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I’m not really sure who remembers that I was on Anderson Cooper’s show in March 2013 for a segment about moms who take anxiety medication. There was a clear bias in the way the subject was handled, but I wrote a companion piece to further explore what I talked about on the show, a post I called You Will Not Shame Me – The Stigma of Mental Illness and Prescription Drugs. As it is April 2015 now, two years has passed since I appeared on Anderson Live, and I’ve had countless people thank me for talking openly about my mental illness because it made them feel like they weren’t alone.

So imagine my surprise when I was checking my blog stats the other day and found this comment pending, two years later:

I had to shrink the image because it was quite wide, so here is an exact transcription:

i would love to try to see you hurt my sister she knows what she is talking about drugs do not make you a better parent you are a stupid woman and you probably sleep all day because of your drugs. You don’t have the slitest clue what goes on because you are to busy passing on because you are on Xanax moron my sister totally won the argue men on this show.

I have a few things I would like to say to Sammy, the sibling of the woman who verbally attacked me on national television.

First of all, I would never want to hurt your sister, and I can’t imagine why you think I would want to. In fact, my anger at anything your sister said is based firmly in indignation at the accusations she made about both moms with anxiety disorders in general and me personally. I did not choose to have an anxiety disorder, and my psychiatrist is a medical doctor who has helped me find the right balance of medications to treat it with the lowest doses possible. I am being proactive about trying to be as healthy as I can be in mind and body – for the good of myself and my family.

You made this personal, and you didn’t have to. You insulted me as a parent and as a person – and you did it more than two years after I appeared in a five-minute TV segment with your sister and wrote a blog post about the subject. What I would like to focus on is that you bothered to look up my blog post after two years in the first place.

If you still have such strong feelings that compel you to demonize anyone who takes psychiatric drugs that you had to search me out, I think you should consider why you couldn’t help but call me a “stupid woman” and a “moron.” If you’d read the post you left your comment on, you would know that I’m not sleeping all day passed out on Xanax because I did take it once and it did turn me into a zombie – and that was unacceptable to me.

Having a graduate degree in psychology means I’ve actually studied psychopharmaceuticals – that means any drug that affects a person’s mental state – and understand their mechanisms of action, thanks to a professor who was an expert in the field, having helped conduct some landmark studies on certain drugs. My degree also helped me recognize projection when I see it, and you’re using me as a target because you can’t actually confront the person responsible for your antipathy.

But I digress; this is about you. I can’t diagnose you from your brief paragraph, but let me run a few scenarios by you. Maybe one of your parents was neglectful because of substance abuse – whether prescription pills or something else – and you therefore distrust any type of medications and assume that anyone who takes them must also be a “bad parent.” You have to blame the drugs because you can’t blame the person who chose to abuse the pills as a form of escape. Maybe it wasn’t your parent, but the parent of someone else you care deeply about. Or maybe you two have your own struggles with anxiety but fear seeking treatment because of the stigma attached to mental illness, so you have to think of people who seek treatment as weaker or somehow less than you because that makes you the stronger, better people for “toughing it out” without treatment.

But it’s not really about me. Because I know I’m not stupid, I know I’m not a moron, and I know I don’t even take the Xanax you assume I’m abusing. I know I wasn’t having an argument with your sister on live television. I was simply stating facts in response to judgmental, loaded questions I couldn’t believe someone could say to another person’s face. I know that you feel it’s very important to your world view to establish that you are “right,” that you are “better” than me. You wouldn’t have to resort to name-calling if it wasn’t about trying to denigrate me and establish your presumed superiority.

I hope you find peace, Sammy. I hope you find love, and compassion, and happiness, and a way to get past the bad that has happened in your life. You will not find these things through misplaced anger and looking for outside targets to blame. I hope you have a safe place with a safe person to talk through your feelings with. That is the first step to healing.

Christina Gleason ( 974 Posts That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a professional copywriter, editor, and blogger. My company is called Phenomenal Content. (Hire me!) I'm a multiply disabled autistic woman doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and select types of gaming, including Twitch Sings and Plants vs Zombies 2. I hate vegetables. I have an intense phone phobia, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or IM instead.