Selling Alternatives to Stigma

At the 2008 convention, I was fortunate to speak with Bob Corolla, NAMI's media director who gave some intriguing reasons why stigma persists in the face of education. This blog entry will examine various forms of stigma, I'll offer my earliest experiences with it, and end with some ideas for fighting it.

According to Bob Corolla:

"The reason that stigma continues to exist now following the turn of the century as opposed to the 1950s is portrayals of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses in the mass media-TV and movies, but also that extends to the advertising industry, even retail products that are at least ignorant if not insensitive to what the real nature of mental illness is.

That kind of massive communication and portrayal makes it very difficult for public education to break through the screening and barriers that most people are exposed to. We're making progress, though. Following the surgeon general's report in 2000, we also saw the premiere of the movie A Beautiful Mind, which was a major breakthrough because it was the first time that a person with schizophrenia was portrayed not only sympathetically but as the hero of a major motion picture that went on to win academy awards.

So there is progress. Stigma Busters [NAMI's program] is viewed as a protest vehicle yet really is more than that because any time you make an initial contact with whatever that source of stigma might be you're at least educating-whether it's a screenwriter or producer-about the real nature of mental illness. Now sometimes they don't listen or they sometimes don't care but at least there's that exposure.

The protest strategy behind StigmaBusters is that in the ideal, you're trying to change people's attitudes but even if you're not changing how a person thinks, you sometimes can change behavior. You can make it embarrassing enough or enough of a problem that they have to deal with it from a public relations perspective.

So that they're going to think twice before they do it again. Now that doesn't change an attitude, it's not the best outcome, but if you can cut stigma at the source, that is a small victory."

Bob Corolla's insights beg the question: shouldn't screenwriters and others know better. Or does stigma sell? Pull back the curtains and raise the blinds on any house in America, and chances are you'll find someone living with a mental illness. I wholeheartedly believe that stigma is the prime culprit in a person not seeking help. He or she doesn't want to be associated with "someone like that," and so they deny their own problems.

The StigmaBusters campaign addresses cultural stigma (entertainment, advertising, retail and other media). Structural issues involves law and policy (e.g. insurance or employment discrimination).

I'll talk now about my own early experiences with stigma. Long before I set the goal of becoming an expert on recovery from schizophrenia, I had a shadow life where my diagnosis was kept secret from others. After a failed drug holiday, I was hospitalized again so I could be stabilized on the medication. When I returned to work at my second job (I had started it two months earlier), everyone knew I had a breakdown and treated me differently. My career was derailed.