Man scapegoating & stigmatizing vulnerable & marginalized veterans on Facebook

Note: I often have links set to open in a new tab & try to indicate that using the mouse hover popup.

(Last edited/updated May 14, 2024)

Note: I didn't put a lot of effort into this page at this point & there may be added content.

This is a sociology presentation (work in progress) about a man's insistence on commenting on a Veterans Administration posting on the Meta (Facebook) social media platform. (Screen captures included here in conformance with fair use in this criticism.)

This man, Alan Smiley, was attempting to educate everyone about schizophrenia with regards to U.S military personnel. The original post from the Veterans Administration was in lines with a public service announcement meant to be educational in nature, and even though it's controversial for me due to subject matter, the post was inclusive and dignified. What Alan commented was the exact opposite of inclusive and dignified.

It isn't difficult to figure out the problem with the idea of a person with schizophrenia serving actively in the military but the context relies heavily on pseudo-scientific labels, misinformation, exaggeration, anecdotal evidence, and mere stereotype. The man is using the platform to scapegoat people he doesn't know and commenting about something he has no knowledge of. What he was commenting was more than insulting, it was cruel in the way that anyone affected by his derogatory words isn't in the position to challenge him. Epitome of the bully pulpit.

Research has shown that people in the "mentally ill" demographic are more likely to be victims of violence than an average person. People in the demographic are survivors of abuse and trauma, etc. (I usually do my best to make that clear ... the reality would only stand to reason but the topic can sure make people reveal their true character!) The movie "Girl, interrupted" is about a young woman who is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, but it would be inconceivable that there was no possible way that the woman's overall problem could be connected to some prior trauma that she experienced. The issue then usually gets to be about what trauma she could've experienced, and who caused it. Of course that'd be human nature to consider that, but there's possibilities to be aware of in regards to her circumstances or socioeconomic status. The first point is that anytime people discuss a person's possible prior trauma it can be assumed that the trauma was during childhood and then, by extension, it might be assumed that the abuse was committed by her parents. It's also common to associate the (possible) child abuse with being parental and then, by extension, figure that the parents would be stereotypical abusive parents who were consistently abusive, instead of being a few isolated events. Of course it could then be assumed that maybe the woman is exaggerating when there were a few times when she was physically abused but nobody ever noticed. The strange phenomenon that is overlooked by people who aren't familiar with trauma and the effects is that it's really never only one person in the person's life that was abusive toward them. Time and again you can hear people who've suffered child abuse reveal that there were other people in their lives who were also physically abusive, including siblings and even friends or acquaintances. In brief, people who've suffered trauma can be a bit strange (to others) and sometimes that strangeness might be merely revealing a compassion or sympathy for other people that the person's cultural group (i.e., their family, friends, coworkers, etc.) do not agree that the others are worthy of the consideration. Undocumented immigrants are a good example for that point.

My mentioning immigrants may seem unrelatable but a person who's experienced trauma and felt outcasted could relate to the insurmountable difficulty of changing your circumstances while living in an environment where you're oppressed. It's not difficult to figure out that it's people who are abusive to other people that would even argue about the precise definition of oppressed, what it entails exactly, or some other trivial aspect of the given example. People have a natural tendency to sympathize with or defend a person or entity that's in a more powerful (or influential) position, initially anyway. In social science that phenomenon is the "Just World" ideology, where people will lean towards an idea that people get what they deserve. Another way to explain it is with the rudimentary philosophy of Theory of Forms, where there exists the perfect form of the associated entity that is unchangeable and so if a person experiences a problem with the entity then the person is the one who bears the responsibility by not accepting or conforming to the entity's immutable standards. Of course the people who like to impose the double-standard on people who are vulnerable and disadvantaged are not so accepting when it's some entity that they have dealings with that is corrupted. There's the people who use language such as "allowing yourself to be a victim" that insist on setting the criteria for what constitutes another person's strength or weakness.

In a relatable issue, it's culturally acceptable to charge minors as adults for crimes in an arbitrary fashion and is a human rights issue but is one of the issues to where I would be expected to accept it as being congruent with our nation's posit, to put it simply. In reality though it's another issue to use to abuse people who are compassionate, is all.

Please note: I get into many debates with people on social media and this is my way of finding/presenting resolution. This page is a template of sorts that I'm re-using for this douche, Cpt. Anonymous (I'll call him), so the text may be a bit dis-jointed at this time. I will work on it but in meantime it's critical that I make this point that in this case, with what this man said about "schizophrenics not being in the military because they'd never make it through basic training" is not true. I attempted to explain that there can be an onset of the condition in a person's late twenties and so a person could very well have served in the U.S. military, received honorable discharge, and be diagnosed with schizophrenia just the same as any other specific diagnoses of "mental illness". All this man is doing is relying on and promoting the reinforcement of stigma and stereotype of a cultural label that's based on anecdotal evidence (rumor) that really only exists because of a human desire to consider some other person(s) as inferior, even if that means blatant exaggeration and deliberate misinterpretation (see: Wikipedia's article: Fundamental attribution error). So what this man is actually doing is in contradiction to the maxim of "No man left behind" since the real veterans that are being referred to here are being ignored and abandoned in their plight due to bias. It could even be argued that veterans were falsely imprisoned in the psychiatric system (as were civilians) and so there would be a point for the captors to justify the action or else they'd be committing a terrible crime. Nobody who was part of the medical community has ever used their position and bureaucracy to cover up their crimes? Do people really think psychiatry is that perfect?

Sites of mine that are immediately relatable to this issue:

• allofus.report is in regards to the VA's participation in pseudo-scientific research of genetic association with human behavior
• atadcrazy.org/va is information for those involved with VA behavioral health
• psychrights.net/ is general sociology information related to behavioral health