The boring life of Jerod Poore, Crazymeds' Chief Citizen Medical Expert.

Why I Hate NAMBLA, er, NAMI



I've had a lot of problems with the National Alliance of people eMbarrassed By a reLative's mentAl illness, or NAMBLA: 

Now they've gone too far.

This time NAMI is actively reinforcing the idea that I am a mass murderer-in-waiting.  That all I need is something to set me off and I'll leave my home that's nestled up against US Forest Service land in a somewhat remote part of northwest Montana, put on a tinfoil hat, make an orgone blaster, and go on a killing spree.

Exactly how are they doing this?  From the AP story on a recent mass murder:

Andrew Engeldinger's parents walked out of the front door of their Richfield home with an executive from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). They read a brief statement about their son; the man police say killed 6 people at a Minneapolis business on Thursday.
"Our hearts go out to the families of the people killed and those who were wounded in this tragedy. Nothing we can say can make up for their loss," Chuck Engeldinger said. The parents also detailed a difficult life.

"Our son struggled for years with mental illness. In the last few years, he no longer had contact with us. This is not an excuse for his actions, but sadly, may be a partial explanation," the father continued to read.

I don't like myself very much for having to use the details of this tragedy so soon in order to make a point, but I am just too pissed off.  And I think NAMI's behavior is making the stigma worse.  The mentally interesting have a hard enough time getting help because of the shame and how we're treated by the members of polite society, adding to the fear factor doesn't help matters.   There were plenty of times when people literally backed away from me when I told them why they hadn't seen me in a long time:  I was so crazy due to bipolar disorder that I qualified for Social Security Disability.  Who is going to seek treatment if they are afraid of being locked up for being a violent criminal?  Does NAMI really think telling everyone that crazy explains mass murder is the way to fight stigma?  Or the way to get people to seek treatment?  Exactly what is it supposed to achieve for the mentally ill?  Or was it all for family members?  Take your pick of family members: victims of the nutjob, other nutjobs, or both.

I never thought NAMI could get worse when it came to the myth of mental illness and violent crime.  It is bad enough that NAMI sucks up to NPR and only bothers to call them out on politically correct speech – their president & CEO saying Juan Williams should have kept his feelings about Muslims between himself and his psychiatrist – while ignoring things like NPR's months-long disinformation campaign of reporting about Major Nidal Hasan's nonexistent mental illness, or repeating the misinformation that all five of the men in China who attacked and killed young children were mentally ill when only one of them was.  To put the second example in perspective, one in five, or 20%, is consistent with the extremely large study done in China that found 17% of the population has the symptoms of a mental illness as defined in the DSM-IV. 

NAMI is spreading fear, not awareness.

And, yes, untreated mental illness often leads to death; but it's the mentally ill who die from it, usually in the form of suicide, or the by any one of the many ways being homeless leads to an early death, or by doing something crazy, or by starving to death in Section 8 housing, or by being murdered.  We are, after all, eleven times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than those who aren't officially crazy.

Recent updates to Crazy Meds

13 September 2012
09 September 2012
07 September 2012
  • Another rave from the grave of the non-wiki version of the site is back: site statistics. I’m sure that means a lot to both of the people who are interesting in that sort of thing.
25 August 2012
  • Back on 23 July I enabled the right sidebar. In addition to providing space for links to other sites, and the replacement for the support group & more information pages, I also have given you, yes you the opportunity to change the color scheme, typeface, and size of wiki. At least on your screen. If you’re on a real computer and not a smart or not-so-smart phone. Why I made the announcement for this in all the usual places except this page is beyond me.
  • What I have done today is something long overdue: a guide on how to actually use this site. Theory of mind is very different for those of us in the Asperger’s spectrum, which is why you’ll often hear us yell, “Isn’t it fucking obvious?” a lot. It also explains why we hate to write [l]user manuals. Many, if not most of us assume anyone who can grasp certain basic concepts must automatically know how to use our elegantly and efficiently designed and executed piece of crap. So I’ve expanded the old How to Read Our Drug Guides pages to now be the How to Navigate this Site, Use its Features & Read the Drug Guides pages.