Floating Away

We were talking about schizophrenia and the one other girl with mental illness was a schizophrenic (it wasn’t known until this exact moment). We were talking about symptoms when someone just asked outloud, “Aren’t schizos like super likely to murder people though?”

I thought, okay, one guy still stuck in the fucking 80’s, whatever.

But Then A Bunch Of People Start Agreeing

And soon we were 20minutes into class and everyone had shared a case of a schizophrenic murdering, abusing, etc etc and They Saw Nothing Wrong With Thinking These Stereotypes Were A Standard

The prof finally stopped them and asked if anyone wanted to make one last statement and this poor girl just raises her hands and “I just thought you all should know that I’m schizophrenic and have never thought about murdering someone, nor have I ever hurt anyone apart from myself.”

And… no one apologized. They literally felt no guilt at all for bashing this girl.

The same exact thing happened when we talked about depression, anxiety, and ptsd.

“Ptsd is what soldiers get after war right?”

“Yeah sometimes, but anyone can suffer from it after a traumatic event”

“How would you know, are you the professor now?”

“No, but I have ptsd from a car crash that nearly killed me so…”

such a lovely place