Some folks here are concerned about mental illness stereotypes. The other night, Glenn Close was on The Tonight Show, talking to Jay. She brought up this non-profit she’s helped create.
Here’s another worthwhile organization combatting stereotypical thinking about folks with psychiatric diagnoses.
I thought this would be about how schizophrenia is not multiple personalities (and isn’t schizoid either), and many OCD people don’t have problems with germs, or most people with Tourette’s don’t compulsively swear.
That MindFreedom link gets dangerously close to Scientology territory IMHO. “psychiatric survivor”?
It’s going to be an uphill battle. It’s hard for most people to remember that the mind is the brain, which is an organ that can get “sick” just like any other part of the body, and mental illness isn’t weakness, any more than arthritis is.
Glenn Close mentioned she went to a science conference, where she is trying to engage research into how to effectively combat the negative image.
The main issue, as I see it, is that diabetes and cancer and whatnot make a person ill, but do not effect behavior. Whereas mental illness directly affects how people engage and relate to each other. It affects behavior in negative ways.
Of course there’s going to be a negative stereotype to something that makes a person not just act weird, but behave in bizarre, exasperating, and even dangerous manners.
The key to the focus is to try to understand the cause of the behavior problems is and illness or injury, and to try not to ascribe moral judgement on a person for having the problem. But that intersects directly what moral judgment addresses - a person’s behavior.
So yeah, it’s going to be difficult.
Thanks. I signed the pledge. I might get me one of those depression or PTSD shirts. Fighting the stigma of mental illness is kind of a thing for me.
It is an uphill battle, indeed.
You’ve nicely summarized my futility with fighting the stigma.
Every day, people do annoying things in my presence. Like talking my ear off about extremely mundane, boring-ass things. What makes these people tick? They are nice people so I don’t think they are being intentionally annoying. And yet they are annoying and it makes me not like them. So I try to avoid them.
What if they have a disorder that makes them this way? Does that change my feelings about them? Not really. If anything, it makes me want to avoid them even more. Would I feel bad for them for having this kind of disorder? No. But I’m not sure they would want my pity anyway.
I’m sure I engender the same feelings, being the aloof and private person that I am. I have a diagnosis that “explains” this perfectly, but I guess I don’t think that it should me a free pass from other people’s judgments. Or worded a bit differently, I don’t expect it would ever free me from other people’s judgments.
Even if a person is compassionate towards the mentally ill, most times they will never know if the bad behavior they dealing with is the result of sickness or just human weakness. It almost makes sense to just assume everyone you meet is mentally ill, and this way you won’t hold their bad behavior against them. But then we wouldn’t be able to call anyone a “douchebag” anymore. 
It is possible to be against communism without having to be a nazi in order to do so. I’m an ex-patient or psychiatric ex-inmate … psychiatric survivor is a common terminology. The acronym you see in the movement these days is C/S/X —— consumer / survivor / ex-patient. I’m sure as hell not calling myself a consumer. I was more the consumed.
I’m also sure as hell not a scientologist. Yeesh.