I am very concerned about your reply to Sinead O'Connor's heartfelt advice to you
I don't care if you want to flaunt your sexuality. You are, after all, an adult. You are no longer Hannah Montana, and I can understand that you wish to make that fact known to your millions of fans all over the world.
What I find really disturbing is your attitude towards mental health issues. You show total disregard to your fans who may be struggling with their own mental illness and coming to terms with a psychiatric diagnosis..
October is Mental Health Awareness Month in the UK, and people all over the country are taking part, raising the issue and thus helping to beat stigma, so your comments are especially poignant. I am sure that you know better than to be disrespectful of people's race, religion, sexuality and physical disabilities. So why pick on a debilitating illness? By the way, some types of mental illnesses are also classed as a disability.
By mocking Sinead's and Amanda Bynes because of their battles with psychiatric illnesses, you are sending the totally wrong message to your fans. After all, it does affect one in four people in case you didn't know. So let me do some maths for you. On your official Facebook page, you have 29 million fans. That means that over 7 million of your fans are currently suffering from mental illness. Some may have been diagnosed. Others will have read your recent tweets and be afraid to seek help because of the stigma you have highlighted so insensitively..
Let me make this clear to you. Insanity, craziness, madness or whatever you want to call it IS an illness. There may not be any visible signs, but that does not mean that it doesn't exist. It does, And it hurts. A lot. It is easy to recover from a broken leg. A heart transplant is now a common surgical procedure. But how do you cure broken mind? Yes, there are medications that help, as well as other types of therapies. But these are just coping mechanisms; there is no 'cure'. There is recovery, but that means learning to live with your symptoms and manage on a day to day basis. This is a lifelong process, and there will be ups and downs.
Unless you or a loved one experiences this, you will have no idea of what it is to live with mental health issues. I suggest that you educate yourself with what happens to those of us who are unlucky enough to receive a diagnosis of psychiatric illness. I really hope you or someone you love never has to go through this, Incidentally, suicide is the most common cause of death in men under 35. Think of that the next time you are twerking.
Oh and one final word of advice - please put that tongue away. It is not pretty.
Yours sincerely,
A survivor
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