Damn. I work in mental health myself. Have seen plenty of people who were very unwell and have no memory of just how unwell they were - particularly individuals with mania - so I do hesitate to judge the individuals involved in the story without a right of reply.

BUT I have also seen plenty of occasions where people with genuine feelings about a situation at work - anger, sadness, exhaustion - were being lazily attributed to illness. It can provide a scapegoat, allow you to ignore the changes that genuinely need to happen.

At times there is a history of mental illness too *but just because you have a mental illness doesn't mean all your negative emotions and controversial opinions are invalid or illness-related*. Yeah as an individual with a history of mental illness and maybe you're the first person to visibly lose function in a toxic environment. Doesn't mean the environment isn't toxic. Maybe you're just the first person to speak up and it has nothing to do with your prior episodes of illness. (Not suggesting this is the case with our writer, but just making the point that once you have the "mental illness" label it can just add to your disenfranchisement).

Because of the vagaries of where I've worked, the individuals in question were often people who were white, middle class, and mental health literate. And universally their experience was awful and demeaning. I can't imagine how much more awful it is when race is added into the mix, but if recent weeks have taught us nothing else, it should have shown us how legitimate feelings of anger or dissatisfaction expressed by people of colour will be that much more likely to be ignored or seen as a threat by people in positions of authority.

Cheers for the link, has given me something to reflect on in my own work.

You're welcome! Unfortunately it seems that PoC have hurdles to get proper medical care across the board. I can't find the article where I first learned of it, but it was something about a black doctor who had to personally arrange every aspect of her high risk pregnancy to make sure that the doctors she would be interacting with during her birth would be familiar with her to ensure that she would receive any pain care she needed. Of freaking course, as luck would have it, she went into labor during some holiday or something and found herself surrounded by doctors she didn't know who refused to give her anything stronger than tylenol. So while she's in the middle of dealing with pain from pregnancy complications, she's also on the phone trying to get a hold of her own doctors. Crazy stuff.

Why middle-class black women dread the doctor’s office | Berkeley News

This game is a 1-trick pony anyway, and now it will be so corporatized that their frat-boy audience will move on to something new.

In a post-covid world it's all about Quiplash now anyways.