Perhaps clinical depression should be awarded identity status. Or those with multiple personality disorder should be referred to as the MPD community. While we are at it, why don’t we just go full acronym-mad and begin talking about the SMPCD (Schizophrenic, Multiple Personality, Clinically Depressed) community and their allies. After the movement has gained some traction, we can lengthen the acronym to include sociopaths and eventually psychopaths as well.
Undoubtedly, these differently oriented individuals suffer significant prejudice in society, negative bias in the media, and discrimination in the workplace (with the possible exception of psychopaths, who occupy perhaps 4% of high level executive positions in the corporate world and in the finance sector). While all the attention has been on the right of transgender people to use the public toilets that correspond to their chosen gender identity, we have yet to hear about the right of claustrophobic individuals to be spared the trauma of a bathroom stall, and accommodated with an open public safe space to defecate free from hate and intolerance.
Members of the SMPCD community are in an uphill battle against backwards and ultra-Right wing hate-mongers who regard their identities as “pathologies” and “disorders”.
Indeed, the SMPCD community are misunderstood victims of the rigid social construct of “mental health” and face regular harassment and bigotry by Pathophobes asking them insulting questions like, “what’s wrong?”; “are you ok?” and “please put the gun down”.
They struggle against narrow-minded, obsolete notions about their identities which still regard them as mental and psychological disorders to be “cured” rather than celebrated.
An SMPCD activist explains, “It doesn’t matter if you don’t hear the voices in their heads; if they hear them, they are real, and you have no right to deny their truth”.
Members of the Clinically Depressed community still, in 2018, must fear losing their job just because they are absent from work several days in a row, because employers have yet to recognise their right to sit on their couches at home with the curtains drawn eating tubs of ice cream. As one CD man said “I’m depressed, that’s what I do. If I went in to the office I would be living a lie. I just hope someday I can live in a society that can embrace me for what I am”.
This is the next major Civil Rights struggle, the rights of the people of different mental orientation. An SMPCD ally says, “I acknowledge my privilege as a person who is generally happy, seldom experiences hallucinations, and who identifies as a single personality. And I fully honor and embrace my SMPCD sisters and brothers for their ability to see things in the world the rest of us can’t see and hear things we can’t hear. I salute their bravery in listening to the disembodied voices that tell them buttered toast wants to kill them; I admire their ability to be more than one person at a time; and I value their journey that has led them to believe in the utter meaninglessness of existence. They are truly heroic”.