I think the rudest thing ever is stigmatizing people that are going through therapy to take care of their mental health and to keep their mental health in check. Why the stigmatization really?
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I think the rudest thing ever is stigmatizing people that are going through therapy to take care of their mental health and to keep their mental health in check. Why the stigmatization really?
Many believe that if you need to see a therapist or get psychiatric help, then you’re beyond getting cured— you’re hopeless. The assumption that, if you are getting therapy or clinical treatment, then therefore somehow you must have a really, really bad mental illness, and so maybe, possibly, speculatively, you’re a danger or something like that . This one is baselessly speculative, biased, and irrational, but I have experienced it myself — the view held by some people that if you are actually seeing a psychiatrist and you are actually taking prescribed psychiatric medicine, it must mean you are particularly and dangerously ill somehow. You actually get penalized in the eyes of some people for doing the right thing and taking care of yourself.
So there is institutionalized ignorance of mental health. Many people are unaware of modern brain research and the medications it has led to. As a mental health consumer, I use my voice, and I just completed training to help others do so, to combat stigma. I feel that the stigma of mental illness and the resistance to finding aid dates back to an antiquated view of the nature of psychiatric diagnoses, after all, it hasn’t been all that long ago when they drilled holes in the patient’s skull to let the demons out. Particularly in America, there is an unspoken rule that those of us with major mental disorders are just weak.