Madness
There’s an article about my old boss in tomorrow’s Style section. It’s all about how she has bipolar disorder and blogs about it and is apparently part of a “mad pride” movement that says, Hey, it’s okay to be crazy!
I’m glad that a lot of people are reading her blog and finding some sort of solace in it, or what have you. But… sometimes she was pretty miserable to work for. You never knew which Liz you were going to get on any given day.
I don’t really know what the answer is. Mentally ill people should, obviously, have jobs! But I don’t think I want another bipolar person to be my boss. It’s pretty hard to deal with, and that part of it was never really addressed—that is, the effect she had on the rest of the staff because of her mental illness. It was like that couldn’t be acknowledged, or something.
I have to agree on the last bit here. Mental illness, even with all the awareness that people have of it these days, is still something that is treated as being very taboo to discuss. If you straight up tell someone “yeah, so, I’m bipolar,” they either think you are trying to get attention/sympathy or are batshit crazy. Then they take two steps backward and pull their kids away. This makes people who are trying their damnedest to live with a mental illness feel kind of like they have a scarlet C on their shirt. We no longer stick people with mental illnesses in the loony bin but we still feel the need to keep them at arm’s length, which leads to the feeling that their behavior cannot be acknowleged or discussed. Because we might go batshit if you do, obviously.
Case in point: today we all had to present our purses for inspection because of some drama at work. I was instantly embarrassed because my lorazepam was in it and I knew that in a workplace full of medically trained people someone was going to know what a drug with “-zepam” at the end of it is for. Thankfully, everyone was too busy with the drama to notice, except for one girl who kind of looked at it, then looked at me, then looked away quickly. Because I might go batshit if you asked me about it.
Man, is this thing turning into a LiveJournal or what? I’d better hurry up and post something funny.