I don't have coherent thoughts about this but I definitely hear you.
Every close person from whom I have experienced abuse (physical or mental) has had mental illness(ess) - generally an untreated one. I think that in all of those cases, if they had not been mentally very unwell they had not been abusive. It doesn't mean that mental illness necessarily leads to abusive behaviour, but it ... is often a contributing factor?
People might be denying it to try to clear themselves of the stigma, which is good for them, but has very unfortunate consequences to mentally ill people who have violent/abusive thoughts and impulses. If the mainstream mental health advocates want to distance themselves from them, where they go for help?
This is somewhat of an ongoing thing in my life and my thoughts are not very well-formulated, but right now I tend to think that we should be more careful about branding people (instead of their actions) with adjectives such as abusive or violent. IE this person is behaving violently (for whatever reason) is very different than this person is a violent person, though those tend to be used interchangeably. Making this distinction tends to (in my experience) lead to a more meaningful analysis of situations - of course it makes matters more complicated too, but humans are complicated...
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Date: 2017-04-18 05:07 pm (UTC)Every close person from whom I have experienced abuse (physical or mental) has had mental illness(ess) - generally an untreated one. I think that in all of those cases, if they had not been mentally very unwell they had not been abusive. It doesn't mean that mental illness necessarily leads to abusive behaviour, but it ... is often a contributing factor?
People might be denying it to try to clear themselves of the stigma, which is good for them, but has very unfortunate consequences to mentally ill people who have violent/abusive thoughts and impulses. If the mainstream mental health advocates want to distance themselves from them, where they go for help?
This is somewhat of an ongoing thing in my life and my thoughts are not very well-formulated, but right now I tend to think that we should be more careful about branding people (instead of their actions) with adjectives such as abusive or violent. IE this person is behaving violently (for whatever reason) is very different than this person is a violent person, though those tend to be used interchangeably. Making this distinction tends to (in my experience) lead to a more meaningful analysis of situations - of course it makes matters more complicated too, but humans are complicated...