It happened a little over a week ago, but in case you didn’t hear, China executed a man named Akmal Shaikh due to charges of drug trafficking.
This isn’t going to be a blog post about the death penalty or China’s sketchy laws and politics (if you feel like you need to know, I’m against the death penalty, but for sadistic reasons: spending your life in prison is about a hundred times worse than just dying and being through with it [since hell isn't real, in case you didn't know that, either]). What really disturbs me about the happenings of this event is the fact that Shaikh was seriously mentally ill, and no one bothered to do anything about it.
Shaikh was held in custody in China for about 2 years after he was convicted of drug smuggling — a whole pile of heroin. Despite numerous claims that he was tricked into carrying the drugs into the country, China denied that he had any sort of recorded mental disorder.
Whether or not a mental disorder was recorded, you’d think at least one person would look into getting him assessed to see if there was one to record in the two years he spent in Chinese prison. Wouldn’t you? His family kept asserting that he was suffering from very serious bipolar disorder. That really, really should have set off a red flag for someone. But it didn’t, and no one bothered to get him assessed, and now a sick man is dead for something he did not mean to do, and was in no way in control of doing.
It’s not just China. This happens a lot. In British Columbia, 2 years ago, a bipolar man off his meds was shot 8 times by a cop. And the cop didn’t get charged because there was “insufficient evidence that excessive force was used.” What?? Okay, the man was obviously in a psychotic, manic state: he was trying to attack the officer with a hammer. But there are ways to disarm people. You tase him, you shoot him in the knees, but you don’t shoot him eight times, especially when you’ve seem him talking to a hammer and can tell he is obviously not in his normal state of mind.
Likely it is difficult, if you are a mentally healthy person, to understand how anyone could possibly be tricked into smuggling 4kg of heroin into China, or how anyone could be delusional enough to attack police officers with a hammer. That’s what this blog post is about — the general public understands shockingly little about mental illness. I know so many people who think schizophrenia means that someone just has voices in their head (and many find this hilarious, somehow; I must have missed the joke), or think that when someone is bipolar it means they have two personalities (or when bipolar disorder is referred to as manic depression, that it means someone is just very, very depressed). This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Schizophrenia is so complex and unique for each person that I cannot even begin to describe it. Bipolar disorder comes in many flavours and intensities, too, but the general idea is that a person with bipolar disorder suffers intense, random mood swings, from incredibly depressed to incredibly manic (which can be I’m-gonna-stay-up-for-a-week-and-drive-across-Canada kind of crazy, or I’m-afraid-of-everything kind of crazy, mostly) and everything in between.
It also might seem difficult to picture people who had to be murdered by police officers and lethal injection being as their families describe them: absolutely normal most of the time. But, millions of people have bipolar disorder. You probably know someone that does. In fact, you do know someone, because I’m bipolar. Mind, I don’t have it nearly as bad as most people, since I am type 2 (that’s right, we have types), or as I like to call it, Manic Depression: Bronze Edition™. While I do carry around a small pharmacy in my stomach, do that utterly-depressed thing from time to time (we bronze types tend to keep to the depressed side and save the real crazy mania for the type ones), sometimes don’t sleep for a week and have a handful of irrational paranoias, I’m generally more eccentric than crazy. You probably never noticed that I’m technically crazy.
The men in these news stories were clearly very manic, going through psychotic episodes. The scary part is that while I’ve never been psychotic, I know exactly how irrationally paranoid the man from BC must have been. My mania manifests itself as intense anxiety, like many other BP2s. He did not mean to attack those police officers, and that is what makes events like this so tragic.
There is a lot of stigma attached to being mentally interesting (as I like to call it) and not much is being done to combat the stigma. Worse is the widespread ignorance about mental illness. And the ignorance is probably not your fault. I don’t remember learning very much at all about bipolar disorder or anything else beyond “teenage feelings” in grade school. In fact, I didn’t know what bipolar disorder really was until I was diagnosed, and that was only a year and a half ago.
What I ask of you is to learn a little bit about mental illness, so maybe tragedies like what befell these two people (and many others) will happen much less frequently. Someone will be absolutely grateful to you for it. I will be. It is important to understand that it’s a disease, like having diabetes or asthma. You can’t get rid of it by thinking positively, and it will only get worse if you ignore it, much like a broken leg would. Just like a diabetic can’t snap into a mindset to get his or her sugar level back to normal, a bipolar person can’t just shake off the depression or come down from the mania.
Be careful of carelessly using mental illnesses to describe unrelated things. Think about it before you laugh at how “OCD” you are because you carry hand sanitizer around, or say that someone is “anorexic” because they are skinny (newsflash: you don’t decide to be anorexic, guys; it’s a disease, too, one that is extremely difficult to recover from). Don’t call someone who changes their mind frequently “bipolar”. I’m actually pretty decisive, you know. And whatever you do, never call anyone “schizo”. You have no idea what a terrible disease schizophrenia is to have until you have met someone who really has it. Even though I know no harm is often meant by it, I feel a sting any time anyone says things like this. It’s just as bad as “ugh, that movie was so gay” and “that test totally raped me.”
Someone, someday, will be extremely happy that you know some real facts about mental illness. Because the stigma is very real, and it’s incredibly difficult to tell people you have something like bipolar disorder. I’m trying pretty hard to be “out” about it (clearly). Most of the time they won’t believe you (the “think positive and it’ll go away” or the “it’s just a phase,” etc.), or they’ll think you are crazy and might kill them in their sleep because they are misinformed. But sometimes, someone actually understands and accepts it, and it is such a relief. You can be that person for someone.
