Crisis by Protyus A. Gendher
Crisis
Let’s take a look at the DSM
The Diagnostic Manual of human experience
Mental health is an ongoing experiment
Normal defined in your distance from it
Neurotypical misalignment
Is the commonality that binds us
The thing about mental health
Is that it makes us require help
For some of us only once in a while
Struggling to face the world with a smile
Others battling every single day
To keep a plethora of symptoms away
Normal’s an anomaly
Putting pressure on us to belief
That we’re somehow broken
Leaving pleas for help unspoken
Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed
Because dread
Seeps underneath
The veil we keep
Sometimes it’s hard to catch our breath
Our minds a wreck
Cannot meet with expec-
Tations
Sometimes the traumas of our past
Out last
Their place behind us
Still confining us
Sometimes we find ourselves pushed to our limits
Thinking we should rid this
World of our presence
Hard to stay in this
Our brains
Not the same
Leave us torn
From your norm
Failing to conform
Impossible to perform
Because we’re different
And all the help’s spent
Catastrophizing thoughts
Cascading mental stops
Spiraling
Why can’t I control me?
Feels like ending
With no one listening
Fading away
From the grasp that could save us
Or unmake us
Fixation
Proper placement
Not casually adjacent
Or I’ll have to replace it
Again
And again
Makes it hard to make friends
Hard to trust myself in these trends
I’ve tried, but can’t stop my hands
I’m outside of my body again
Dissociation
Could it be my pain this time
Or is it the situation
Something in the conversation
That has me gone
Detached and numb
Executive disfunction
Is life malfunction
In conjunction
With a social label
“Lazy” but able
My own hater
Blasted stims
Can’t keep them in
Can’t mask enough
To fit in my skin
Sometimes I can’t breathe
Panic taking over me
It keeps getting too big
In a world so overwhelming
My dad took his life when I was ten
Now there’s a semicolon on my skin
A pandemic of experience
Sometimes so hard to stay here in this
Life
This Day
So many ways
To have divergent faces
Society does not embrace this
I could stand here today and go on and on
Of how most of us are deprived of song
And could be diagnosed as being wrong
But I won’t keep you long
Mental illness is more common than you think
Sometimes it runs in families
Sometimes rooted in our history
Our behavioral psychology
It’s said 1 in 5 adults experience it for themselves
For 2019 that’s what the National Alliance on Mental Illness said
But each of us affects other lives
Individual mental health affects more than 5
So, no one’s immune from feeling effects
Nobody safe from what normal expects
Nobody benefits
From a refusal to face this
Remaining silent and complacent
A system that punishes difference
Was never meant to fix this
Can’t intimidate Depression back into place
Can’t punish Autism till we fall in good graces
Can’t restrain an obsessive mind
Thinking that doing time
Will make us toe the line
Penalizing
And Chastisement
Leave both people and resources spent
Without anything getting better yet
And we’ve got to question what help we would get
When we dial 911, and are met with a bullet
Helping’s not that complicated
Prioritize deescalating
Instead of sending instigators
Rely on people better equipped
To value life, and try to save it.
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What do you think?