With Tipper Gore's Mental Health Conference recently, Mrs. Gore made stigma a consistent topic, devoting a major speech to it.
And it's about time. Since earliest times, mental illness has been considered on par with leprosy.
Once a doctor told me: "There are two primary fears people have: death and insanity."
A remark that "mental illness is AIDS of the mind" was made at a NAMI meeting.
And it's on the minds of those suffering from mental illness, those who care for or live with them, and even those who are neither mentally ill nor have relatives who are. In an informal poll I recently conducted among those populations online, stigma has been mentioned a lot. (Come back for the full statistical rundown!)
And I'm curious--for a reason--how did you become aware of stigma? Did you stigmatize? What led you to get over it? Please email me at lomax1@iAmerica.net with your responses. You can be a part of this crucial mental health issue!
O.K. I'll 'fess first.
I was visiting a nearby rodeo with my school. We went every year, and, every year, the clients of the state hospital came on an outing to the same rodeo.
The kids laughed at them. Now, I'm not one to laugh at anyone! (I was a hyper kid, myself.) But the lure of peer influence won out.
I laughed too.
They called them names: crazy, nuts, psycho. . .Where were our teachers? Why were we allowed to get away with laughing at anyone, especially those suffering from mental illness?
As to how I got fairly outraged, remember Boo Radley, the character in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird? The movie came out about that time. And it motivated me to never laugh at anyone again.
Boo, as you recall, was the "not quite right" neighbor who stayed indoors except at night, when he would put surprises for the kids in the knothole of a tree.
Boo never appeared on screen until the end of the movie. But he was constantly on the neighborhood's mind. There seemed to me to be an aura throughout the film--an aura of fear. The neighbors gossiped, was glad he was in the back room of his house and fervently hoped he'd stay there.
It seemed only the Finch family knew to be compassionate towards Boo.
Boo got his fifteen minutes of fame when he rescued the children from a stalker. He was a hero!
And then, the men decided, in deference to his "quiet ways" to
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