A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
Stereotypes are a way that we store knowledge about social categories. When a category is considered by society to be deviant, such as the group of people who are mentally ill, members of that category tend to be viewed as a homogeneous group that is accurately represented by stereotypes. There may be a grain of… Continue reading The “Good Patient” and Other Mental Illness Stereotypes
I recently came across Manhattan Institute fellow Stephen Eide's 2020 article In Defense of Stigma in the online magazine National Affairs. It had some... odd... ideas about mental illness stigma, so I thought I would explore some of them. Okay, forget about exploring, I'm going to rant. The basic argument in the paper is that… Continue reading In Defense of… Stigma?
One of the most common and damaging stereotypes about mental illness is that mentally ill people are chronically dangerous and violence-prone (Corrigan & Watson, 2002). This stereotype is especially strongly linked to people with psychosis. Like many stereotypes, it's not true in the vast majority of cases, but the general public may not realize that.… Continue reading Psychotic Does NOT Mean Violent
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is the psychology of war atrocities. This post won't go into any details of the atrocities themselves; rather, the focus is on what contributes to people becoming perpetrators. This post is based on a comprehensive paper on the… Continue reading What Is… the Psychology of War Atrocities
Two men get killed. Some members of the Christian right are calling the man who killed them a hero and a patriot sent by God. Something isn't adding up here. On August 25, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse grabbed his AR-15 style rifle and left his home in Antioch, IL, to head over to Kenosha, WI. He… Continue reading Kyle Rittenhouse as Christian Right Hero?
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is victim blaming. I got thinking about this while reading a recent post on domestic violence on Mental Health 360º. Victim blaming commonly occurs in connection with domestic assault, but also in a variety of other contexts, including… Continue reading What Is… Victim Blaming
In this emerging blogger post, HealthComesFirst!!! Blogger writes about the stigma around bipolar disorder. I have often felt that the stigma associated with bipolar illness is as big if not bigger (twice as big) than dealing with the illness itself. Every time there is a school shooting or a gun incident or a drug cartel… Continue reading Bipolar Stigma (Guest Post)
We're all familiar, at least to some extent, with the sex trade. If nothing else, you may have seen the movie Pretty Woman. The level of desperation in the survival sex trade, though, is galaxies away from what you see in Pretty Woman. The vulnerable I used to work at a community mental health team… Continue reading The Survival Sex Trade
They may not be politically correct, but terms like "psycho killers" and "psychotic killers" get tossed around rather freely. Sometimes people will assume that to do horrific things people must have a mental illness. But is that accurate? It's not, but that kind of misconception may originate from a few different mistaken assumptions. Psychosis One… Continue reading Are “Psycho Killers” Psychotic?
I first heard of the documentary Out of Mind, Out of Sight when I saw it recommended on the Bipolar, Uninvited blog. It sounded interesting, so I wanted to check it out. NCRMD It's shot at an inpatient unit in a forensic psychiatry facility in Brockville, Canada. All of the patients had committed a criminal… Continue reading Out of Mind, Out of Sight: A Forensic Psychiatry Close-Up