The Hunters, Sherlock.

In the midst of the senseless police violence we’ve seen this fourth of July week, the Murphy Bill slipped through the House of Representatives and few people noticed.

PLEASE help stop this bill from passing the Senate.

This is a well-intentioned but terribly designed bill which would strip civil liberties from the mentally ill, especially those already marginalized because of their race, class, and/or gender identity, and especially, especially the homeless. And frankly, it’s not great for otherwise-privileged mentally ill people, either, though with money you can find ways to get around it.

If you feel able, write or call your US Senator (contact information here) and tell them you want mental health reform, but you REALLY don’t want it like this. And if you feel strongly, please share this post.

Below is the letter I sent to Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein today. Feel free to use any parts that apply if you are able to contact an elected official.

Note that I’m a very privileged person and my diagnoses are not as serious as many other people’s. I use the words “like me” in this letter mostly for rhetorical effect, not because I think I’ve suffered anything the way a schizophrenic person with no home has. If you feel you can speak more personally about this problem, if you have had interactions with this terrible system, if you can talk about your experiences with a condition like psychosis or autism that others vilify and belittle, it would be great for those narratives to reach the ears and eyes of our officials. If you can’t talk about it, know that people are still fighting for you and you’re worth the fight.

    As a young constituent who plans to vote, all the time, I am writing today to ask you to oppose the Murphy mental health bill, which just passed the House as H.R. 2646, and which the Senate will vote on soon.

    Please, please oppose this bill when the Senate votes on it.

    I recently graduated with two degrees from [school] despite crippling anxiety, depression, and intrusive disturbing thoughts. My situation is overwhelmingly privileged. Most of my equals in mental health do not have the resources to seek appropriate treatment for their conditions, and when in emergency situations they end up in the mental health care system, they are treated with appalling disrespect and violence.

    This bill severely limits critical legal advocacy on behalf of people like me with psychiatric diagnoses and increases the likelihood of violence being used against us even in hospitals.

    It reduces privacy protections for people like me with psychiatric diagnoses.

    It redirects federal money from innovative programs, particularly substance abuse programs, to involuntary outpatient commitment, which is expensive and ineffective. It centralizes mental health care when such care should be more specialized.

    And, most importantly, it increases needless institutionalization, which causes many low-income people with mental illnesses to lose their jobs and be unable to find new ones. This further reduces their access to long-term, effective treatment.

    Our mental health care system is in desperate need of reform, but the Murphy mental health bill is a step backwards. It’s a cruel one at that. Please, please help protect us, the mentally ill. Among us are some of the most marginalized people in the country: people of color with mental illness, trans folks with other diagnoses, the chronically underemployed, and the homeless.

Please help us stay safe. Please oppose this bill.

LINKS:

Full Murphy Bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2646/actions

Analysis: https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/07/hr-2636-coming-to-a-vote/

Too much personal information time: I’m a Canadian looking to emigrate to the US soon. I’m also severely mentally ill. This bill, if it passes? Will probably be my cause of death.

I was institutionalized for a week, half a lifetime ago. It was the single worst experience of my life. That week has shaped my life more than anything else. Basically all of my self-care is an effort to stay the fuck away from institutions. I have thought long and hard about this, and I can say with complete confidence that I will die before I let them send me back.

I know I tend to exaggerate a bit, so I want to emphasize that I am being deadly serious here. There is not a single word of hyperbole in this post.

But since fetuses already knowing advanced medical sciences aren’t a thing, I figured I’d provide some more valid alternatives:

What if the cure for cancer lives in the mind of someone who has a “black sounding” name and gets their school application thrown out?

What if the cure for cancer lives in the mind of someone who accidentally becomes pregnant where abortion is illegal or very difficult to access and they are forced to quit the sciences to raise the child?

What if the cure for cancer lives in the mind of a fat person whose credibility in the medical field is destroyed because they are assumed to be “unhealthy” and a hypocrite?

What if the cure for cancer lives in the mind of a person who starves to death?

What if the cure for cancer lives in the mind of someone who is murdered by drones or police?

What if the cure for cancer lives in the mind of someone who is raped and cannot continue their research due to trauma?

What if the cure for cancer lives in the mind of someone who is killed in a shooting because some below average teen boy couldn’t get laid?

Who alway got in trouble? Me.

They would call my mother and she always came in and lectures my teachers and threatened to sue for making her miss work and treating me poorly.

She always taught my brothers to respect women. The only fights my brothers ever got in was defending women from someone else.

So naturally, I end up in the principal’s office, refusing to apologize. 

“He shouldn’t have put his hands on me and I wouldn’t have hit him!” That’s the only thing I was saying.

These people had the unfortunate luck of catching my dad at home, instead of my mom. So he comes fucking sauntering in there, like he’s Clint fucking Eastwood in some western movie and looks at me. 

“Melissa, did you punch him?” 

“Yes.” I said. 

“Why?” 

“Because he snapped my bra strap.” 

And he turns his squinty eyed glare to the principal and says, “You’re telling me my daughter is in trouble because that squirrely looking kid put his hands on her and she chose to defend herself? That’s what you are saying to me.” 

“Well, sir-” The man kind of stuttered because my dad is kind of intimidating in the quiet sort of way that kind of whispers in the back of your mind that this person could be dangerous. “Melissa did make it physical.” 

“No. That kid put his hands on my daughter. Are you saying my daughter cannot defend herself when some boy decides to put hands on her? Is that what you are teaching my girl?” 

I found out why after I’d been working there, oh, about a month. My period started suddenly, as it sometimes does, and I asked to excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room. He wanted to know why. I told him.

He started ranting about how lazy women were. How we wasted time. How we were so careless and unhygenic, and that there was no call for that. He finished by telling me that I certainly was NOT going to the ladies’ room and that I was just going to sit there and work. He finished this off with a decisive nod, as if I’d just been told and there could be no possible argument.

“If I don’t go,” I said in an overly patient tone, “the blood is going to soak through my pants, stain my new skirt that I just bought, and possibly get on this chair I’m sitting in. I need something to soak up the blood. That’s why I need to go to the bathroom.”

His face turned oatmeal-gray; an expression of pure horror spread across his face. He leaned forward and whispered, “Wait, you mean that if you don’t go, you’ll just keep on bleeding? I thought that women could turn it off any time that they wanted!”

I thought,  You have got to be kidding.

Several horrified whispers later, I learned that he wasn’t. He actually thought a) that women could shut down the menstrual cycle at will, b) that we essentially picked a week per month to spend more time in the bathroom, i.e. to goof off, and c) that napkins and tampons were sex toys paid for by Health and Human Services. I didn’t know the term then, but he believed that tampons were dildos. Which was why he and a good number of his friends considered them luxuries.

‘My Hijab Has Nothing To Do With Oppression. It’s A Feminist Statement’

Not all Muslim women cover their bodies. Not all Muslim women who do are forced to do so. Like freelance writer Hanna Yusuf, who chooses to wear a hijab in a daily act of feminism. In a new video for The Guardian, Yusuf challenges stereotypes by setting out to reclaim the choice to wear a hijab as “a feminist statement.”