I recall from some years ago when a mental health survivor of the system told me about a meeting he had with script writers working on a soap opera. They were trying to create a storyline regarding a character and his psychotic breakdown culminating in him running amok brandishing a knife. The script writers were happy with the storyline and were engaging in a discussion with mental health users to see whether they had anything to add. The guy telling me the story said the other people he was sitting with just sat there totally gob smacked. One of them explained to the script writers that the current storyline as it stood only reinforced stereotypes and stigma (mental distress=psycho=knife wielding maniac).
After much patient explaining the penny eventually dropped, wasn’t so much an eureka moment when that happened. They changed the storyline, taking out the needless psychodrama for psychodrama sake. Wasn’t perfect, it still referred to stereotypes and your average psych textbook but at least they took out the knife wielding moment. My own view and I said it to the guy who told me the story is that this exposes lazy script writing as opposed to researching the realities of mental distress.
And now there has been a call for de-stigmatising mental health in the media. Including the assumptions regarding labels such as schizophrenia (which not a split personality…and the number of times I have tried to explain the differences between the two!). And I agree that language is a powerful tool that can create oppressive ideas and labels. But equally it can also be the language of liberation as well. Rethink (and I never thought I’d agree with them…. many many disagreements with Rethink/NSF in the past) are correct when they maintain that mental health storylines are used as a tool for dramatic tension.
But simple representation of people with mental health issues, or even programmes exploring the subject, are not necessarily enough if not done in the right way, says Rethink. “With the soaps, for example, being dramas they often focus on a dramatic incident rather than following people with mental health problems going about their lives like everybody else,” says Corry. “We need more accurate representation.”
And that’s central to the argument, depicting people with mental distress living their life day after day. The negative stereotypes do have an impact on people (I know Mind did a survey many years on this) such as avoiding people, not going out of the house etc. Stigmatisation and vilification have consequences on lives. Indeed, positive images depicting mental distress is vital, the complexities as well rather than resorting to 1-dimensional characterisations and caricatures. In my own experiences of mental distress, it is complex and contradictory, sometimes good sometimes bad, sometimes clarity sometimes a thick fog dragging me down, sometimes ordinary sometimes out-of-the-ordinary. but then that’s life but it is about coping, how people cope with what is flung their way. Storylines should be about exploring mental distress as whole. From a study in 2006, it was found that 64% of psychiatric stories were negative compared with 46% of general medical pieces (and the number of times over the years I have written letters criticising storylines that engender stereotypes and stigmatisation especially around the psycho=knife wielding maniac scenario, and also the depiction of self-harm which has always had negative stereotypes that expose a real ignorance.
One way forward to stem this negative tide is to involve mental health users/survivors in storylines (I know it happens but not on a grand scale) because we are the best people who know what it is like and the realities of mental distress….
In my psychiatrist’s waiting room the other day I saw a whole bunch of fab posters/leaflets about how common mental health problems are. Shame I haven’t seen them anywhere else, not even in my GP’s surgery. I’d like to see it become a widespread campaign, rather than telling the people who already know (those of us in the psych’s waiting room!).
Totally agree Anji, there’s need to be mass education on this precisely because if affects so many people.
Rethink have just helped spend £18 million on an anti stigma campaign.
My opinion is that this is the the wrong approach. Stigma like all prejudice comes out of ignorance. So educate people about mental illness. But not as part of some anti prejudice campaign. Educate people properly the way you run public health campaigns about other illnesses.
When my son was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia we had all spent ten years wondering what was wrong with him and being turned away by doctors who knew nothing about schiziphrenia just like us.
If one in a hundred young people are going to get this illness surely it deserves as much prevention and education as cervical cancer or breast cancer. Early warning signs should be publicised. Getting treatment should be made easy. Getting the right medication and sticking with it, support in staying well.
But none of these real things are happening. ESA will destabilise many people. The MPs are as ignorant as every one else or they would never have passed ESA in its current form.
Tackle the real problems of mental illness. Get the information out there so people aren’t frightened and know how to get help and know they can get medication and live good lives.
You can’t by pass the real public health information that should be out there and indulge in image making. You help blind and deaf people in pro active positive ways and that is what takes away the fear. Spend the money on actually educating and helping people with mental illness and their families and their friends and that will move it from the realm of the unknown in to being just another illness. This is 2009.
Tell me, were a similar proportion of people mentally ill in the past ?
I’m interested because
a) the standard liberal narrative is that “every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better”. This view would necessitate an answer to the effect that, yes, it was just the same in times past, but people covered it up, wouldn’t ask for help, shame, fear of stigma etc i.e. what I call the Domestic Violence Narrative
b) I keep reading that half the people in prison these days are mentally ill – with the sometimes explicitly stated corollary that it’s because of their illness that they commit crimes. Prison Reform Trust say “72% of male and 70% of female sentenced prisoners suffer from two or more mental health disorders.”
