We're all too quick to judge people, says Doncaster writer Lisa Fouweather

A 'sane reaction to insane circumstances', it's not madness that you are observing, but a person trying to survive.

As a society, we're all too quick to judge each other when we diverge away from what we are told is 'the norm', when, even in the face of blatant oppression and discrimination, we are brandished as being 'in the wrong' if we refuse to conform.

(And, by 'refuse to conform', I mean 'refuse to be complicit as they exhibit blatant discrimination against the marginalised').

When we see someone slumped in a doorway who may or may not be dead, and we're expected to walk on by regardless because, 'yesterday they were off their head', shouting and swearing, 'the local crackhead...'

We're all too quick to judge.

When we hear the word 'psychotic', and we immediately think of knife-wielding schizophrenics, 'the voices tell me to kill', and we're expected to label them as 'evil', when they are just mentally ill.

We're all too quick to judge.

We're all too quick to judge the behaviour, but not the cause, condemned by the same society that is the very cause of our collective downfall.

A sane reaction to insane circumstances, it's not madness you are observing, it's a person trying to survive.

An important question in psychiatry shouldn't be 'What's wrong with you?', but rather, 'What's happened to you?'

By condemning the behaviour and not the cause, we are just perpetuating a cycle of mental illness, and anti-social behaviour, and crime and deviance, forevermore.

Tell a serial offender to stop stealing, and they will laugh in your face.

Because, before you can tell the poor to stop stealing, first you need to sort out Britain's crippling welfare state.

No one wakes up one day deciding to be an addict, or a schizophrenic, or in and out of prison for the rest of their lives. Usually, mental illness, and crime and deviance, are born from trauma, as people turn to something in an attempt to escape from everything, when reality just feels 'too much...'

So, instead of brandishing people as 'evil', 'lock 'em all in prison and throw away the key', or 'dangerous' put 'em on psychotics so they can't harm me', can we please show some humanity (if we've got any left).

The man slumped in the doorway doesn't want copper change, he wants systematic change.

Instead of sending an angry email to your local councillor about the state of the city centre - 'crackheads and prostitutes on every corner', consider sending an email asking them to do better.

Because, regardless of Suella Braverman and her ridiculous spiel last year about people 'choosing to be homeless', no one chooses to be homeless. People are on the streets because society cannot meet their basic needs – simple.

There's no disputing that there's a drug problem, and that drugs clearly exasperate poverty, but the drug problem, the addiction, is there for a reason, and that reason?

Society.

Whether society is directly to blame, through cuts to the welfare state, toying with the working class like it's all just a game, or indirectly, systematic failures where child abuse goes unchecked, and mental health is dismissed because, 'well, it's all just in your head...'

Gaslighting us into thinking that it's all just in our head.

'What do you mean you have to wait about 20 years for a doctor's appointment?. Think of yourself lucky that you've got the NHS!'

'If you don't want your trans daughter to be murdered, just don't let her wear a dress!'

'Simple!'

Victim blaming, naming and shaming, 'stop complaining...' 'Simple!' that society is to blame, yet society pins the blame on the very people whom they have singlehandedly turned into this state.

'Lock 'em up and throw away the key' is what you said about the serial thief, the hypocrisy of this, getting away scot-free when for the past 14 years (and counting) under Tory leadership, you have been stripping away every last scrap of humanity.

And then, when we find ourselves in a mental health epidemic, you dismiss it away as insanity – 'It's all just in your head.'

The prime example of why you 'shouldn't let power get to your head...'

But, it's too late, the powers already got to your head, evident in how you are so quick, undeterred, to continue to oppress, forgetting that there is no difference between you in Number 10 and the man slumped in the doorway in Doncaster who may or may not be dead.

Human is human, the only difference is that, unlike you, we actually have some humanity left.