Well, I'm not sure that I like the premise of the show. I know the participants signed up of their own free will, but it seems out of line. I mean, can you imagine a similar show about cancer or AIDS or, heck, Diabetes? I'm pulling disease names out of thin air, here, but you get the point. I think that having a game show in which the point is to guess the identities of the mentally ill does more to stigmatize mental illness, not less -- especially by showing that the pros even get it wrong now and then, which could easily lead to the conclusion that mental illness is a bunch of bunk and make it even harder to the mentally ill to get the help that they need. I think it is in poor taste to make a game of other people's diseases.
My thoughts on mental illness are pretty jumbled up and confused right now. In days gone by, I thought only obvious mental disorders resulting in paranoia, delusions, and other absolutely nutso behavior were real. I thought subtler forms of mental illness, like Depression, were character flaws. I thought people could pull themselves out of Depression if they only tried harder and that they didn't deserve special accommodations. In fact, I was outraged when a friend of mine got into the same prestigious honor society even though she took Incompletes on a lot of her classes and then had extra time to make up the work at will. *I* did my work on time and made my deadlines. It didn't seem fair that she got extra time and yet still got the same reward. Only 1% of college graduates make it into this honor society, so it was a pretty big deal. I didn't understand why people got a pass for being sad and lazy.
I also didn't understand why or how I was supposed to have compassion for people like my Grandfather, who blew a hole into everyone's lives when he killed himself. I was angry and I felt entitled to that anger. Basically, I had a very narrow, very skeptical view of mental illness. It existed in a grey, shadowing world that I didn't understand and didn't want to understand. In my world, personal responsibility reigned supreme, and I thought people who blamed their failures on mental illnesses were taking the lazy/easy way out.
If this story is sounding predictable, that's because it is. After years of poo-pooing mental illness and privately accusing those on "Happy Pills" of Brave-New-Worlding it, mental illness hit *me* like a ton of bricks. And it wasn't the laziness, self-pity, or even sadness that I thought it was. Instead, it was like being under the influence of a sedative that gradually sapped away my intelligence, my concentration, my energy, my ability to move my limbs, etc. It got to the point at which I was shuffling across the street so slowly that on more than one occasion, others yelled at me to walk faster. I wasn't aware of my surroundings. I became sick and injured more frequently than in the past. I was in constant physical pain.I barely had enough energy to make it through the workday. It was so hard to complete any one task that I began to feel as though I had died and everyone had forgotten to tell me. My body felt like a corpse that I was dragging around only with extreme effort. My brain felt muddled and disconnected from the world. For me, Depression felt like being old and then, later, it felt like being dead.
My Depression was complicated by other factors, like my Cerebral Palsy and my PCOS, which led me down a strange and scary path of medical tests. Eventually, after ruling out a lot of other things, the doctors settled on Depression. Certain that I would lose my own self respect as well as that of my friends and family, I resisted that diagnosis. Recently, my mental and physical state reached extreme lows. I don't want to get into the details, but things had to get very bad before I finally caved and accepted my doctors' diagnosis and went on the medicine that she recommended. It's been about a month now, and the medicine is helping. I'm nowhere near 100%, but I feel more mentally present, am not in constant physical pain, and no longer get shouted at on the street. Those who know me best say I seem more like myself. My shrink, whom I have seen only once so far, says I'm lucky that the first medicine they tried is helping me so much without any side effects.
Basically, this whole experience has been an eye opener for me. I feel guilty for having judged others so harshly in the past and I feel anxious about what this means for my future. I wish mental illness was easier to diagnose and understand. I wish we could test chemical levels or something and make the diagnosis less subjective and more difficult to refute or dismiss. I wish the stigma of mental illness was not there. Beyond that, I'm not sure how I feel about mental illness in general. I'm not even sure exactly how I feel about my own mental illness. There's definitely still a large part of me that views this as my own fault. In the end, I really just wish mental illness didn't exist -- either to blow apart my own life or to provide entertainment for these Brits.
As someone who has been newly diagnoses with a mental illness and still feels rather ashamed and scared as a result, I've gotta say that the premise of that show holds absolutely no appeal for me. if any of those people are suffering to the extent that I was suffering, then I think it's rather wrong to exploit their diminished capacity for decision making and rational thought in order to put them on TV to derive entertainment from their pain.
