Stigma of mental illness and ways of diminishing it :: Learning experiences :: Reblog

The relationship between psychiatry and the advocacy movement is not a one-way street. In the past three years, these are the learning experiences that the author has encountered at advocates’ meetings:

• an architect objecting to her work colleagues’ constant references to a psychiatric unit they were designing as a “nut house” or “psycho depot”

• an insurance executive, with a remote history of mental illness, challenging the loading of his insurance policy – by his own firm

• a nurse, following an episode of depression, insisting on returning to the intensive care unit and not, as suggested, to a convalescence ward

• a medical student challenging the Dean to show the same flexibility with mental illness as he had previously shown with physical disability

• a teacher with bipolar disorder encouraging the schools’ board to include information on this illness on the curriculum

• a footballer insisting his team play the local psychiatric unit

• a newsagent offering to keep newspaper cuttings to facilitate a local initiative on negative media coverage of mental health issues

• a parent’s description of services as “supermarket psychiatry”

• a man who had recovered from an episode of depression, objecting to a public education campaign that would include schizophrenia and depression together: “Why drag depression down to the level of the gutter?”

• a consultant psychiatrist, on hearing an articulate account of schizophrenia from a woman living with the illness, “Then she couldn”t be schizophrenic”.

  [excerpted from

  Stigma of mental illness and ways of diminishing it
  Peter Byrne
  Advances in Psychiatric Treatment Jan 2000, 6 (1) 65-72; DOI: 10.1192/apt.6.1.65]