Speak Up! This article appeared in the August issue of Mental Health Nursing and is reproduced here by the author. Benjamin Gray, Service User Expert, Rethink Mental Illness.
1 in 4: time to change and end stigma and discrimination.
Dr Benjamin Gray, a service user with lived experience of schizophrenia, explains his work with a charity to campaign against stigma and discrimination.
According to official statistics, one in four people will experience some kind of mental illness. Even today, mental illness carries with it strong feelings of stigma, exclusion, fear and discrimination. These affect all aspects of life, from those as simple as making friends and socialising to being able to work and find employment. Many people who experience mental illness spend their lives on benefits at the margins of society. Stigma about mental illness is still a strong, pervasive and undesirable force.
According to a carer of someone with mental health problems: ‘I think within mental health one of the biggest challenges is stigma. If you’re a carer for a disabled child, if you’re a carer for somebody with a learning disability, if you’re a carer for someone with cancer, the instinctive reaction is “Oh, you must be an angel, you’re having to deal with that, poor thing” you know, it’s a tragedy. With mental illness there’s still the stigma of “Hold on, is it catching?”
In the words of another person with schizophrenia: ‘I go out in the community and they arrange housing for me, but it never lasts long. They know I’m different so they pick on me and bully me. They smashed my windows and call me names, so it never lasts long and I end up back in hospital’.
Images of mental illness in the media and among the public are very negative too, generating feelings of fear, disbelief, guilt and chaos. These can be controlled through better information about mental illness, optimism, promoting routine living, better social and employment expectations and hope.
An important question arises: If 25% of people suffer from some kind of mental illness, is the experience of mental illness so aberrant, abnormal and wrong? There is a strong case to be made that mental illness is just like any other kind of illness, in need of sympathy, care and support. It is a common human experience that should not be stigmatised.
To begin to end discrimination and stigma, Rethink Mental Illness has recently run a very well received advertising campaign, Time to Change, both on television and by posters showing a brain with a bandage saying: ‘If only’, indicating the promise of healing mental illness and the hope of recovery.
The research team has also organised a number of lived experience advisory panels (LEAPs). These bring people with lived experience of mental illness and their carers together so that they can shape the direction of individual research projects. The LEAPs shape the important work that Rethink Mental Illness does to end stigma, exclusion and discrimination against people with mental illness.
1 in 4 means that mental illness should not be stigmatised. It is a common human experience that many people encounter in their lives.
Ending stigma and discrimination will no doubt be a difficult and unsettling journey for many, but if some health professionals and people in society continue to silence and stigmatise mental illness, the consequences may be far more serious.
Denial of stigma and exclusion also denies the possibility of opening up new approaches and avenues of debate that may in turn influence more democratic alternatives in mental health. Psychiatry and mental health, rather than doing things to or for people with mental illness, must begin to work with them to end stigma and discrimination.
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There is something wrong with humankind, if, even with the other cases described by the carer, the compassion is there not for the person being cared for, but for the carer - the concern for the carer actually patronizes both carer and the person cared for, I believe.
ReplyDeleteI do hope that campaigns such as Time to Change will have the desired effect, and not backfire, because, as the person with schizophrenia points out, there are too many who want to exploit, victimize, harm and torture people in that position : our language has these words and phrases humane, humanism and common humanity, but I see human beings often enough out for what they can get, even at another's cost, or specifically to do down those perceived as weaker.
I hope that it is just my fear, but I think that putting one's head above the parapet by talking about lived experience, or outing others by virtue of the fact that unhealthy suspicion falls on them when too much is talked about the signs and signals of mental distress, could give rise to unpredictable consequences in our fragile and envious society.