Do You Stigmatize Mental Illness?

There was a moment in Beth Johns’ life, about 25 years ago, when her brain shut down, rendering her body so immobile that she had to rely on friends to pull her around from place to place. She was nearly catatonic.

“I couldn’t talk,” she said. “I just kind of let people lead me around. My family didn’t know if I had brain damage.”

Beth talked to a doctor and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her brain, apparently, had found a way to defend itself against an abusive marriage, although the warning signs of mental illness had been there for years.

Desperate to find a new home, Beth moved in with her mother, but after just one year, her mom died in a car accident, and Beth had her first manic episode.

Beth soon found herself in and out of the hospital, locked in a downward spiral culminating with a seven-month hospital stay.

Without nowhere else to turn, Beth discovered , the largest care-giver network on the Peninsula for people struggling with mental illness.

At a large benefit dinner for Momentum Mental Health last week, Beth, with her curly brown hair, angular face and confident eyes, stood tall, recounting those dark days and reflecting on the path that brought her—25 years later—to the place of comfort and strength she finds herself in today.

“I didn’t have confidence,” she said. “I was just overwhelmed by my whole situation. I thought that here I have this thing that bothers me, and people are going to think badly of me my whole life.”

What she discovered at Momentum, however, was a community that understood and appreciated her. A social network of sorts, made up not only of people struggling with mental illness, but also those who do not.

“Being somewhere where you get acceptance has helped me to really accept myself,” she said.

And that, says James Millsap, Executive Director of the Momentum group on California Avenue—known as La Selva—strikes at the core of the challenge faced by anyone struggling with mental illness.

Fighting Stigma

“We often hear our clients say, it’s not the depression that keeps me down, it’s not the anxiety that gets me down, what gets me down is the way I’m treated once people hear I have this condition,” said Millsap.

Momentum CEO Paul Taylor agrees. He said that untold numbers of people with mental illness are going untreated because of such stigma.

“Unfortunately, due to a lot of misinformation and ignorance about serious mental illness and stigma, people are reluctant to seek help,” said Taylor. “They are even reluctant to admit there might be a problem with themselves or someone in their family.”

Taylor said that that stigma is rooted in a series of myths held about mental illness.

For one, Taylor said there is a widespread belief that people with serious mental illness are more dangerous or violent than people in the general population. Unfortunately and ironically, the opposite is more often the case, he said.

“There is no statistical correlation between crime and mental illness,” said Taylor. “People with serious mental illness are frankly more likely to be victims than anything else. And in terms of dangerousness, they are more likely to be dangerous to themselves than to others.”

Furthermore, Taylor blames the media for propagating the false correlation between mental illness and crime. He said it is common for reporters, when describing an accused perpetrator of a crime, to include details about that person’s mental health.

“They’ll introduce the notion—so and so has a mental illness. And that’s part of what keeps the myth going,” he said. But with no real, fair correlation there, the reporter might as well rattle off other meaningless characteristics, said Taylor.

“Why aren’t we using other adjectives?” he said. “They drank milk when they were little. They’re a Democrat. They have blue eyes. Whatever it is.”

Loud and Proud

Beth Johns has taken the effort to overcome stigma far beyond the act of finding confidence in herself—today she works day in, day out helping others do the same. For 22 years, she has worked at Momentum, recently as their manager of employment services.

“The getting-a-job piece was really huge for me to kind of be able to maintain my health and wellbeing, and now my job is to help other clients in the system get jobs,” she said.

That role fits snugly into Momentum’s larger mission of erasing the line between those in the community with and without mental illness. Beyond the medical treatment Momentum offers clients—including medication, psychiatric care and education—the social services are designed as much to make clients feel normal about their condition as they are to make everyone else feel normal living alongside them.

“Anything that we can do to educate the community is really important,” said Beth.

Paul Taylor said that education, contrary to what is typically practiced throughout the country, best comes in the simple form of direct human interaction.

“Studies show that one of the best ways to reduce stigma and change peoples’ minds is to actually meet a person,” he said. “Immediately you go, like—they don’t look like what I thought they should look like, they don’t sound like what I thought they should sound like. Gee, I really like this person.”

Taylor added that that kind of interaction goes much further than an employee of a health agency can by simply citing statistics and studies.

For the numerous Palo Altans out there—many of whom include Stanford students and professionals—who are grappling with depression, anxiety, or something more acute, James Millsap has the following advice:

“Fight through the stigma, reach out, find  a professional out there,” he said. “Have the courage to want a better happier life, and take that step to get there.”