An effective way to combat prejudice against mental illness

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Given all the discussion about mental health since the COVID lockdown, you might think that stigma would have decreased significantly. While more people are seeking mental health care, that does not equate to a reduction in stigma. Mental illness remains misunderstood, and as the American Psychiatric Association (2024) notes, stigma exists due to a lack of understanding.

Keep in mind that adjectivizing disorders remains popular: “He/she is so bipolar,” “You have total OCD,” “That’s very ADHD of you,” etc. In a course I sometimes teach about the lives of people with mental illness, which aims to reduce stigma and promote empathy, students are assigned to interview nonclinical individuals about their thoughts on bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and other disorders that are misrepresented in the media.

It is not uncommon for the person being interviewed to state that people with this condition are unpredictable or unpredictable and that they are not sure if they would consciously associate with someone who suffers from a mental illness. This may be because it can be stressful to have to cater to a person's needs to make sure everything is perfect, or dangerous because you don't know when someone's mood might change.

If the above perspective applies to the person being interviewed, students practice their psychoeducational and advocacy skills by providing more factual descriptions of the diagnoses and, if the person is interested, engaging in a discussion of more empathetic ideas.

Change of perspective

Sometimes it is suggested that someone try to understand mental illness by exaggerating an experience they have had. For example, if someone is being told what it is like to suffer a major depressive episode, they might be told, “Imagine a sad day you had and then exaggerate it for days.” This experiment may give a general sense of the issue, but it does not show how widespread the illness is or how it affects the person, their family, and even the community. This makes it harder to develop genuine compassion and thus reduce stigma.

In my experience, the most effective way to introduce someone to the experience of mental illness is through biographical accounts. Students quickly became fascinated with the material because it portrayed sufferers as more than a collection of symptoms that simply needed to be categorically reduced. Witnessing a biography awakened the need for patience and genuine curiosity about people's experiences, which naturally led to greater empathy and reduced the fears they had about working with particular disorders or problems.

For those who want to better understand what it is like to live with certain mental illnesses, below are essential biographical accounts of five disorders that I believe are perhaps the most misunderstood and stigmatized.

1. Bipolar disorder: Kay Redfield Jamison A restless spirit (1995) is a classic treatise on bipolar disorder type 1. Jamison begins by describing her time as a teenager struggling with moodiness and takes the reader through her progression from persistent bouts of mania to devastating depression in vivid detail. One can't help but empathize with her experiences. Jamison makes it clear that bipolar disorder is more than “up and down, unpredictable moods” and that even people suffering from serious mental illness are resilient, as readers learn how Jamison earned a doctorate and became a respected professional despite the torments of bipolar disorder.

2. Borderline personality disorder: In The Buddha and the Borderline (2010), Kiera van Gelder gives readers an insight into the storm of push-pull dynamics, reactive anger, identity disturbances and self-destructive activities of people with borderline personalities that annoys sufferers and outsiders alike. In addition, she gives a first-hand account of the catastrophic nature of not diagnosing the disorder when it has been clearly identified in adolescents and tells “in the room” of her successful treatment process.

3. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID): Kim Noble Everything from me (2012) will certainly provide the understanding that DID (historically referred to as multiple personality disorder) is not like in the movies Share or Sybil with a Jekyll and Hyde character. DID is much more subtle and not nearly as strange and violent as Hollywood and the media would have you believe.

Noble takes readers on a journey through her confusing early latency years, when she lost time and could not justify the actions she was accused of, through to her adult life. She recounts how she realized she was experiencing frequent shifts in her consciousness and identity, and how she began to sort things out.

4. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD): Terry Weibel-Murphy helps OCD veteran Ed Zine tell his story of incapacity and recovery in Life in retrospect (2010). After the loss of his mother, Zine's inner conflicts erupt in a way that causes him to literally live his life backwards, feeling that time does not move forward toward death.

Zine was so debilitated by obsessions and the rituals he needed to keep them under control that he was trapped in a basement bedroom for years until a particularly patient psychiatrist began working with him from upstairs in the house. This book will make readers who have only a popular culture idea of ​​OCD realize that it is a much more complicated matter than strange organizational habits and ritualized germophobia.

5. Schizophrenia: The collected schizophrenias (2019) by award-winning novelist Esme Weijun-Wang is written in a way that explores what it is like to fall into a cloud of hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized behavior, and then emerge in periods of stability. What is particularly interesting is that the author recounts what it was like to live with the extremely rare, nihilistic CotarCotard sessions where she believed she was dead among the living.