is my enemy. Under its rancid umbrella Stigma sleeps lingeringly, like souls damned to hell believing hell on earth to be a better place for them. They will not leave. A hateful lot of ugly bedfellows they torment, deceive, and corrupt everyone including me who relate to the mentally ill. Stigma compels us all to judge silently the mentally ill. Beneath the umbrella this is what is spoken out loud. "It's no illness unless weakness of character and immorality have become illnesses. We have choices and the mentally ill choose to play on the kindness of strangers. Bent on their own destruction, no less than suicide bombers and murderers the world over, depressed people--so-called--take as many with them as they are able. Misery loves company." Among the company under the black dogged umbrella is also judgment, chastisement, distrust, fear, and abhorrence. They are alive but not well under stigma's secret protection.
The following pages talk about the silent enemy of the mentally ill...stigma. Stigma judges. Stigma chastises. Stigma distrusts. Stigma fears, abhors, and detests noise. Stigmatic silence is a very quiet killer. But why are people so quiet when it comes to talking about how people in general collaborate to isolate and eventually reject even close friends who are mentally ill? I don't know, but in the next pages I need to talk about it with you.
