Are people with schizophrenia dangerous???

When we keep answering stigma’s questions, we keep its logic alive (Part 3)

As schizophrenia awareness week approaches…

Comin in hot Matty!! Are you ready you dog Matty??!! You can’t cut the mustard Matty.

Can you cheesy Matty.

…Oh my goodness. I was trying to start off this address with a little bit of finesse. Once again I have ruined it by just being myself..

Have I though?

The conversation surrounding schizophrenia and its spectrum of disorders is gaining a little bit of volume, but it’s not loud enough for enough of the general population to hear more than just that we’ve had enough.

Schizophrenia spectrum sapiens vs stigma. Round 101 Dalmatians. FIGHT!

And whilst the ongoing stigma and the battles many have had to take on over the years just for the right to be ourselves, without being seen as wrong in ourselves-elves has created a tremendous amount of rightfully appropriate friction, it feels like we are still stuck in the sticky thoughts of the web that stigma has trapped us in.

Are we just persevering through perseveration? Persecutory positions pushed against us purposefully propagating the problems we pounce on?

Feedback loops of spinning wheels, digging us further away from the surface of what it means to be human. Muddying the clear intention of purposeful pursuit of progress.

No matter how right we are, we seem to be left in the same position in some ways.

Notice how I didn’t say righteous? Well righteous, although it can be what it is, is easily misunderstood when filtered through someone else’s preloaded idea of what righteous can look like.

So here we are, on the “right side” of a narrow conversation that needs to widen.

And in trying to widen it, we end up anchoring ourselves to the very thing we’re trying to move away from.

We have become adverse aerials, trying to reverse static. But the distortion of our picture cannot be edited. It is there. And it is here. So how do we commence in a way that is clear?

Unfortunately, by using the little exposure that we have to directly challenge the stereotypes attached to the aerial static that we have, we have kept the battle against stigma on stigma’s terms. We have started to shape the conversation all around it so that it orbits exactly what we’re trying to move beyond.

Sheesh some mouthfuls there Matty. Punctuation would make this more punchy.

There’s a lot of frustration that comes with living under this diagnosis, and rightly so. Speaking about stigma and how it shows up is part of the picture obviously.

But it is not the only way to channel our efforts in trying to cross the canal in front of us.

If it becomes the only focus, then we’re still having the conversation in stigma’s wheelhouse. Still reacting inside the frame it sets. And the box it has taped us in, like an old VCR trying not to chew up the story it once held.

What actually shifts things is changing the frame altogether — building a more accurate shared understanding of what it looks like to live with these experiences, in shared life as we all know it. Not just in crisis, not just through symptoms, and not just through labels, but across the full range of being human.

Strangers to each other, smeared by tar smudges that no longer budge.

The way forward is collaborative: lived experience voices, clinicians, researchers, and systems working together to build a reality that accurately represents the shared stream of ideas.

Because the more fully human the picture becomes, the less space stigma has to define it. The more we stop waiting for stigma to arrive to answer it, the more we can show how irrelevant the assumptions it spruiks actually are.

I have a lot of information in my brain. Sometimes so much it spills into my perception of the world around me into the bubble that surrounds me at all times, as my inverted grandiosity falls on top of me. Underneath my surface, upside down, left the right side up but so wrong.

I am but a Crash Man-dicoot. I should ban myself from tapping buttons.

Meh that reference was so-so Matty.

I guess we’re at the point where stigma has built itself a solid foundation for the bridge connecting a clinical term, to the perception of what it actually means to live with the diagnosis.

In order to reshape that bridge into something that we can actually navigate, we need to be less focused on the dichotomy of where stigma is wrong, and more focused on the connective tissue of what a life looks like from the ground up.

Singing symptom sounds by seriously sending selective snapshots so we can service successful standpoints.

The way forward is collaborative. It lives in lived experience voices, and in open, respectful conversation.

Diversity of experience. People first. Human always.

Perhaps instead of trying to reshape a connection that is so clearly, and undeniably corrupted. We might be better served building a bridge next door to it. One that we can use to reflect on, whilst answering our own questions. With humanity as the anchor to hold our connection to the world around us steady.

Human beings are more than one thing, and living with schizophrenia is an extension of that. The more humanity we put forward, the less stigma we get back.

So although the fight against stigma is a righteous one.

But Matty you said…????

Ugh there are more chips in your argument than you have for dinner Matthew.

It has become a one-lane bridge trying to carry the weight of two sides of a much larger system.

A system that, once upon a time, delivered a verdict:

I sentence you to a life imprisonment. Your sentence is:

schizophrenia.

DUN DUN

That sentence, although it sounds like a dramatisation, is really just a reflection of the mirror we’re told to look into to define who we are.

While we must continue to call out stigma, it cannot be the only lane we travel in. It must no longer be the bridge we use to thread the patchwork quilt of understanding that brings comfort to the cold harsh reality of the misunderstanding around us.

The bridge is a multi-lane highway of connection. And we are people on both sides of it. There is more than one way for us to communicate. More than one route to focus on. More than one mode of transport.

This is our port of call.

Preachy Matty …. Life isn’t peachy Matty.

We must make our experiences accessible. So access to the righteous perception is no longer inconceivably misperceived.

Sure we might take a wrong turn. But the journey continues. It will always continue. It is never ending. Fluid.

But the path must be forward. It must be created by the people that live in it. Not the shadows that stigma casts on it.

Such is the journey of what it means to be human.

Such is the journey of what it means to live with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Sheesh Matty say something original.

Why can’t you just let this go?

You are feeling better now Matty why does everyone have to know what you are Matty… Walk away from it Matty. Pretend you haven’t been through any of this.

Life would be so much easier.

Would it though?