Do you need to change?

Yesterday my sister and I were out shopping. We were looking through some DVDs, and getting rather giggly over some of them as we tend to do when shopping with each other, probably drawing attention to ourselves. No wonder, then, that a man who I suddenly realised had been staring at us, came over, pointed to a film we had just been discussing, and said in a high voice, with many stutters, that it was a good film. As I turned to him, it was quite obvious that he was “mentally handicapped” (I don’t know if that’s the current PC way to describe him, it seems rather insulting to me), and possibly homeless too. However, he didn’t seem like the next axe-murderer stereotype people fall into (the DVD he had pointed to was Miss Congeniality), and he wasn’t leering at us in any way or anything ridiculous like that, so I answered him as friendly as possible, saying that I liked it too. He proceeded to advise my sister and I not to buy anything for the sake of buying it, but to buy things because we really liked them, and I replied that that was very sensible. He continued to point out films which he liked, and I told him whether I liked them or not, when my sister, who I could tell was growing more uncomfortable the longer I spent talking to him (as, I think, were the people shopping around us) turned around to me and said “okay Ann, I’m going to get that thing we need to buy up there”, and turned and walked to the other end of the shop. Of course, we had had no plans to buy anything in particular – I was so irritated with her, mostly because she was treating someone as completely inferior to herself, who really wasn’t – nobody should be treated as inferior to yourself. I deliberately stayed where I was for a good few minutes, before he waved me goodbye, and I went to find my sister. The conversation which followed went something like this (House references explained in footnotes):

Me: I cannot believe you just walked away from that conversation! Talk about obvious – it was really rude.

Her: Yeah well… he was weird, it was freaky. It doesn’t matter.

Me: Still, you shouldn’t have done it! Just because he doesn’t have all of his brain cells, it doesn’t make him any less of a person. You had no right to treat him that way.

Her: Oh come on, big deal. Seriously, Ann, you’re starting to sound like Cameron¹.

Me: I am not! But even so…

Her: Look, the guy’s a weirdo. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, there’s no reason you should indulge him. It doesn’t matter.

Me: Chase…²

I’m not sure if I’m overly touchy on the subject of mental illness – after all, my sister was only removing herself from a situation she felt uncomfortable with. It’s more the stereotype that people have that upsets me, they think that mentally ill people are scary weirdos who are going to harm you in some way. They’re not. Most of the time, you won’t even know they have it, they’ll behave, for the most part, normally. And even if they don’t, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t have a conversation with them, the same as you would a friend – sometimes they’re friendlier than regular strangers you meet on the street.

When I was in London for Imperial’s open day, I saw some posters for a new “Time to change” campaign, aimed at changing people’s attitudes towards mental illness. I was so happy, I almost cried. I think it’s time people changed.

1. female doctor in House, who is often mocked by House for caring about people too much, and being too emotional [↩]
2. another doctor in House who tends to take House’s point of view, and would probably take same sort of view as my sister just did. [↩]

Tags: House, me, mental illness, sister, time to change