Personal encounters with untreated mental illness, stigma, and YouTube

[David Baxter PhD]

Personal encounters with untreated mental illness, stigma & YouTube
By Treatment Advocacy Center

A key and understandable focus of many mental health organizations is fighting stigma. Educating, and sometimes chastising, journalists who propagate derogatory stereotypes is a common way to try and prevent the most severe manifestations of mental illnesses from being associated with all who have them.

Yet would stigma be eliminated if advocates were given the final say on every article, movie and TV Show? Hardly. Opinion is forged through personal experience.

People who have overcome mental illnesses don?t wear tags marked ?I have Bipolar Disorder? or ?successfully dealing with Schizophrenia.? Many of those in the grips of the untreated symptoms of such illnesses make their conditions distinctly apparent. An encounter with someone in the midst of a psychotic episode can shape an individual?s opinion about mental illness for life. E-mails, phone calls, and media education can?t prevent such encounters ? only treatment can.

Nafiza Ziyad is ?an ambitious, bright and happy person.? She also has bipolar disorder, but ?thinks she can do without the medicine.? A manic episode recently led to Ziyad angrily, confusingly confronting an elderly woman on an Atlanta train and to becoming the face of mental illness for most of the other passengers.

As it happens, Ziyad?s behavior also provided an ?education? for many others. It was recorded and posted on YouTube. The video is entitled Crazy Girl on Train.

Currently, 847,638 people have viewed the sad incident and 10,274 have posted written comments concerning it. Should you wish to watch the video of this sad episode, please be aware that it contains a great deal of profanity.

And does this create stigma?...below are a sample of comments from the YouTube posters (profanity has been excised).

• ?Oh my God...what a horrible person.?
  
• ?That was scary?
  
• ?what a nutcase.?
  
• ?She needed to be popped in the mouth.?
  
• ?some forgot to take her meds..?
  
• ?i'd hit her in the middle of the face with a baseball bat if i was just sitting there in the train going home or anything. i'm pretty sure i would have support?
  
• ?Yall can't see that this girl is mentally insane.?
  
• ?shes disturbeddd?
  
• ?If i had been on the train i would have ------ kicked her in the face.?
  
• ?that chick needs to be medicated.?
  
• ?THIZ FEMALE CRAZY?
  
• ?Somebody call the doctor. This girl is obviously not healthy in the head?
  
• ?Definitely psychotic?
  
• ?Schizophrenia is a terrible illness of the mind. She needs meds STAT! Or she needs to up her dosage.?
  
• ?This girl is having a psychotic episode. Somebody should have called the doctors in white coats to take her to the nearest state mental hospital.?
  
• ?...wow...get this b---- a straight jacket...?
  
• ?nuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuttssssssssss?

 

[braveheart]

I have mixed feelings about this.
I watched it with no sound, but still found it upsetting.

In my mind, what we need is greater education about the effects mental illness can have.
Everyone has feelings, everyone gets into embarressing situations from time to time. I know I have, as part of PTSD stuff. I'm in treatment, but that doesn't make you less of a human being, less prone to distress. It rather helps me contain it better, and come back to myself faster after 'losing myself'.

I don't think that stigma is 'created', rather, narrow minded people who don't know how to relate to their own distress can provoke people who're already vulnerable, and make things more volatile. There's nothing like being called names to upset someone who's suffering from severe anxiety and hyper-vigilance from having been abused over more than a decade.

But then, maybe things look different for people with Bipolar.

*gets off soapbox*

 

[Lana]

I watched the video.
My reaction to it all is biased because I watched it with compassion and the knowledge that the girl is afflicted with the Bipolar Disorder. But I wonder what my reaction would have been if I was one of the passengers, or the “old Lady” myself. I also wonder whether I’d sit idly by and not say anything while avoiding eye contact with the ‘crazy’ person so as not to turn her on me, or if I’d say something….and what could anyone really say? When the guy finally did say something to her, she seemed as if she’d become violent. It’s a tough tough call.

I think one of the issues with mental illnesses is that often, they’re not visible to others. When they do become visible, they appear threatening and they don’t make sense to the people around. That can evoke feelings of confusion, misunderstanding, fear, and aggression (for self-protection). Those are all basic self-defense feelings and I’m not sure that we can ask folks to abandon them in the name of mentally ill.

I hope that my next comment doesn’t upset anyone, but after seeing this video, I wondered if anyone showed Nafiza what happened when she had an outbreak. She put a lot of people at risk with that, especially herself. She could have gotten seriously hurt while her actions delivered a huge blow to mental illness acceptance. Having said that, perhaps it would help if the mentally ill persons understood the power of their outbreaks and the effect that they have not only on themselves, but on those around them, and everyone that would like to see the stigma lifted. Asking others for acceptance, when the person him or her self is refusing to accept the seriousness of their own illness, the treatments, and the effects it has on others is, in my opinion, very irresponsible and does more damage then good.