Mental Illness Stigma: Overcoming the 'Scarlet Letter' of Our Times | Emily Grossman. Perhaps you read the book The Scarlet Letter in high school or saw the Hollywood version. In the book, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the protagonist, Hester Prynne, commits adultery and becomes pregnant. She is forced to wear a scarlet letter "A" (for affair and adultery) on her dress as a sign of shame, making her a pariah. While I've never been in that position directly, I have lived in Hester Prynne's world in another way: I am a person living with a mental illness known as bipolar disorder. I remember when I was diagnosed in 1996. I was a freshman at Emory University in Atlanta. I was two months in, and in those two months, I had created a great support network of friends, become involved in several activities, and gotten straight As.
Now, I know what you're thinking: It was all in my head. I was in and out of the hospital for treatment, which involved taking a mini-bus to my partial program while living in my sorority house. These days, I am still speaking out about bipolar. Coming Out of the Bipolar Closet | Danielle Hark. You have a secret. A secret you've been keeping for years if not forever from your family, your friends, your boss, and maybe even yourself. A secret so secret that if people knew, it might change your relationships. They might judge you.
They might hate you. You're bipolar. Bipolar. Pretty little cocktails of yellow, pink, and blue pills abound. Enter the inevitable crash. You stop answering your phone, and eventually it stops ringing. You stop going out. Soon you're stuck in your room. Things deteriorate. You stop driving. You stop caring about anything and everything. You start to think everyone would be better off without you. Then you see your perfect little daughter, your partner, your mother, or your friend, and you remember that you are not alone. Frustration. Then comes the psychoanalysis and everything else they throw at you -- dietary changes, magnetic and shock therapy, hospitalizations, more meds... You feel a shift, and realize you can choose to live. Isolation: A Double-Edged Sword For The Mentally Ill. One of the casualties of mental illness is often any kind of healthy social interaction. If we aren’t careful, we can end up in a vortex of loneliness that serves only to make us feel worse about our mental health and cause our condition to deteriorate.
Why do we, as people with mental illness, isolate ourselves? We know it’s not the best thing for us, but sometimes avoiding people is the only way we feel safe. When I’m in a deep depression, I don’t feel safe. My posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) causes hypervigilance, which makes me feel paranoid and threatened. There is no trust in anyone besides the closest family members, and even they sometimes become a target of my distrust. I go to my room, lock the door, get in bed and hide from the world. Habits, Like Isolation, to Cope With Mental Illness We know there are a myriad of situations in life where we see habits at work. All these things can be abused and can cause great damage to our well being. That one is hard for me. The Science of Loneliness: How Isolation Can Kill You.
Who are the lonely? They’re the outsiders: not just the elderly, but also the poor, the bullied, the different. Surveys confirm that people who feel discriminated against are more likely to feel lonely than those who don’t, even when they don’t fall into the categories above. Women are lonelier than men (though unmarried men are lonelier than unmarried women). African Americans are lonelier than whites (though single African American women are less lonely than Hispanic and white women). The less educated are lonelier than the better educated. The unemployed and the retired are lonelier than the employed. A key part of feeling lonely is feeling rejected, and that, it turns out, is the most damaging part. To psychologists trying to puzzle out how social experiences affect health, AIDS amounted to something of a natural experiment, the chance to observe the effects of conditions so extreme that no ethical person would knowingly subject another person to them.
Ariel Lee And he was right. Self-Stigma in People With Mental Illness. The Stigma of Mental Illness Is Making Us Sicker. Self-Stigma in People With Mental Illness. The Stigma of Mental Illness Is Making Us Sicker. Unafraid Edition. Live Successfully Online Course. Living Successfully with a Mood Disorder is an online course consisting of approximately four hours worth of video-taped training delivered by DBSA staff members, accompanied by a synchronized PowerPoint presentation and downloadable handouts. The Living Successfully course is normally delivered in local communities across the United States by trained DBSA grassroots volunteeers as a four-week course about how to live a healthy, full, meaningful life with depression or bipolar disorder.
DBSA is happy to also offer the Living Successfully Online Course in an effort to provide basic information about living with mood disorders to as many people as possible. Course Trainings When Finished... Please click on the link below and complete the survey for DBSA's Living Successfully on-line Learning program. Click here for survey. NIMH · Home.
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