No one here seems interested in the grimy parts of mental health. Everyone wants to talk about mental illness as quiet introverts drinking tea and nervously stuttering over words. No one ever talks about symptoms like paranoia or hallucinations or hypersexuality or compulsions or homelessness or drug addiction or delusions or psychosis or violent urges. Every time a clearly mentally ill person commits a crime, and someone says, “Hey, maybe this is a sign that we need to improve mental health awareness in this country,” everyone goes to screaming: “This isn’t about mental illness! Mentally ill people aren’t violent!”

But yes, sometimes mentally ill people are violent. Sometimes we are bad people. And even those mentally ill people are in need of advocacy, maybe even more so.

When you post “Protect people with mental illnesses at all costs,” do you mean all of us, or just the cute ones?