Stigma 2010

"Who had not heard all the old-style high melodrama of insanity; of the madwoman in Jane Eyre, of Bedlam, of the hundreds of dark house with high walls and little hope, of lesser dramas in lesser memories, and of maniacs who murdered and passed on the taints of their blood to  menace the future? "Modern Science" had given the official lie to much of this, but beneath the surface of facts, the older fears remained in the minds of the well no less than of the sick. People paid lip service to new theories and new proofs, but often their belief was no more than the merest veneer, yielding at a scratch to the bare and honest terror, the accretion of ten thousand generations of fear and magic."
              -------Hannah Green " I Never Promised You a Rose Garden"

That book was written in 1964. Are we much better at not stigmatizing mental illness in 2010?

 I am on an anonymous chat board where moms get together to chat. Since it's anonymous, it is really interesting to see people's real feelings and prejudices come out.

These women are intelligent, well-read, many attended Ivy League Colleges and yet even amongst these so called 'educated' people attitudes about mental illness have not progressed.

Judge for yourself. I am going to quote verbatim from threads where the topic of mental illness came up.

The show 'The Real Housewives of New York ' is very popular with this crowd. They speculate endlessly that one of the characters, Ramona, might be bipolar.

"I think Ramona is bipolar or something. She's freaking NUTS. She has not filter at all"

"Ramona is bipolar, I'd say. She's manic and hysterical then crashes down and is crying and has goosebumps all the space of five minutes"

"Omg, Ramona is bipolar" The replies to this were "Crazy eyed killa" and "She has that scary twitch thing going"

"So is Ramona in need of meds for bipolar or she on drugs which make her loopy?"

"Ramona may be bipolar or schizoid. Jill looks completely different, Ramona looks the same brand of crazy."

"Doesn't Ramona have crazy eyes?" the reply "Batshit. She's definitely bipolar manic/depressive."


On the topic of what to do if you had been dating a man and saw lithium in his medicine cabinet:

"I would run, not walk, away from him."

On the topic of psychotropic drugs:

"Those drugs are NOT NICE. My point is-- rotten choices, be crazy or be drugged."

and "You can't be mildly bipolar"

And someone who posted that her mother-in-law told her she needed to 'grow up and stop being a whiner' when she was hospitalized for bipolar disorder.

And about Lindsay Lohan: "She'll be the next to die, the poor bipolar girl."

And let's play a fun game: "If you had  a choice- would you rather be bipolar and super smart or normal and so-so?"

The answers:

"What the question is not even worth an answer. Being bipolar is like a cruel, awful curse."
"Bipolar for sure. You could always come off meds and write a sonnet or direct "Apocalypse Now'


And the response to this story:

"Fucking bipolar people. Stop doing that shit, it doesn't help with the stigma."


That's what we face. Nothing has changed . The good news is that there are many orgnaizations fighting stigma. One is NAMI and a new one that is doing wonderful things is Bring Change 2 Mind.
http://www.bringchange2mind.org/   and http://www.nami.org/