More Difficulties for the Mentally Ill

MENTAL ILLNESS AND BARRIERS TO SOCIALIZATION

Jack Bragen

One stereotype of mentally ill people includes the perception that we lack basic social skills. However, this stereotype is not always inaccurate. There are multiple reasons why persons with mental illness often experience difficulty socializing among “mainstream” or “normal” people.
If you’ve read much of my writing, you have seen me “blame the system” for a lot of things. Well, I am about to do it again. Since mentally ill people are often segregated by virtue of being in a “day program” as well as living in “supported housing” and then looking forward to a step up, which will be “supported employment,” we are often deprived of the opportunity to live alongside anyone in mainstream America, unless they are in a role of supervising us. (And I resent this segregation!)
Secondly, without having a “normal job,” something most people with severe mental illnesses don’t have, we are deprived of the opportunity to learn job etiquette. Job etiquette is so much a part of fitting in with others in society that the lack of a chance to learn this is crippling to someone’s general life skills.
Not having a job, in general, promotes a lack of confidence in a typical “normal” person, and it is no different for the mentally ill. It may be less common, today, for someone to pop the question “what do you do?” because of how bad the economy has become. Yet, should this question be asked, including in some roundabout way, a mentally ill person is often left speechless, or with an answer that instantly brands him or her as a freak.
Paranoia certainly can contribute to difficulty socializing. It is possible for a schizophrenic person to be certain that they are disliked. This is a perception that can be created directly by the disease, and is usually not accurate.
To compound all of this, the mentally ill person may have a lot of shyness to start with. I went through an obnoxious phase in my life that lasted more than one decade, in which I lost touch with the fundamental fact that I am afraid of people. The obnoxiousness was there to cover up the vulnerability that I felt. This obnoxiousness, of course, interfered with my popularity. Much of this abrasive veneer has been stripped away by means of becoming self-aware of how I behave, and I have returned to the baseline of having some amount of social fear.
Because of all of the reasons listed above, it is clear that mainstream society doesn’t bear all of the blame for the difficulty mentally ill people have in adapting and acclimating. Yet it is clear that many people who are not mentally ill have an intolerance of those who are. While there are others who view us through a “stigmatizing” filter; we are being perceived as a child in the body of an adult. Maybe the applicable term is “poster child.”
I try to get out of the house and spend time among the masses of seemingly “normal” people at least once a day. Sometimes I go to places that are frequented by employed “professional” people so that I can be exposed to society and will not lose the possibility of eventually being in some “in” crowd in the world. This is in stark contrast to the times I’ve spent among the down and out, for whom there are far fewer standards of how one should look, act, and speak.