A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
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 Try to Sanitize Mental Illness?
Lately white privilege has been a hot topic. The people I've come across who take a stance against the idea of white privilege seem to have in common the line of thinking that they haven't been handed anything, so how can they have social privilege? I thought it might be worth reframing social privilege in… Continue reading Another Way of Looking at Social Privilege
- I've seen ableism being mentioned on Twitter a number of times lately. Aside from the obvious meaning, I wasn't familiar with in a mental health context. This post will explore what ableism means for people with psychiatric disabilities. Defining ableism An article on the Center for Disability Rights website describes ableism this way: Ableism… Continue reading Ableism: The Assumptions People Make About Disability
Time.com Not long ago, a photo was forwarded to Time.com from a 2001 yearbook of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who was a teacher at the time, dressed in an Aladdin costume that included brownface/blackface makeup. It caused quite a stir, with some people criticizing him as being racist. Since it's Halloween, it seems like… Continue reading Halloween, Blackface, and Cultural Appropriation
NIMBYism is a fascinating phenomenon. NIMBYs, who think that something is okay 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. The NIMBY arguments NIMBYs' arguments… Continue reading NIMBYism and Resistance to Mental Health Housing
Written Off: Mental Health Stigma and the Loss of Human Potential by Philip T. Yanos wasn't available from the local public library, so I got a copy from my alma mater university library. That difference in availability gives some indication of the nature of the book. I didn't think it was overly textbookish, but at… Continue reading Book Review: Written Off
A few days ago, my family doctor had sent me into hospital because of worsening shortness of breath. I wasn't overly surprised when I was met with stigma in the ER. It seemed like the ER doc took one look at my list of psych meds and wrote me off as "just a psych patient". … Continue reading Adventures in Mental Illness Stigma in the ER
I was inspired to write this post after reading the book The Stigma Effect by psychologist Patrick Corrigan. The book looks at what research has to say about what works and what doesn't to fight stigma. Corrigan is a prolific stigma researcher, and I first encountered his work when I was doing my master's thesis.… Continue reading The Stigma Effect: Fighting Mental Illness Stigma Effectively
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 study by Rose… Continue reading How Do You Respond to Stigmatized Language?
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week's term is conversion "therapy". I've forgotten the details, but recently I heard/read something that mentioned conversion therapy, so I decided to look a little closer at this pseudo-therapy that aims to force people's sexuality to fit with heteronormative expectations.… Continue reading What Is… Conversion “Therapy”