They come out from the woodwork whenever something big happens. It could be another mass shooting, terrorism, a suicide that shakes a community.
These folks, for the most part, have good intentions, I think. Due to that, people are suffering. I know that I do, in my own way. Small things, big things. The fact that when I worked full time I had to add mental health days off to my physical health days off. The fact that I have to get really great mental health coverage if I want to be able to pay for the kind of treatment I need.
There are others who have it much worse than me. They see a big event, and they see a chance to increase awareness, increase acknowledgement of what they or the people close to them are going through. Blog posts spread like wildfire, Facebook images, whatever it takes. These people are dangerous. He has full control over his mind, his faculties.
He is logical. Even worse, it spreads the myth that all mentally ill people are not responsible for their actions. Which is, of course, not true. Mental illness works in degrees, not absolutes. True, mental health comes into play whenever something as extreme as murder or suicide comes into play, but what the Mental Health Opportunists have done is turned it into a blanket term, something without nuance, without taking into account the many factors that result in the tragedies that surround them.
This has resulted in plenty of awareness around the subject but little actual help to people who suffer from mental illness themselves. Creating an image of a hopeless mentally ill person creates a victim mentality, one that implies there is no help out there. And that for some of us, this disease can be terminal. I still believe that with all my heart, but I wondered, when I saw my post being shared in a situation that I felt was completely inappropriate, if perhaps I myself had been a Mental Health Opportunist when I wrote the post.
