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Anonymous,
I'm sorry for what you've been through, and hope things are getting better for you.
Thanks for sharing your story. It articulates very well why people who are diagnosed with mental illness need and deserve the support and assistance of those closest to them, the people who know them the best.
As it stands, the mental health system is too much like the penal system. You may be innocent, but once charges are brought against you, the world begins to view you in a different light. And if a guilty verdict is reached, it becomes awfully hard to turn things around, even if (as still happens all too often) the wrong charges -- or diagnoses --have been brought against you. Except mental patients don't automatically get an advocate to represent their interests in the mental health system. Patients themselves are discounted, because they 'don't know what they're talking about,' they're 'crazy,' after all -- 'out of touch with reality.'
Mental health diagnoses and treatments are often determined -- especially in the case of the indigent and immigrants -- in a very cursory, subjective, pseudo-scientific closed circuit. (Kind of like the 'diagnoses' that so often appear among these letters: "bipolar!" "bpd!" "manic!")
It's more likely due lack of training, time and resources than malevolence on the part of anyone out there in the real world, but that hardly matters when a misdiagnosis affects you or someone close to you. This special circle of hell is really just an extension of the overburdened, inadequate medical system.
Mental illness and the stigma surrounding it often causes people to push away anyone who dares care about them. We must help care for them anyway, with the support of professional intermediaries, rather than leave them stranded to navigate a deeply flawed system all by themselves.
