On #WorldMentalHealthDay

In much the same way I am tired of awareness for autism, I am tired of mental health awareness. I understand that autism is different from mental health disabilities, that there are also many autistic people with mental health disabilities who dislike autism awareness but don’t mind mental health awareness. I am not one of them.

When I hear you talk about awareness for mental health disabilities, when you say, “This is a serious condition affecting this many people,” or “this many people have a mental illness!” or “we need to focus on access to care,” I hear, much like many autistics hear the same when autism awareness campaigns occur:

We are an epidemic. We are a public health crisis (and get named as such). We are only DSM diagnoses and flight risks and patients and if we’re not trying to hide ourselves we are a failure to a model that teaches us the best patients are telling their stories of how they got better to end the stigma. We are merely the rates of our mental health disabilities among people.

In fact, I would argue that only having stories of getting better hurts those people who may not get better. And why can’t we talk about issues like employment (or better benefits for those who would have a hard time working), access to housing, before access to care? Access to care, if desired, should follow meeting basic needs. It’s a little hard to focus on any sort of treatment when basic needs aren’t being met.

I am tired of awareness. Why do we have more people talking about access to hospitalization instead of peer respite care? Where are our community-based supports? Where are our warmline projects to prevent crises? Where are our self-directed services? Where are they?