Building mental wellness on a foundation of strength
As an official Crazy Person, I'm all for laughing at ourselves. It makes the hard stuff a little bit easier. But when other people use stigma as an excuse to laugh at us, that makes this Crazy Person very unimpressed, because stigma isn't funny. Canada's public broadcaster, the CBC, seems to do a pretty good… Continue reading Mental Illness Stigma Isn’t Funny
Last year I wrote about a police wellness check gone wrong, in which a young woman was dragged half-naked in handcuffs through her building by a police officer, While the woman was apprehended under the Mental Health Act, a story about the matter in the Kelowna Daily Courier used the word "arrested" multiple times, including… Continue reading Homelessness & Addiction: Embracing Stigma in a Third-Rate Newspaper
I saw this CBC story recently about a man who was written off because he was just a psych patient. I wanted to write about it, then promptly forgot about it until suninthespring brought it to my attention. In April 2018, David Pontone went to the emergency department at Humber River Hospital in Toronto, Canada.… Continue reading Just a Psych Patient? – Stigma in the ER
A little while ago, I posted Attitudes About Mental Illness That Make You Go Hmm… based on an article by Heather Stuart, an epidemiologist at Queen's University. She currently holds a Bell Canada Mental Health and Anti-Stigma Research Chair. She's also got some odd ideas about mental illness. Anyway, while researching for my next book,… Continue reading The Ship of Fools and Other Odd Mental Illness Ideas
Mental illness stigma is a very real problem. Those of us living with mental illness usually aren't thrilled when people casually toss around mental illness diagnoses as adjectives, such as "she's so bipolar" or "he's so OCD" or "everyone's a little ADHD." Yet, when it comes to narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), all of a sudden… Continue reading Stigma Is Bad… Except for one Diagnosis?
Recently, I was looking on Debate.org for some Holocaust denier-related willful ignorance, and I figured why not see what the crazies of the non-psychiatric variety had to say about us crazies of the mentally ill variety. Debate.org seems to attract a lot of willfully ignorant blowhards, so this certainly isn't reflective of broader public opinion.… Continue reading Willful Ignorance and Mental Illness Stigma
Patrick Corrigan has been my research crush for a number of years now. And what is a research crush, you might ask? I like how his mind works. He's a psychologist and stigma researcher, with lived experience to boot. He's one of the most prolific publishers in academic journals that I've ever come across. His… Continue reading The Problem with Language Policing
Photo by Robin Hammond, The Guardian, Feb 3/20 – small, low-resolution version included here as fair use for critical analysis of subject matter of high public significance The man in the photo above has a chain around his ankle, and he's chained to the tree he's leaning against. That's his wife, and he has a… Continue reading Mentally Ill People In Chains – A Disturbing Reality
Recently, I came across a post that was a myths vs. facts type deal on mental illness stigma. One of the myths identified was that people with mental illness are disabled. The blogger's response was that, on some days, mental illness could make it harder to work for some people, but there are also people… Continue reading Is It Helpful to Sanitize Mental Illness?
An open letter to the Hon. Judy Darcy, British Columbia Minister of Mental Health and Addictions I'm writing to express my dismay that it appears that the Government of British Columbia does not intend to take advantage of the modernization of the Health Professions Act to remove section 32(3), which stigmatizes health professionals with a… Continue reading Stigma Enshrined in Law: An Open Letter to BC’s Minister of Mental Health and Addictions
