CULTURE
Mental Health is NOT Fake
WRITTEN AND DESIGNED BY ANYA HABER
Roughly 90 percent of people with mental health problems have felt discriminated against by stigma, according to the Mental Health Foundation. Living with mental illness is hard enough. What’s even harder is to do so while having to defend the very existence of a disease you wish you never had. There’s no denying that mental illness is shrouded in stigma, both social and perceived. Social stigma comes from society, whereas perceived stigma comes from within. Perceived stigma can have an immensely devastating effect on individuals with mental illness. The shame of being labeled causes people to forgo treatment and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Although societal attitudes toward mental illness are improving, social stigma is still a potent force and is often masked as something else. Films and TV shows tend to exacerbate
SCAN MAGAZINE // WINTER 2019
symptoms of mentally-ill characters for dramatic effect, causing the public to be bombarded with messages that the mentally ill are dangerous. According to Psychology Today, “An analysis of English-language movies released between 1990-2010 that depicted at least one character with schizophrenia, found that most schizophrenic characters displayed violent behavior, one-third of these violent characters engaged in homicidal behavior and a quarter committed suicide.” You could be promoting social stigma without even realizing it. A popular and insulting way to subtly shame mental illness is to treat it as a common emotion that can quickly come and go. Using clinical illnesses as adjectives to describe feelings is a form of social stigma. When you’re feeling sad, don’t tell people you’re depressed. If you are a perfectionist, don’t say you have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Conversely, if someone diagnosed with OCD talks