Does not equip you to diagnose me with mental health issues. However, this is much education medical professionals get on Mental Health. 30 minutes.
There was an article recently that said starting in 2027 doctors would go from 2 years to 3 years of training, so they would be better equipt to deal with addictions, mental health issues, and Indigenous, Black, and Brown issues.
Doctors voted vehemently against it.
Doctors are not prepared to deal with folks who have complex mental health issues. To this day my (newish) doctor is convinced that because I am schizophrenic, I thus must also be making up years and decades really of sexual abuse and rape trauma.
It’s frustrating to exist in a reality where Doctors convince themselves that patients make up the realities that we live with.
I don’t want to be the person who swears up and down that I did in fact get raped for years, by the same boys who were children when it started, and adults when it finished. I hate knowing that men I loved, and trusted, turned on me and became the enemy instead of being the heroes that I wanted and needed for them to be.
Instead of Prince Charming, I got Dracula, and people would rather say “Devon made it all up,” than focus on the fact that I have genuine scars all over my body, that come from being raped, tortured, and traumatized, by men who should have kept their hands to themselves.
I have to keep saying that because I am being gaslit by my doctor, into thinking that I made it all up because I’m crazy.
Actually, that’s wrong. You can think whatever you want about me, think I made it up, think I’m crazy if you need to, if that makes you feel more comfortable, but don’t tell me that’s what you’re thinking and that’s how you’re feeling, because I no longer care.
It is not my responsibility to make the world more comfortable, about living with the fact that the system that should have protected me as a child, failed me miserably, by choice, because of racism and racial bias.
If I had been a white child, I would have been protected, loved, and encouraged in school. But largely because I was a Brown/Black kid, all the supports and systems that would have protected me were used to weaponize against me, so that I would be too afraid to come forward and explain why I was missing school and what was happening to me.
If I had felt safe, if I had had the words I needed, to come forward, don’t you think I would have, decades ago? I didn’t come forward because I didn’t know that there were people who would have protected me, so again, if I could have, I would have.
What I need, is for the people who come into my life to understand that my mental health issues came before you, and they aren’t going anywhere. I have valid reasons for being traumatized and scarred, and I am not afraid to admit that.
When I do feel the need to hide, it’s largely because I can tell the people I am with don’t understand or care, about what I’ve been through.
These days I don’t tell my trauma story to just anyone, I tell it to people I think can understand, people who I genuinely want to have a better connection with. I use it to build bridges where there are deep crevasses so that I can get closer to the folks who matter to me.
There are folks out there who absolutely loathe that I came forward because in their circles they had to answer the questions they had been avoiding for years.
“Where were you?” “Why didn’t you help?” “Why didn’t YOU say something?” There were lots of people who knew and did nothing to help. For a lot of us.
A lot of us adults would have been better off, if the adults in OUR lives, had taken the “no man is an island,” quote seriously.
None of us get out of this life alive, but all of us would be better off if people made the decision to intervene when they see something happening, that shouldn’t be happening.
Earlier today I got into a conversation about gangs on X, one of the things I said was that gangs wouldn’t be a reality if the system that surrounded communities were gangs exist, was set up to give kids different options.
If kids had encouragement in school, if they had after-school activities, if they had jobs, if they had other avenues of support instead of relying on economically devastated parents, and overworked educational systems alone, gangs wouldn’t be an option
. The reason that most kids become abusers, is because they are taught at an early age that their lives don’t matter. What if we taught kids – all kids, regardless of age, race, creed, nationality, size, orientation, educational ability, or economic status – that their lives DO in fact matter.
What kind of a world could we have then?
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 