Posted by LostBoyinNC45 on February 23, 2014, at 12:39:26 [reposted on February 24, 2014, at 16:51:42 | original URL]
In reply to Re: THE root cause of TRD is, posted by SLS on February 23, 2014, at 9:33:16
SLS,
You seem to be kind of, shall I say, unable to think or abstract or something. I made it clear that in the beginning that the problem is the MAJORITY of seriously mentally ill individuals do not vote and if they vote, they dont vote CONSISTENTLY.
The key is getting seriously mentally ill people to vote en masse. And not only vote en masse, to email their elected officials en masse on this subject.
It is only when a block of voters with special interests (you and me) vote en masse and write their elected officials en masses, that what I am describing actually works.
So you have voted? Thats great, wonderful it truly is. Congratulations. But, do you vote every election? Even in the mid terms? And do you also write and email your elected officials and tell them about the issues you care about and things you want changed or not changed? Do you get a formal written response back from your elected officials?
And do your mentally ill brethren, en masse, do the same thing? I realize there are some very severely mentally ill individuals who are too far gone to have the mental ability to go to the polls, vote and compose emails and compose their thoughts. But those people are in the minority of the mentally ill ranks.
If you are here on this forum or other, similar forums, you have the ability to vote consistently and to email and write your elected officials. No excuses, no ifs, ands or but this, but that. No more excuses, no more bs. You either care about yourself or you dont. One of the ways people show to the world that they care about themselves (at least a little bit) is to go to the polls consistently, vote and email/write their elected officials. Thats the way our country operates.
Lets take an example of a demographic that votes like crazy and writes their elected officials like crazy. I belong to this demographic as well as the mentally ill demographic. The NRA, pro-Second Amendment demographic. This demographic is very aggressive when it comes to voting consistently and very aggressive when it comes emailing and writing their elected officials on the subject of gun control laws and pro-Second Amendment issues.
And look at the results they typically get! They broke the President of the United States back last April, when comrade obama's vaunted gun control Act was defeated in the U.S. Senate. Why did that happen? BECAUSE PRO-SECOND AMENDMENT PEOPLE VOTE CONSISTENTLY AND THEIR ELECTED OFFICIALS KNOW THAT AND THOSE SAME ELECTED OFFICIALS WANT TO GET RE-ELECTED!!!!
Other demographics with similar successes in the lobbying/voting area include: AARP members, the pro-Israel American Jewish lobby, the homosexual/gay HIV/AIDS demographic...they were very very successful in the late eighties and the nineties at getting politicians to move off their butts in getting aggressive federal aid for HIV drug research. If they had not done that back then, there would be a huge amount more of dead people in the USA from AIDS.
I see nothing like this from the mentally ill crowd. While you might find some exceptions such as myself, who vote and write very consistently, I am not typical. The typical is to be depressed/bipolar/schizophrenic whatever, go on disability or hold down a part time job and live with your parents or in a group home and post on psychobabble or similar forums a lot. And go around WHINING all the time and trying new drugs all the time, like a dog chasing its tail.
To me, that is not the way I like to do business. I dont know why I bother to try with you people anymore. I should have learned my lesson a long time ago.
Again, if you are posting here or elsewhere on the Internet regularly, you ALSO have the full ability to vote in every single election and to email and write your elected officials on the subject of serious mental illness, improved funding for vastly more effective medications and treatments. There are simply no excuses, other than laziness and ignorance.
The "why bother?" or the "who cares?" or the "my vote does not matter" is exactly the reason why there is such a thing as TRD.
Eric
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> LostBoy,
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> I am mostly offended that someone should blame the mentally ill electorate for the lack of extant knowledge that is to be "THE" root cause of TRD. Was this true 100 years ago before MAOIs appeared by accident? No, of course not. From what I read on the Internet, research is proceeding at a fevered pace. It occurs to me that more money might not have quickened the pace of discovery over the last 55 years. There are still sticking points as the evolution of medical technology to perform experiments simply did not exist, and today dictates the rate of discovery.
>
> Okay. I vote. Now what? Severely depressed people have difficulty getting out of bed. Now what? Severely depressed people don't read the newspaper on a daily basis in order to stay current. Now what? The newspaper often does not announce the position canditate's takes on spending more money on the research of mental illness. Now what? Sometimes, no candidate has in their stated platform an opinion on mental illness. Now what?
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> Tell me who to vote for. I'll do it!
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> The answer is not so much how to vote, but to produce canditates to vote for.
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> It is unfortunate that politics should so often dictate the behaviors of politicians. In my state, a prospective candidate for governor who had a family member with severe depression was the ideal person to advocate for the mentally ill. He capitulated to the candidate who had far more money to campaign with. In this case, I doubt write-in votes would have helped.
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> Grass-roots campaigns to write massive numbers of letters to incumbents and potential candidates should help produce sympathetic and activist candidates to vote for. Perhaps this is already being done. NAMI and DBSA have done this for years. Now what? I once sent a document that I wrote to EVERY state legislator in my state and managed to get it physically placed into the hands of the governor. I was advocating for Medicaid recipients who were being ejected from the partial hospitalization system. Within two months, a change in state Medicaid regulations allowed for the continued care of the mentally ill in these programs beyond the former two year limit. Did my letter writing campaign help to produce substantive change? I don't know. Probably, according to the facilitator of a local PH program that shoved my letter in the governor's hands. Bully for me. Now what?
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> How about severely anergic depressives with cognitive slowing? Most cannot pull off what I did. In other words, severely mentally ill people can rarely advocate for themselves. Now what? Is the failure of them to vote at the root of their TRD?
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> I don't know who to vote for. Maybe a democrat by default?
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> I have voted in the past. I remain ill. Now what?
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> Am I a defeatist?
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> I don't think it is productive to blame the victim for the absence of an effective treatment. I doubt you set out to assert such an opinion, but this is how I took it.
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> - Scott
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poster:LostBoyinNC45
thread:1061206
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20120327/msgs/1061222.html