Just to get things started, I will say that I am "mentally ill", I "suffer from" depression, and I'm a little bit "crazy", although the degree varies over time. Now that we've got that out of the way, there are a lot of people who like to take a stand against language that is thought … Continue reading “Rules” for Talking About Mental Illness
NIMBYism is a fascinating phenomenon. NIMBYs, or people think that something is okay just as long as it's Not In My BackYard, cover discrimination with a thin veneer of civility and acceptability. Among the many manifestations of this is with regards to social housing, including supported housing for people with mental illness. NIMBYs' arguments may … Continue reading NIMBYism and mental health housing
As a nurse in my province (British Columbia, Canada), if I am hospitalized for mental illness then the provincial Health Professions Act requires the hospital to report me to the nursing regulatory college, and the college must treat this as a complaint about my fitness to practice. This ends up with being offering the non-choice … Continue reading The Health Professions Act and the Fight Against Stigma
There are certainly some good things about social media, but it also provides an opportunity for stupidity to get much greater exposure than it deserves. Some people would likely have a platform to reach large numbers of people even if it weren't for social media. But the average science-naïve person who thinks that snow in … Continue reading Should You Challenge or Ignore Ignorance on Social Media?
Your Mental Health and You is written by Sandy Pace, whose blog I've followed for some time. He has a degree in psychology, lives with ADHD, and has experienced addiction. The book covers various areas of your life and your thinking where you could make changes to promote better mental health. It's immediately clear how passionate … Continue reading Book Review: Your Mental Health and You
People tend to fear the unknown. Psychosis is arguably the group of symptoms that the average person finds the most frightening when it comes to mental health problems. There is stigma associated with many/most/all mental health conditions, but psychosis kicks it up a notch. As a quick explanation, psychosis refers to a cluster of symptoms … Continue reading Why psychosis scares people
I first heard of the book Written Off: Mental Health Stigma and the Loss of Human Potential by Philip T. Yanos on a blog post by Don't Stigmatize Me. It immediately went on my list of books to read, but it's taken a while to get around to it, and I ended up getting a … Continue reading Book review: Written Off
The emerging blogger series is a way to give mental health bloggers who are early in their blogging evolution the opportunity to have their work seen by a wider audience. It's also a way to introduce you as a reader to some new bloggers you may not have discovered yet. This week, we have Nathan … Continue reading Emerging Blogger Series: Nathan
I mentioned in yesterday's post that a few days ago my family doctor had sent me into hospital because of worsening shortness of breath. It seemed like the ER doc took one look at my list of psych meds and decided to write me off as a psych patient. He barely listened to anything I … Continue reading Adventures in stigma in the ER
Today is Bell Let's Talk Day (#BellLetsTalk), an anti-stigma mental health awareness campaign sponsored by the Canadian telecom company Bell. Similar to the UK organization Time to Change's Time To Talk Day coming up on February 7, the goal is to get people talking about mental health and mental illness. A couple of weeks ago … Continue reading #BellLetsTalk – What if the elephant in the room could speak?
In my local health care system in Canada, the term behavioral health isn't used, but I've seen it used a fair bit in the context of other mental health systems. As far as I can tell it's mostly an American term. Since it's relatively new to me, I tend to consider it from a more … Continue reading Is there something wrong with “behavioral health”?
I was inspired to write this post after reading the book The Stigma Effect: Unintended Consequences of Mental Health Campaigns. It's written by psychologist Patrick Corrigan, whose research on stigma I first encountered when I was working on my Master's thesis, and in it he challenges a lot of commonly held ideas about how we … Continue reading How can we fight stigma most effectively?
I discovered this quite a while back, but it just popped into my mind again recently. Pinterest won't let you search for the word "depression". If you try, it gives no results, just this message: "If you're in emotional distress or thinking about suicide, help is available." If you search for "depressed" or "major depression", though, … Continue reading Why can’t you search Pinterest for “depression”?
Crazy. Psycho. Schizo. Nutbar. Mad. Retard. Lunatic. Loony tunes. Insane. F***ed in the head. Bonkers. Whack job. Batshit crazy. Certifiable. These are just a few examples, but when it comes to derogatory mental-health related terms, there are many of them and we hear them often. Sometimes we even use them ourselves. A … Continue reading How do you respond to stigmatized language?
I like to answer reasonable questions about mental health on the question-and-answer forum Quora, but often reasonable questions are hard to find. Here are some of the dumb ones I've come across that show that mental illness stigma is alive and kicking. Question: Do you think it's cowardice to think that people with borderline personality disorders … Continue reading Quora: Dumb and dumber