Building mental wellness on a foundation of strength
Over the last three years (wow, has it been that long?), I've read and reviewed a lot of books. Here are a few quotes that stood out for me. No One Cares About Crazy People In No One Cares About Crazy People, Ron Powers intertwines a sweeping history of mental illness stigma with the stories… Continue reading Interesting Book Quotes from Past Reviews
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
Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness is written by Roy Richard Grinker, an anthropology professor at The George Washington University. Autism and cross-cultural psychiatry are listed as areas of expertise on his faculty page. He's the father of an autistic daughter, who he refers to a number of times throughout the… Continue reading Book Review: Nobody’s Normal
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
Ceponatia of Dogmatic Panic wrote a while back about social media claims that a film was whitewashing. It reminded me of a conversation about on-screen representation of marginalized groups that I'd had with someone not long before that. The beginnings of this post languished in my drafts folder for quite a while, until I saw… Continue reading Marginalized Groups and On-Screen Representation
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
The emerging blogger series is aimed at community building through giving 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 newer members of our community. This post is by Heidi of… Continue reading Emerging Blogger Series: Heidi (Here Are My Brains)
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
