There Are Elephants in this Room

To my mind, it is time to declare a moratorium on elephants in rooms and let them into fields to be free. On the downside, this means that we have to get honest- and perhaps brutally so.  We will have to talk about difficult subjects at a level deeper than the lip-service that has become popular.  Additionally, we also have to forgo the ever-so-popular civil disobedience.

In short, we have to decide that the issue is important enough to take a stand in a very unpopular way.  We need to responsibly speak up- and then stand our ground.  We have to decide that stigma can no longer be tolerated and that people who live with mental health issues be allowed a safe place to discuss them.

Lovely pipe dream.  *sigh*

My ADHD life includes some lovely side effects.  While ADHD itself is a neuro-biological differentiation. it usually brings "friends" along with it.  Those "friends" are called co-morbids and they live in the Mental Health spectrum.

ADHD  carries along "the three D's".  They are Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, and Dysgraphia.  I have Dyscalculia and, to an extent, Dysgraphia.  In short, I am wicked ugly with numbers and I can only write because I can draw.

Dyscalculia is number confusion.  Math leaves me in a cold sweat and I transpose and substitute numbers routinely.  I can't balance as much as a checkbook because I am bewildered by numbers of any kind.

Dyslexia is letter confusion.  Letters flip about and become incomprehensible.  Written communication becomes a horrific mine field and reading can be nearly impossible.  Some report that even pictographs are confusing.  

Dysgraphia is a challenge of writing and fine motor skills.  I was taught to "draw" rather than to try to "write".  I was blessed with people who taught me to see the task differently as a way to master it.

With the "three D's" more complex issues exist and thrive.  Among others, they include depression, anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, substance abuse (frequently as self medication) and more.

Just to keep everything fun, ADHD is often considered to be nothing much and people who live with it to be "drug seekers"because the medications that are generally most helpful are also stimulants.  

So a person with ADHD doesn't just have to try to deal with their non-existent social skills, whatever co-morbids are tagging along, and often crippling impulsivity, they are told that their only problem is that they don't try hard enough and they need to "get over it" because ADHD isn't real (it is), is over diagnosed (it isn't) and EVERYONE has issues (they do- but that doesn't negate mine).

What I'm saying is that we can't have serious discussions about mental health without recognizing that there is some mental illness that we don't want to discuss.  We have to understand that real people have real experience and that some of it makes some folks uncomfortable- but those people need to have a safe space to relate their experience too.

Mental health doesn't pick and choose.  It doesn't target only the thin, beautiful, talented, or socially accepted.  It gets some of those, but it gets a bunch of us "regular folks" as well.

In order to have any credible discussion of mental health, we have to become willing to challenge preconceptions and stop the disbelief.  The experience of the individual has to be considered and valued.  The stigma must end.

In the perfect world, stigma around mental illness would end and the elephants in the room be allowed to roam free.