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April showers bring more than May flowers. In fact, this entire month is dedicated to Mental Health Awareness. While salacious and insane stories about psychiatry often dominate national attention, it is important to focus on something positive – Hope!
With this goal in mind, I recently gave a TEDx talk, “Creating Hope for Mental Health,” that highlights the wonder, heartache, and possibility that define living with mental illness.
There are many barriers to psychiatric care; dismal insurance coverage, soaring out-of-pocket costs, criminalization of the mentally ill, and lack of inpatient bed availability. One of the biggest hurdles, which we as a public have the power to change, is stigma. It perpetuates silence in those who need a voice most.
Fear and ignorance create an ever widening chasm between mental illness fact and fiction. There are many myths on the topic, five of which are cited frequently: mental illness only affects a few people; personal weakness causes it; mental illness is untreatable; people with psychiatric problems are violent; the mentally ill should be locked up forever in a hospital.
We are all people, and we all struggle from time to time. Some people just struggle more than others, through no fault of their own.
Anxiety and depression are commonplace and account for the leading causes of disability in the United States and Canada according to the National Institutes of Health. Not everyone experiences psychiatric symptoms on a pathological level, but we all know someone who does, and we will undoubtedly experience some fleeting symptoms ourselves.
During medical school I learned that many great writers, among them, Jonathan Swift (who funded Ireland’s psychiatric hospital where I trained), were victims of stigma! Moreover, I came to appreciate that beyond family and friends; professors, actors, Nobel Prize winners, and even world leaders have struggled with and overcome psychiatric problems.
In polite society there is a code of silence around this topic. We can all break that silence by talking about mental illness for what it really is – shared experiences.
Check out my TED bio: http://www.ted.com/profiles/3674816
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HelenMFarrellMD
