Stigma

We look at Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five and we can immediately say he suffers from what is commonly known as PTSD, a mental illness. So many of us are quick to judge and say he's 'crazy.' We see all he's experienced and we understand why he would suffer from such an illness, and we sympathize, but we still call him crazy. I'm not saying we're bad people or that we're wrong, but we're only seeing it from one perspective. Billy is mentally ill and he is coping. His coping, to us, looks like lunacy. He talks to aliens and travels in time. It's funny and weird and unfathomable. It's creativity on the part of the writer, but for some people it's reality.
There are a lot of people in Canada and the United States living with mental illness. This is not news to us. Many of us probably know one or more of these people, and we know they're not crazy. They can't change the way things are for them. I have a really close friend who lives with someone suffering with a mental illness. Talking to her, I have learned a lot about what it is to live with someone suffering from mental illness. It is not something that is easy and it takes a lot of patience, which only comes with time. My friend, who has also read this novel, says that there are certain things it has reminded her of, certain experiences she can relate to. Although the person she lives with has a different illness, she understands the stigma and she also understands what Billy has to go through.
The thing she says she notices most though, is the difference in the person. She lived with this person prior to the recognition of symptoms and the diagnosis and she continues to live with this person, and she says that although this person is fundamentally the same, this person has changed in a lot of ways. I think this kind of relates to Billy pre and post war. He was this innocent, frightened young man before he left and he come back so much older and so changed by the war that he could hardly relate to people anymore.
When I've talked to my friend about this book, she says that a lot of the things Billy does, things we would probably judge as crazy, are in fact, things people really do, methods of coping. For different people, they are different, but they are related, and to people who are just seeing these things from the outside, they may seem odd. They probably are odd, but they are how this person gets through.