I saw a post at Unstable Blogger’s which is a reprint of an article, “Americans Exhibit Low Tolerance of Mental Illness.” While I’m definitely not shocked or even surprised, it brought something to my mind.  Something I’m not proud of, but is true.

I have a low tolerance of mental illness. Shit, that sucks.  Especially since I have a couple of them. Ugh.  And yes, I’m an American.

Why do I have a low tolerance of mental illness?  Perhaps it’s obvious why I have a low tolerance for my own — they’ve ravaged my life.  But others’?  Theirs has smacked my life around too.  From the pedophile borderline father, to the severely codependent mother, to the C-PTSD former boyfriend, to the Uncle with PTSD, to the many people with substance abuse disorders I’ve known, to the last boss that went up and down like a yo-yo because of his schizo-affective disorder, to the friend whose bipolar disorder smacks me when she’s both high and low, I’ve gotten beat up by other people’s mental illnesses.  I’ve had a lot of mentally ill people in my life, and yes, I still keep dealing with them. But it’s hurt so much. Now I’m wary.

Wary, yes. Cautious, yes. Low tolerance, yes. In spite of that low tolerance and wary caution, I keep meeting folks with mental illness, associating with them, loving some of them, and being one of them.  My world is populated with mentally interesting people.  I sometimes wonder if there are any other kinds of people out there.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under mental illness, oddball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.