Folks with mental-health issues are encouraged to create emergency plans for when things go wrong, but scant attention is given to wellness plans that prevent things from going wrong in the first place. To make matters worse, emergency plans are behavior-driven, when we should instead focus on the dozens of easily trackable biomarkers that indicate the presence or absence of metabolic/circadian homeostasis and that precede behavioral issues by days if not weeks.

Why don’t we do that? Because those with mental health issues are routinely dehumanized, discriminated against, abused, maligned, written off, and seen as incapable of attaining health, wellness, and happiness. The system doesn’t even try to help us be fully human and to live full, productive, creative, enriching lives.

We aren’t as far away from locked rooms, back wards, lobotomies, electric shock, insulin shock, and chemical lobotomies as we think. The medical establishment still treats us like that’s where we belong and that’s what we deserve. (And in the case of electroconvulsive therapy and chemical lobotomies, they’re still happening, just not as barbarically, one could argue.)

So when I resigned from my role at the University of Arizona and passed a vehicle on my way out with a bumper sticker that read Ask Me About My Lobotomy, I was understandably livid. That sticker encapsulates all the sanist* comments I heard while working at UA, from library customers being called meth heads and trash humans to the word crazy routinely being used to describe people and situations to the phrase homeless people being used with derision.

Fuck all of that. UA culture, go fuck yourself.

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* Sanism is a subset of ableism, so these are more examples of the ableism I witnessed or that was directed at me while employed at UA.