50 years back reported crime was at 10% of current levels and the prison population was half its current size. If the level of mental illness was the same 50 years back, why so many fewer crimes ?
i)
I know I’m slightly re-treading ground here with other commenters but for one we don’t have very good statistics of mental illness in history. Twenty years ago autism wasn’t routinely diagnosed but now doctors are more aware of its existence. Also, diagnostic labels come into and out of use regularly. So, forty years ago your homosexual relative may have been considered mentally ill, your neighbor with Asperger’s would have been considered quirky, and the elderly woman at the store would have been told she had hysteria as an emotional, strong-willed teenager and been given treatment in kind. Nowadays only one would fall under a DSVM category. Trying to judge the ratio as to whether or not it is more common would be comparing apples and oranges.
The “Standard Liberal Narrative” is more like: “every day, in every way, we have the potential to be better.” Doesn’t mean we are or that we are there yet, but eventually society can be more equitable and just although that doesn’t mean it will be. And, if you want an interesting perspective on domestic violence in the past, Patrick Stewart (yes, THAT Patrick Stewart) has penned an interesting submission to the Guardian this past week. I recommend you give it a gander.
Finally, person’s who were considered mentally ill were often institutionalized in the past. Said institutions were closed down for a variety of valid or otherwise reasons but mental health services have always been a low priority politically and most insurers do not cover the care needed by most even if they are able to access it. This means there is a gap between what is needed and what people can get resulting in prisons being used essentially as a stop-gap. People who are mentally ill are at risk of being arrested and, as there are few services to aid them, they are carted off to prisons. In fact, I have heard of some judges and police officers targeting mentally ill persons for imprisonment as they hope that they can at least get treatment there that they cannot gain on the outside. Unfortunately, prison healthcare is often substandard and the treatment they do receive can exacerbate their symptoms creating a vicious cycle.
Firstly, reported crime doesn’t equal number of crimes occurring, it just denotes how many were actually reported.
Secondly, from what I understand, mentally ill people are far more likely to be the victim of a crime than the non-mentally ill, and I’d be sceptical of any source which “explicitly stated … that it’s because of their illness that they commit crimes” :/
“reported crime doesn’t equal number of crimes occurring, it just denotes how many were actually reported”
I see. So crime hasn’t REALLY increased.
I’m impressed. I thought that argument had finally been put down some time in the 90s. It’s like finding a creature previously reported as extinct.
Any source for that ‘from what I understand’ ?
Laban, taking of citing research where did you get yours from?
Where is the evidence that crime is increased? Actually, I thought what you are arguing is worthy of extinction which your own brand of right-wing thinking denotes.
Also, reported crime is precisely that (as Anji states), reported. What about hidden crimes such as white collar fraud, environmental crimes, theft and so on. Unlike the usual issue of street crime which is emphasised in the media because it gives right-wing populist ideologues an excuse to ‘get tough’ what about deaths in the workplace where managers are culpable. Is that not a crime? It is also how you interpret crime. How about war crimes?
It is how you define crime as well.
Anji, methinks Laban is incapable of google as well as being open to argument which is own closed mindedness exhibits.
Also, people are being sent to prison for crimes that do not need imprisonment. A right-wing populist social authoritarian government that uses the prison system as social dustbins. Drug offences, we have a pernicious drug laws. Here’s an idea for you Laban, decriminalise drugs and for starters….. you will be clearing the prison system by many!
Are you incapable of using Google?
“A British study has joined earlier research is demonstrating that, contrary to media stereotypes and the rhetoric of forced treatment advocates, people with psychiatric disabilities are far more apt to be victims, not perpetrators of violent crime.”
“Comparing national criminal-justice figures with those for an urban sample of mentally ill persons shows that they are more likely to be victims of violent crime than is the general population.”
“More than one fourth of individuals with severe mental illness (SMI) were victims of violent crime in the past year, eleven times the rate in the general population, according to a study in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.”
“Victimization rates vary with the type of violent crime, said the researchers. People with mental illness were eight times more likely to be robbed, 15 times more likely to be assaulted, and 23 times more likely to be raped than was the general population. Theft of property from persons, rare in the general population at 0.2 percent, happens to 21 percent of mentally ill persons, or 140 times as often. Even theft of minor items from victims can increase their anxiety and worsen psychiatric symptoms, the researchers said.”
“The notion that mentally ill people are dangerous, I think, is a dangerous notion,” says Mitch Bruski, chief executive officer of the Kenneth Young Center, an Elk Grove Village-based provider of mental health and senior citizens’ support services. “They actually statistically are much more likely to be hurt than to hurt other people.”