Stigma associated with Mental Illness: A long road ahead
Posted on 18/06/2009 | 3 Comments
New government figures out this week in the UK claim that public attitudes towards people with mental illness have reached a tipping point. The Department of Health survey shows improvements including:
- 77% agree mental illness is an illness like any other an improvement of 3% on last year and up 6% since 1994
- 73% think that people with mental health problems have the same right to a job as everyone else, up 7% on last year
- 78% judge the best therapy for people with mental illness is to be part of a normal community, up 8% on last year
- 61% agree that people with mental illness are far less of a danger than most people suppose, an improvement of 4% on 2008
However, it also includes some more alarming figures:
- 11% would not want to live next door to someone with a mental health problem, an increase from 8% since 1994
- Almost a third of young people (16-34yrs) think there is something about people with mental illness that makes it easy to tell them from 'normal people'
- 52% of young people agree people with mental illness are far less of a danger than most people suppose, 17% less than people over 55yrs
- 22% feel anyone with a history of mental health problems should be excluded from taking public office
- When the issue is brought closer to home - only 23% feel that women who were once patients in a mental hospital can be trusted as babysitters.
- 65% underestimated the actual prevalence of mental illness and only 13% were aware that 1 in 4 people will experience at mental health problem.
Stigma is essentially the polite word for discrimination. It has no place in our caring society. While some public attitudes toward people with mental illness are improving, the numbers above suggest we still have a long way to go. It is all too easy to look at these numbers with rose-coloured glasses and proclaim that we have reached a tipping point. However I believe the Canadian Medical Association's assessment of a similar study conducted last year to be more accurate when they called Canadian stigma and attitudes a "national embarrassment". Findings from that report (pdf) indicate:
- One in 10 thinks that people with mental illness could "just snap out of it if they wanted"
- One in four Canadians is afraid of being around someone who suffers from serious mental illness.
- Only half of those surveyed would tell friends or co-workers that a family member was suffering from mental illness.
- Only 16 per cent said they would marry someone who suffered from mental illness, and 42 per cent said they would no longer socialize with a friend diagnosed with a mental illness. By contrast, 72 per cent would openly discuss cancer and 68 per cent would talk about diabetes in the family.
- Half of Canadians think alcoholism and drug addiction are not mental illnesses.
- One in nine people think depression is not a mental illness, and one in two think it is not a serious condition.
- Almost half of Canadians (46%) think the term "mental illness" is used as an excuse for bad behaviour;
- A solid majority of Canadians would not have a family doctor (61%) or hire a lawyer (58%) who has a mental illness;
Stigma against the mentally ill is recognized as one of the greatest barriers to social justice, appropriate health care and development of civic society. We are not at a tipping point yet, but hopefully sometime soon. ~ David Venn & Dr. Stan Kutcher (image credit: nite fate)
Blog Tag Cloud
adhd anxiety disorders attention award awards behaviour bipolar blog brain & neurology bullying canada care carter center conference confidentiality control coping criminal justice system cruelty cutting depression discrimination doctor driving eating disordersRecent Comment
This is a great set of comments and rings very true.
I totally agree that scientists (just like everyone else) have their biases and foibles. After all, scientists are human beings too! But science is different than scientists.
The scientific method is the most objective frame that we have by which to evaluate and predict. Science is not about finding truth. It is only about being less wrong most of the time. The scientific method (experimental design and mathematics) gives us the ability to test what we believe. The scientific method is not used to prove something is correct, on the contrary, the scientific method is designed to prove that something is not correct! It is designed to test what is called the “null hypothesis”. It takes ideas that come out of left field (or wherever else they come from) and puts those ideas to an independent test.
t does not drive our beliefs. It does however challenge our beliefs. In that way it is self-correcting. Of course scientific inquiry and understanding lives within a wider social context. That is one of the great features of science.
But gravity is gravity, social context notwithstanding. And thus it is nasty, brutish and long. As Brecht said, (something like this) - the purpose of science is to save us from everlasting error.
By Christina Carew on May 11th
You can find us here too!
We would like to say thanks...
Without their help this initiative would not be possible. Thanks for you help.
What people are saying?
Lester Hanenberger said...
Thanks for the nice post. Look forward to more posts like this one. I’ll check back soon.
