A Brief Rant about the Behavioral Health Model

I'm one of those caught up in the system, one of the crazies looking for support and relief from the madness from time to time.

In an attempt to combat my agoraphobia I've been looking for public places I can go where my madness will be accommodated and I can leave any time without it getting awkward for everyone.

There are community programs for the crazies like myself where I can go and find a supportive environment to just get out and not overburden myself with feeling like I have to try to be too normal. And they have yoga.

However, in recent years in an attempt to expand these programs it seems, they've rolled them in with drug counseling programs and such.


That's okay, or so I thought, except in practice I've been uncomfortable with it and I had to reflect on why.

Well, drugs come up in conversation among people in recovery, and my flavor of crazy tends to drive its host toward drug use, so being around a lot of people, a plurality of whom have been in a recent state of relapse or will relapse again is not necessarily the greatest place for me to be in. Recidivism is so high among this group.

I appreciate the extra community programs that wouldn't otherwise be there. Schizoaffective disorder only impacts about .3% of the population, so without the addicts there would be no community programs for those like me at all.

I mean, the official line is that treatment for both groups is largely the same, and maybe there's truth to that but I can't help but feel like this is a band aid over a larger issue, and that is that our society doesn't take mental illness seriously enough in general. It's a public health issue**, not an issue for prisons, where the bulk of us go. I'm fortunate I'm not one of them.

** It is for drug abuse too, and yet that's a different topic, which is rather the point of this topic.