under the radar’ of all services.
The media like to report the person was known to MH or Prevent or suchlike but dont report this could have been months or years before an event.
Risk assessments are dynamic, only what is captured at that point in time