Comment made on August 05th, 2010
Colorado Medical Health Insurance said...
Hello, I believe this is providing a great resource. Keep it up. Cindy Klauson
Comment made on August 05th, 2010
AB Curtiss said...
A Stigma Against Mental Illness? No Way!
I have read numerous articles over the years complaining that people who have been diagnosed with mental illness not only have to struggle with their illness but the universal stigma against the mentally ill.
I have wondered for a long time why people who have been diagnosed with mental illness don’t stop complaining about the stigma, and why they don’t put more energy into complaining about the diagnosis.
For instance. When I was diagnosed with manic-depression (they call it bipolar now) as a young woman in my 30s, I asked for some explanation of what, specifically, was my problem. I got such a hodge-podge of confusing-information that I rejected the manic depression diagnosis of me as medically unsound. The medical doctor could give me no medical explanation, or point to any physical evidence that proved I had a mental disorder.
The answer I got was “You feel helpless, you are in a lot of pain, you can’t sleep, you feel depressed, you can’t concentrate, and you have no zest for living.”
“Yes,” I said. But what is causing all of these problems?”
”
Depression is causing your problems.
‘You’re telling me that depression causes depression.? That’s like saying measles causes measles.”
“Well,” the psychiatrist continued, “Nobody really knows exactly what causes depression. It’s some kind of chemical imbalance in the brain, associated with low serotonin levels and anti-depressants are the recommended cure for it.”
“What do the anti-depressants do?” I asked.
“They make you feel better.”
“How?”
“Nobody really knows.”
“Do the anti-depressants cure the chemical imbalance?
“That’s not clear.”
“Well,” I said. “My father and brother have also been diagnosed with manic depression, and they are both on anti-depressants, and they are either depressed still, or they are manic. And not only that, they are each on different medications. And neither one is able to work anymore. They are both writers. I am a writer. How do I know how the anti-depressants will work on me?
“We’ll try one. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try another. We just have to start you on some and see how they work for you.”
“I don’t think I want to take any.”
The psychiatrist got very upset when I said that I didn’t want to take his anti-depressants. He even raised his voice, looked sternly at me and said, “You can’t come into my office and sit there like you are a student in class taking notes on what I say. That’s not how it works, and this session is now over.”
My husband tells me that I am much too confronting and argumentative, and he’s embarrassed by my attitude toward doctors, and no wonder doctors don’t like me. Maybe so. But here was somebody going to stick me with a mental illness diagnosis, and I didn’t think he had a good reason to do so. I didn’t think I got a good enough answer to what I thought was a reasonable question. What is physically wrong with me that needs to be fixed by drugs?
So I never took anti-depressants for my supposed bipolar mental disorder. And I accept no stigma. The whole thing is ridiculous. And that is the reason I went back to graduate school and became a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist. I’m one of those people who went into the field to help myself.
And I must say that I found very little in the psychology or psychiatry I studied in graduate school to help me out of my bipolar condition. I certainly did suffer a lot of pain from depression and manic episodes for many years. And not until I studied neuroscience did I finally understand what was wrong with me.
What was wrong with me was that I had no idea how my brain worked. I had no idea what a neurotransmitter was. I didn’t know how I got from one thought to another. I didn’t know what powered the brain. I didn’t know that if you understood the neurological process of pain perception, you could get yourself out of any depressive episode with a few mind exercises.
I didn’t know that the brain always followed the direction of its most current dominant thought, and you could make any thought dominant by thinking it over and over, repetitively. I didn’t know that depression only happened in the subcortex, and there was never any depression in the neocortex. I didn’t know you could quickly separate the message that you were depressed from one part of the brain to the other.
So for all you fellow sufferers of depression. Accept no stigma. And learn something about how your brain works. Probably your psychiatrist can’t help you there, but there are books available so that you can educate yourself. It’s no harder to learn how your brain works than it is to study to get a license to drive your car. Would you let your car take you anywhere it wanted? No. You learn how it works, you memorize the rules of the road, and you make your car take you safely where YOU want to go.
As long as you don’t know how your brain works, it takes you where IT wants to go. Now there’s real stigma for you.
Comment made on August 05th, 2010
What do you think?