I work at a university for eight years and I am allowed to bring my trained, pet therapy dog with me to work for the first seven years until my supervisor tells me that I have to see the ombudsman for permission to bring my dog to work with me.
I walk across campus on a Friday during the latter part of winter in 2007 to the ombudsman's office. I step into the ombudsman's office from the cold and await to be called for a meeting while the ombudsman immediately receives me stepping into the waiting room calling me into a back office.
Sitting at a table across from the ombudsman, the ombudsman begins to ask questions as to why I need to bring a dog to work.
"Because I am schizophrenic and everybody is scared of that!"
"How long have you been schizophrenic?"
I stand up like a bolt. I say that I am leaving.
"Oh! You can't just come in here ..."
"What!? Am I in trouble?"
"No. You are not in trouble."
"Then, I am leaving."
I leave the ombudsman's office at the first question, which triggers suicide ideation in me due to perceived stigma because of my diagnosis. A year later during May 2008: after random people in the university system are posting signs on my office door that dogs are not allowed, I hang myself with a rope at home. However, my then girlfriend saves my life with help of a carpenter who is working on a lower floor at the house.
When I am released from the psyche ward after two weeks, I go to the supervisor who sends me to the ombudsman during 2007 and quit. Before quitting on June 11, 2008, I ascend the elevator to the President's office where my supervisor's supervisor has an office.
I tell the supervisor's supervisor that when the ombudsman asks me "how long have you been schizophrenic" during 2007 because I bring a pet therapy dog to campus (a pet therapy dog with a history of providing comfort to retirement facility residents as well as admitted, hospital children), I have a good mind to ask the ombudsman "how long have you been black?"
Needless to say, I quit the next day on June 11, 2008 from a $12.64/hr job after eight years starting at $9.89/hr on June 12, 2000.
The ombudsman is not the only experience for me at the university involving stigma due to my diagnosis. During the first two weeks of my employment at the university, two supervisory co-workers invite me to a baseball game at a stadium nearby campus to which we walk.
At the baseball game on the clock during the latter part of June 2000 after two weeks at the university job, the two supervisory co-workers return to bleacher seats where we are seated with hot dogs and one of them says "he's crazy," assumedly referring to me who can't sit in the sun because of adverse reactions from a medication that I am prescribed.
People at seats below where I am seated are turning around and speaking in gestures seemingly about me saying:
"Do you see any friends here? I don't see any friends here."
I assume the comment refers to my one time letter to an editor at a newspaper about animal trapping whereby I begin my letter with "my friends of Maine, my heart palpitates," calling for an end to trapping in Maine because my dog is caught in a trap not five minutes into woods.
I commute from two hours north of the university during the summer of 2000 due to stigma seemingly directed at me by not only co-workers and supervisors, but by street urchins, strangers and others who see me around town on my bike with my dog in a basket on the back of the bike.
People say things out of thin air around town when I am present like "go back to Kansas" and "Dorothy" in reference to a commercial radio station advertising an event at the time of Pink Floyd music mirroring the Wizard of Oz movie.
To sum up: if there is one thing that angers me more than anything else, it is people who would assume to know about another person yet do not know themselves and so stigmatise those who appear or are in a compromised position or status in life.
I accept that people judge others based on everything from appearance, hearsay and actions, but what people in general fail to do is question their judgements and actions regarding minding one's own business. My motto at the university during my probationary, first year on the job is "say nothing, do nothing, keep your nose in your own papers, respond only and do what you are told on the double."
After the first year of probation, my eventual supervisor before the office is disbanded during June 2001 says to me in the office that "you have this down to a science, don't you Jim?" It is a year of living by my motto at the university before I am able to communicate that "sane" people ain't all that!
I keep the university job for eight years to the day and quit because I hang myself fed up with irreconcilable differences between myself and other people in my life due to my diagnosis of schizophrenia and the stigma it incurs.
Like I tell the ombudsman: "because people are scared of that," as if for the general public the word "schizophrenia" does not conjure scenes of axe murderers pillaging everybody in sight. Am I talking out of my ass as to how long the ombudsman has been "black" compared to the question of "how long have you been schizophrenic?"
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