mental-health-stigma

It__ hard to imagine a more squarely on-the-nose example of demonizing mental illness than portraying a mentally ill man as a literal demon.

A panic attack is pathological exaggeration of the body__ normal response to fear, stress or excitement.

Beautiful things have been broken before_

The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from individual to individual. The process of treatment can therefore be long and complicated. Finding the right balance of drugs, whether lithium salts, anti-psychotics, SSRIs or other kinds of treatment can be a very hit or miss heuristic process requiring great patience and classy, caring doctoring. Some patients would rather reject the chemical path and look for ways of using diet, exercise and talk-therapy. For some the condition is so bad that ECT is indicated. One of my best friends regularly goes to a clinic for doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment looked on by many as a kind of horrific torture that isn__ even understood by those who administer it. This friend of mine is just about one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and she says, __ know. It ought to be wrong. But it works. It makes me feel better. I sometimes forget my own name, but it makes me happier. It__ the only thing that works._ For her. Lord knows, I__ not a doctor, and I don__ understand the brain or the mind anything like enough to presume to judge or know better than any other semi-informed individual, but if it works for her_. well then, it works for her. Which is not to say that it will work for you, for me or for others.

Unfortunately, mental health is so misunderstood that some people think you have to be crazy to need to speak to a therapist.

The stigma of mental illness is first and foremost a social justice issue!

Those with dissociative disorders face a big enough battle living as multiples and dealing with past trauma. Like everyone else, they deserve to be heard and recognised, not stigmatised.

And if we do speak out, we risk rejection and ridicule. I had a best friend once, the kind that you go shopping with and watch films with, the kind you go on holiday with and rescue when her car breaks down on the A1. Shortly after my diagnosis, I told her I had DID. I haven't seen her since. The stench and rankness of a socially unacceptable mental health disorder seems to have driven her away.

They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.

Self-stigma refers to the state in which a person with mental illness has come to internalize the negative attitudes about mental illness and turns them against him- or herself.

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.

There needs to be a nationwide awareness programme for all NHS staff, to educate them about dissociative disorders. Diagnoses need to be more obtainable within the NHS; people's lives should be placed ahead of funding restraints and bureaucratic red tape. We need minimum standards of care and treatment agreed and implemented within the NHS to end the current nightmare of the postcode lottery__ot just guidelines that can be ignored but actual regulations.

Holding one's self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor. The degree to which the stigma is socially apparent is the degree to which one must negotiate the issue of blame, not only for one's self but between one's self and the other who is witness to the stigma. Stigmatization is a much more powerful elicitor of shame and guilt in that it requires a negotiation not only between one's self and one's attributions, but between one's self and the attributions of others.

Although enlightened people know that an extreme phobia wasn't a form of madness, hey could not help but regard it as odd.

You__e not fine. You__e not. And that__ OK. The first thing I want you to do is to finally tell yourself that it__ OK not to be OK. To accept that you__e feeling badly and that something isn__ right. Too many of us are in denial because we think that to admit there__ something wrong means we__e weak or broken or odd. I don__ know if it__ society, or just who we associate with, but we need to change our way of thinking. We are not weak. We are not broken. We are not odd.

Anxiety is the monster that resides within.

You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

Having a child who is struggling doesn't make you a bad parent, just as being a child who is struggling doesn't make your child a bad kid.