Speakout: Stigma a hurdle to treatment for mental illness

Dyana Z. Furmansky

Sunday, June 4, 2006

These days, no class of disease has as much social stigma attached to it as does mental illness. You can tell someone, even a stranger, that you have AIDS or breast cancer and receive encouragement, commiseration and life-saving treatment. But you might hide your depression. And if you or your friend or your sister or your husband or your son talk openly about a bipolar disorder, you risk losing your job, your family, your health insurance, and the goodwill others feel toward you at a time when you need these affirmations the most.

We all thoughtlessly dismiss people who are "crazy" or "nuts," employing demeaning vocabulary that allows us to reject a vast segment of humanity.

The pattern of categorization and isolation is an old one; it surfaced in the institutionalized prejudice toward previous groups that were demonized because they were gay. Or female. Or Jewish. Or black. Or disabled. Today, the people treated dismissively because of their mental illness are the ones on the front line in the ongoing fight to extend civil rights to all.

Why are we so hard on the mentally ill? Perhaps because mental illness seems so avoidable - to those who don't suffer from it. Or perhaps because its boundaries are unclear; a loved one's cancer does not infect us with cancer. Another's emotional suffering, however, often becomes our own.

But to a greater extent, the stigma attached to many mental illnesses arises from the widely held conviction that they are hopeless. A diagnosis sounds like a death sentence. Indeed, it can literally become one if the person in unbearable pain takes his own life. It can remain one figuratively if the person is driven from her place in her world by the shame or scorn we heap on her.

We should realize that a diagnosis of a mental condition - as of a heart condition or of cancer - is the first step on the path to treatment. Treatment leads, in more cases than is realized, to remission, enabling a person to work and conduct meaningful personal relationships. It can lead to cures, too. According to data provided by the Mental Health Association of Colorado, panic and bipolar disorders show a treatment success rate of 80 percent. Schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorders have a treatment success rate of 60 percent.

Success includes a person's ability to live more fully than would have been possible without treatment. Medical research pushes recovery from heart disease and cancer ever higher. It is doing the same for mental illness, and as we learn more about how to manage stress, the most debilitating effects of mental illness can be avoided. A shift in our attitude toward mental illness might make it this century's equivalent of tooth decay: together, prevention and treatment work to keep it at bay.

Remove the social stigma of mental illness and we who need treatment will seek it in greater numbers.

Remove the social stigma and more of us will talk about the full range of therapies that work.

Remove the social stigma and we who have loved ones battling mental illness will be better able to help them win their fight.

Dyana Z. Furmansky volunteers for the Mental Health Association of Colorado. She is a resident of Denver.