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Mental Health Stigma Still Hard to ShakeThe Virginia Tech Aftermath By Kathi Wolfe
Twenty years ago, Joseph Rogers worked at a community mental health center. It was the first professional advocacy job for Rogers, the first consumer to organize self-help groups at the center. One day, Rogers went upstairs to the third floor. A co-worker, he said, told him, “patients aren’t allowed on the third floor.” Rogers told his colleague that he was a “staff person,” but that didn’t seem to matter. “I was told I was making a disturbance (by being on the third floor),” Rogers recalled. The center was supposed to know about mental illness, but even if “patients” became staffers, the center “would see us as ‘patients’ first and foremost,” he said. This story is just one of the countless instances of the stigma that consumers with “a mental health diagnosis” encounter, said Rogers, now executive director of the National Mental Health Consumers’ Self-Help Clearing House. Stigma, ignorance and the negative stereotypes surrounding mental illness fuel discrimination against people with psychiatric disabilities in all areas of life, from housing to employment, said consumers and experts recently interviewed by telephone and e-mail. But since the April 16th Virginia Tech shootings in Blacksburg, Va., when Seung-Hui Cho killed 25 students, five faculty members and himself, prejudice has increased to an alarming degree, they said. Larry Fricks, a consumer and director of the Appalachian Consulting Group, trains consumers to provide peer-support services to people recovering from mental illness. “We teach people how to set goals — how to direct their own recovery,” he said. “We went through a lot of processing,” said Fricks, who was conducting a training session in Michigan during the Virginia Tech tragedy. “People were upset because the media was depicting all people with mental illness as dangerous and violent.” This misperception grows out of a core of fear within our society, said Fricks, who added, “Deep down inside, most people don’t trust us (consumers with mental illness).” People with mental illnesses commit crimes, as do people without mental illnesses, Otto Wahl, director of the Graduate Institute of Professional Psychology at the University of Hartford, wrote in an e-mail. But, he added, “The vast majority of crimes ... are committed by people without mental illnesses.” The “vast majority” of people with mental illnesses are not violent or dangerous, said Wahl, author of “Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness.” “Mental illness is a poor predictor of violence,” he added. The best predictors of violence (beyond a history of it) are youth, being male, substance abuse and growing up in a high-crime neighborhood, Wahl said. People with mental health needs are more likely to be victims of violence “because we are vulnerable people who need help, and we’re not getting it,” said Lauren Spiro, director of public policy, National Coalition of Mental Health Consumer/Survivor Organizations. But despite the fact that numerous studies show that there is no correlation between violence and mental illness, violence has become the image of mental illness to the public in the aftermath of Virginia Tech, say mental health advocates. Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, was a young man who did not get treatment, said Bob Carrolla, a spokesman for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “The likelihood is that his mental health problems began in childhood or high school and that he never got help,” Carrolla said. “The images of Cho on television and in the newspapers are now the face of mental illness,” he said. There is a potential for a backlash against consumers with mental illness, Carrolla said, which could adversely affect “how colleges deal with consumers and extend to how the workplace will deal with consumers who may need accommodations.” Just as after 9/11, Islamic groups urged Americans not to view all Muslims as terrorists, in the wake of Virginia Tech, mental health advocates are urging the public not to paint people with mental illness with the broad brush of violence or psychiatric labels. Mental Health America (MHA) warned the public “to avoid diagnosing others with mental health problems or engaging in other ‘profiling.’” According to the MHA, discussing classmates’, colleagues’ or neighbors’ mental health or potential for violence “is not a productive way to deal with feelings of anxiety and fear.”
Many states are following that path. For example, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia recently signed an executive order mandating that a list of individuals ordered into involuntary mental health treatment be reported to the state’s Central Criminal Records exchange. “This was a terrible mistake,” Spiro wrote in a letter to the editor published in The Washington Post. “Eroding the civil liberties of some people does not make our community safer ... It will fuel more discrimination and fear and add a further burden for those experiencing distress.” Gov. Kaine “isn’t really paying attention to the fact that that’s going to have a huge chilling effect on anybody’s getting treatment for anything,” said Andrew J. Imparato, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities. If you take away civil liberties and reinforce negative stereotypes of people with mental illness, he added, “that’s just going to make people want to be in the closet and not seek treatment or enter on a path to recovery in whatever way works for them.” Many individuals who are not a danger to “self or others” may be included on these lists, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law stated in an Action Alert posted on its Web site. “There is a significant danger that those names will be shared with other agencies ... (legally, accidentally or illegally) in addition to the FBI,” the center’s statement reads. Rather than creating “illusory, knee-jerk (non)-solutions,” this society should be working “compassionately” to fix this country’s “failed, broken, fragmented mental health system,” Spiro said. She said she is hopeful that the influx of veterans with mental disabilities returning from the war in Iraq will become “the face of mental health.” “We have these veterans with mental health needs,” Spiro said. “People want to understand (that) ... the Hill is looking at increased funding to meet their mental health needs.” It’s as if a door has been opened, she said. ****************************** Kathi Wolfe, a Washington, D.C., Metro-area writer, was a 1998-1999 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow. |
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Yet, this is precisely what’s happening, said
Spiro. “On ... (Capitol) Hill there is a proposal to develop a national
list of everyone who has ever been involuntarily committed to a mental
hospital, which would be shared with law enforcement personnel,” wrote
Spiro and Judi Chamberlin, director of education and training, National
Empowerment Center, in a commentary for Talking Justice, a National Public
Radio blog.