Much has been written and said about the stigma of mental illness. In reality it means that people suffer in silence rather than seek help because they don't want to admit they have a problem to themselves or others. It is very real. At one end of the scale there are increased insurance fees, Jet's Law which means you have to give this information to the Main Roads Department in Queensland, with no confidentiality and then the employers who will not employ you or the friends and family who abandon you. Sociologists call this deviancy theory, meaning it resides in the group that is rejecting you because it is their way of defining themselves as not ill at your expense.The 1980s saw a process of de-institutionalisation to decrease stigma, but probably more to decrease running costs. It did not really work. An advertising campaign to educate the community about mental illness may have been helpful but I have seen no research to prove that this is so.
The problem is that it comes from within us all. We can accept an invasive germ causing medical illness and freely talk about other organs and systems failures but we have a collective denial that our minds and brains are inextricably one and feel that brain disorder is clearly different to mental disorder. A problem of Cartesian thinking no doubt.
Mental functioning however is higher end processing and clearly more important than body. We need both of course but one can live well without a toe, not without a mind. If we use the computer metaphor. We need the hardware of course but if the software is not working, wrong program, wrong language, has programming problems, the result is dysfunction. Changing the program, re-booting will mean return to full function. That is the same as mental illness.
Thankfully advances in psychiatric care, pharmacological as well as psychotherapies means that the outcomes for most people are good and return to normal living. So if we talk about the good outcomes more than the scary process of the illness hopefully we de-stigmatise mental illness and become a caring society.
The problem is that it comes from within us all. We can accept an invasive germ causing medical illness and freely talk about other organs and systems failures but we have a collective denial that our minds and brains are inextricably one and feel that brain disorder is clearly different to mental disorder. A problem of Cartesian thinking no doubt.
Mental functioning however is higher end processing and clearly more important than body. We need both of course but one can live well without a toe, not without a mind. If we use the computer metaphor. We need the hardware of course but if the software is not working, wrong program, wrong language, has programming problems, the result is dysfunction. Changing the program, re-booting will mean return to full function. That is the same as mental illness.
Thankfully advances in psychiatric care, pharmacological as well as psychotherapies means that the outcomes for most people are good and return to normal living. So if we talk about the good outcomes more than the scary process of the illness hopefully we de-stigmatise mental illness and become a caring society.
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