[quote=@TheDookieNut]
It's not the religion thing that bothers me. It's the fact that this person is ignoring how much help there is available outside of a state prison. Mental Illness isn't like it was 100 years ago. It's understood now. All you have to do if find a doctor and ask for help. It's not hard.
[/quote]

Let me put it this way; there's still a lot of stigma for it. And finding a doctor is just about the first step and for people with really serious issues, it's a lifelong struggle to cope.

How do I know? Because I have an IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease; Crohn's and Colitis), it's a physical problem and a chronic condition but I have to do a bunch of shit to keep it from overcoming me. If untreated and left unchecked, my immune system shuts down my digestive system. Not everyone is as lucky for a variety of reasons, such as the medication being very expensive and not widely approved for everyone. 

Some people can't keep it under control and live a ghoulish existence of constant pain and incontinence, and because the symptoms appear in the toilet bowl and are otherwise internal, it can seem like 'just bitching' to an outsider. And then that outsider googles it and sees "oh, it's stress related" (which is essentially not really the case-- IBS more so than IBD; but the two get confused) so clearly a person can control it...oh yes, I've see the stories on support forums, when I was hanging out there. Because people didn't understand how it worked, or the symptoms, and didn't see evidence, they blew it off. I learned a good lesson from that -- the last time someone wanted to question the reality of my illness, I took a picture of blood and poop in the bowl and sent it to the motherfucker on facebook.

Argument won. 

I still have, five years later, a picture of that bloody poop just in case I ever get another motherfucker like that again. (I'd update, but I've been in remission a long time.)

Too bad people with mental illness can't take a picture of their symptoms. It gets mistaken for a drug addict or an alcoholic (a conversation about drug/alcohol abuse among the mentally ill can wait for another day) or something else. It'd make life easier.

So with people suffering from a mental illness, I try to keep the bloody poop in mind. It's my metaphor for all the shit I don't understand because I'm not there and it's the reason I try to find as much solidarity as I can with the mentally ill.