Stigma and What We Can All Do to Help

Crazy. Damaged. Loony. Demented. Mad. Insane. Unhinged. Half-baked. Lunatic. Mental. Nuts. Cuckoo. Crackers. Wacko. Batshit. And in modern parlance, cray-cray.

As I sit here, writing this longhand, on a psych ward, no less (with a dull pencil, since pens are too dangerous), I stop and wonder if any of the above words ring true. The answer is yes – I have too often seen how mental illness is treated in the press, how I myself have been treated (often by people who know better), not to mention how I treat myself.

Truth be told, my great-grandmother spent the bulk of her life in state hospitals and died in one – the cause of death on her death certificate is listed as pneumonia and melancholia: pneumonia might have killed her body, but mental illness can kill the spirit, the soul. So many people in my family have a mental illness (including two completed suicides) that it lights up my family tree like a damn proverbial Christmas tree.

Personally, I feel like I hit the mental illness jackpot – I am diagnosed (finally correctly in my mid-forties) with Schizoaffective Disorder and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Most people have half an idea what PTSD is; Schizoaffective Disorder, not so much. It is an unhappy marriage of some of the so-called “positive” symptoms of Schizophrenia (in my case, hearing voices) and a mood disorder (in my case, Bipolar I).

There. I said it. It’s officially out there. I figure some people will treat me differently now, but I know I’m still just that dog and horse fanatic who loves to write.

Stigma Kills

Those who will treat me differently are the ones who actively or complicity participate in the stigmatization of mental illness, and I couldn’t care less about them: they aren’t my people. Stigma is treating someone with mental illness as “other” or “deviant” or just plain “different.”

Stigma kills. Stigma kills hopes, dreams – and lives. Stigma perpetuates the stereotypes of straight-jackets, padded rooms, and restraints. Stigma prevents so many people from seeking and receiving treatment.

If you don’t think stigma is a big deal, imagine that the person not engaging in treatment who kills themselves in despair is our parent, child, sibling, partner, or best friend. That’s stigma. Ask yourself if you could bear losing them. No? Then it’s time for us to do our part and fight to end stigma, even if it’s just objecting to an off-color joke about mental illness.

The worst stigma, however, is the stigma we direct at ourselves. We see ourselves as damaged goods, and to the Beast’s delight, we sometimes see ourselves as undeserving of the air we breathe. The words that go through my head, over and over (along with “You should kill yourself”) as a constant refrain is: “Worthless, useless, hopeless, failure.” That is honestly how I view myself most days, and any outside validation of my mental illness being a character flaw instead of a real, physical disease will send me into a downward spiral, and the Beast shrieks, “WORTHLESS, USELESS, HOPELESS, FAILURE.”

As I said, stigma kills. Maybe not everyone it touches, and hopefully not me, but one death due to stigma is one too many. As I struggle currently to cooperate with my treatment team in the hospital, I am at the same time arguing that I don’t need to be here because my voices want me to leave the safety of the hospital so I can kill myself (which oh-so-productively resulted in an emergency court hold).

Right now, I am trying to trust that my treatment team has my best interest at heart, but the Beast makes it so, so hard to do. What I do know, in a moment of clarity, is that I am here in part because of the stigma that I direct at myself – the belief that I can pull myself up by the bootstraps, that I can think my way out of this. NO, NO, NO!!!

If you think that crazy joke you hear (or worse yet, tell) is harmless, that perpetuating the belief that people with mental illness are lazy, self-indulgent, and beneath you, you are making it just that much harder for people like me to get help. Just remember, that person in front of whom we ridicule mental illness – who subsequently doesn’t get treatment – could be our parent, our sibling, our partner, our child, our best friend. Don’t help the Beast rob anyone you know of their fight against mental illness -- just say NO to stigma.