@FridayJones I love love love the distinction "Fighting for fun - fighting for need - fighting for cruelty." Awesome. I'm teaching about what distinctions are today and I needed a good one to start with and now I have it! How much more important can a distinction get? Plus the students will all be interested in it. Perfect.
Why do I get the label when clearly the things done to me were done by someone who is not at all right? Because I choose to get help and they don't? Is that why they aren't considered an ill person?
I speak to doctors about what they did and they say I am mentally ill? I don't hurt people! I don't smash small people around! I don't victimize others! I don't go out and seek vengeance. WTF? Is this not the hidden mental illness in this world? The one that nobody looks at? If it wasn't for them would I have a label of 'mentally ill'? If I was allowed to live my life without being a target to these people would I be all that I could be?
Seriously? What if all the perpetrators were called to task? Who would we be then?
To go back to the OP. It is an excellent set of questions - and a deep one about why individuals and institutions focus on the victim rather than the perpetrator. As if abuse were somehow compatible with "mental health" or "sanity."
In what follows I am using "mentally ill" in it's broadest sense that includes "mentally/emotionally damaged and/or challenged as well as organically mentally ill" in contrast to "overall mentally healthy."
On consideration, the blanket victim blaming you are questioning is a strange impersonal variant on that Joanna Russ logic - People with mental illness are often involved in "crazy" conflicts and get abused, statistically more often than non-mentally ill people. Perhaps it is the ever so basic mistake - correlation = causation. Here is how it might work: Because people with mental illness are disproportionately
involved in "crazy" conflicts and situations of abuse, people (who don't pay very close attention at the best of times) jump from the fact that mental illness correlates with conflict/abuse to the causal claim that mental illness causes abuse/conflict. Ignoring the fact that some kinds of mental illness can be
caused by abuse, and that most forms of mental illness tend to make a person a "good potential victim" in that the limitations often make it difficult for a person to defend her/himself. But then instead of seeing that the
perpetrator is
acting out a form of mental illness (almost always) "we" ignore it. Why? Because... then "we'd" have to deal with the perpetrators? Then "we'd" have to recognize that this is a
systemic societal problem that
everyone has to deal with. Which is pretty uncomfortable. So... zap. Gone. All it costs is blaming the victim.
Oh, and it might mean that even the people we want to believe are "the good guys" might ... do really really bad things. (see Ferguson's recent problems in the news... "cops, bad guys? surely not!" except... as
@FridayJones points out, their actions are clearly and
explicitly being driven by fear. So they are hurting and killing people disproportionate to need, and maybe sometimes out of cruelty.) It might even mean that some of the things we and our friends do are bad...
Honestly, I see all kinds of "low level abuse" of kids and students and employees. This culture that I live in (maybe most cultures so far) just don't have a very clear model of what it is to treat people with respect, never mind compassion. Just respect would be a huge improvement. It is apparently really really comfortable to believe that people in roles of authority are better than everyone else and so can be trusted. If only it were so.
Does Canada have a federal drug enforcement agency? (Like the US's DEA?) That you could call independently of the local cops to report the ex?
