Tag: mental illness

Monsters and Metaphor, Part 2

jwtroemnerLeave a comment

To recap the previous post:

There are a lot of horror stories that like to use monsters as a metaphor for people with mental illnesses. I prefer to think of the monsters as the mental illnesses themselves, whereas the people dealing with them are more the Buffy-esque badasses who deal with them.

An unrelated conversation got me pondering a fairly common question: “Why do kids these days have to put a label on everything?”

Well, since I’ve already got the metaphor onhand, let’s talk about the thing:

Continue reading “Monsters and Metaphor, Part 2” →

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Invisible monsters

jwtroemner3 Comments

People are afraid of mental illness. They see the mentally ill in every deranged killer on the screen, every act of violence on the news they can’t explain, every action whose logic is not immediately apparent. When we make no effort to understand mental illness, all people who are mentally ill are unknowns. And we fear the unknown.

Stigmatization of mental illness and the people who have it has led to sufferers being ostracized, demonized, attacked and even killed– and consequently, those who do suffer from mental illness are often reluctant to acknowledge it or seek the help they need for fear of the consequences.

And yes, mental illness is scary. It doesn’t turn you into a monster– more often, it’s like a monster living inside your own head. It’s like a vampire that looks normal to everybody else, except you’ve noticed that it doesn’t have a reflection, and you try to keep it out but it’s too late—without even thinking, you’ve already invited it in. Continue reading “Invisible monsters” →