Stigma and Mental Health

Stigma Around Mental Health (opinion)

Mental health in today’s society is seen as a very touchy and personal topic. For many, asking about other’s mental health feels like an imposition. There is a lot of stigma towards mental illness that promotes this idea of hiding one’s true state. This stigma is due to a combination of a lack of awareness and misinformation. In my life, I have seen media falsely portray mental illness countless times. One of the more prominent examples of this is in the movie Pyscho, regarded as one of the best horror movies of all time. In this movie, the main character Norman Bates has Dissociative Personality Disorder and does extremely violent and horrifying things, which is not a characteristic of that disorder. My school has put a tremendous emphasis on informing students about depression. However, we have never gone in-depth about other mental health issues. There is also a great counseling and therapy department at my school that tries its best to be welcoming, yet, it still feels sort of strange going there. Most of my knowledge about mental health has been from courses outside of school.

There are many risk factors of mental health that we can not avoid, such as having a history of mental health in a family or growing up in an abusive household. However, there are some factors, such as diet, that we can control. A poor diet (eating lots of saturated fats and processed foods) is associated with poor mental health. We can also help others avoid mental health by doing things like standing up to bullying or being there for people when they need it. This prevents societal risk factors for mental illness. My perception of mental health has changed over the years as I have become more informed and aware of what is going on.

Issues with a Name

It is important that the medical field lead by example and identify mental diseases correctly as brain disorders. This will help eliminate false information and stigmatization around mental diseases. Even though a name seems like such an unimportant correction in such a huge project, it is more about the classification and the implications behind the name. There are three major things to focus on to increase funding and success in the field of psychiatry that reclassification could help achieve; spreading awareness, eliminating stigmatization, and increasing research.

Due to the lack of awareness, mental illness is not taken as seriously and sensitively as it needs to be. Fields such as cardiology or oncology are highly funded and understood. People are aware of their seriousness. The same should be true to brain disorders but, unfortunately, they are not. In fact, according to Dr. Lieberman in his TED Talk about eliminating stigma, there are anti-psychiatry movements that believe that psychiatry is a pseudoscience and that treatments are harmful to patients[1]. This lack of awareness in the field needs to be fixed. Even medical professionals identity brain disorders as behavioral problems. Classifying brain disorders as such will help advertise the legitimacy of the condition. A good example of our obliviousness and carelessness towards brain disorders is seen in Autism. In 1998, the Lancet, an acclaimed medical journal, released a study linking MMR (Measles Mumps Rubella) vaccines to Autism. Despite the linkage being false, this study was left untouched and unquestioned for twelve years until it was finally retracted. According to the article, Dr. Wakefield and his associates “claimed to have investigated a consecutive series of 12 children referred to the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine with chronic enterocolitis and regressive developmental disorder.”[2] They only tested twelve kids in their entire study. This massive error shows little attention and information there is in the field. There needs to be more awareness at every level of this field from specialists to the general public. Sharing stories and spreading correct information will help eliminate stigma and help people understand. This awareness can start with classifying it more accurately as a brain disorder instead of behavioral disorders which make it sound less important than other organ problems.

Stigma towards brain disorders is a serious issue. People tend to separate themselves from those that have mental illnesses, making brain disorders seem unusual. This issue goes deeper than just misinformed people, trained professionals distance themselves from their patients as well. Elyn Saks, a professor at USC Law School who has schizophrenia, shared in her TED talk that she consulted a psychiatrist about restraining patients with mental diseases.[3] This man said that people with these brain diseases “wouldn't experience restraints as we would.” There should be no stigma towards mental illness because it is preventing many from getting proper treatment. People with brain disorders often feel ashamed and may not reach out to get the help they need. Many people and medical professionals alike classify brain disorders as behavioral disorders, suggesting that it is something that they should be able to control. Calling brain disorders as such may help eliminate some of the stigma because it helps show how mental illness is an abnormality, a change in an organ just like any other organ such as the heart. ‘Behavioral’ shies away from the fact that mental illness is often a structural or genetic issue, something people are born with rather than developed. It was discovered recently in 2016, for instance, that people can be born with a variation in the C4 and therefore be at risk of having schizophrenia[4], a condition which people, as Saks psychiatrist unfairly described, are inhumane.

By changing the name and the level of awareness behind brain disorders, the field of psychiatry would be taken more seriously and research and treatment would advance, something the field desperately needs. Advancements in research and treatment plans in psychiatry and brain disorders have slow-moving. Starting with the brilliant neuron observations of Peter Huttenlocher in 1979, a hypothesis was formed, linking the disruption of pruning in adolescents to be a cause of schizophrenia[5]. It was not until 39 years later that this hypothesis was proven correct with the research study done by Matthew B. Johnson and Beth Stevens. A similar story is seen in treatment. In her TED talk, Xiaosi Gu reveals that the same method used to diagnose patients in the 80s is what they use now[6]. This diagnostic method does not use imaging or scans to come to a conclusion, but instead a manual called DSM (Diagnostic and Statistica Manual). As Dr. Daniel Amen, a famous psychiatrist, said in an article “psychiatry is the only specialty that doesn’t actually look at the organ it treats.”[7]A new revolutionary treatment is underway that edits genes, and can potentially “treat various genetic diseases by modifying cells.”[8] Unfortunately, there is a lot of ethical concern and fear in this field because scientists are at risk of getting penalized for their work. More funding and research need to be poured into this field so that better treatment can be available.