The late Mitch Hedberg once said that alcoholism is the only disease you can get yelled at for having. But all types of mental illness provoke prejudice, anger and denial of what it means to suffer from something that is so often conflated with antisocial behavior.
Recently, I’ve tried to figure out where that stigma comes from. What is it about our culture that makes it so difficult for us, myself admittedly included, to sympathize with schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder and eating disorders the same way we sympathize with a more visible malady?
It’s probably a combination of factors. We’ve all heard that men are discouraged from surrendering control of their feelings to anything, whether it be a woman, “The Notebook” or mental illness.
American culture expects us all to be full of the boundless optimism and resilience that supposedly allow each and every one of us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and succeed on our own.
It doesn’t help that mental illness serves as a plot point in nearly every horror film.
But I think the biggest problem might have to do with how the issue is framed in our most impressionable years. After all, how often do you remember someone frankly discussing struggles with depression, bipolar disorder or anxiety in middle school and high school? And how many times do you remember signs of those struggles being tagged with words like “angst,” “weird” or “attention-seeking?”
We were taught that missing school with the flu or a severe injury was acceptable, but that staying home to deal with crushing depression likely wouldn’t be an excused absence. Teenage angst was temporary and normal — something to be expected and not approached in any serious way.
And high school sucks for a lot of people. It sucked for me sometimes, and I was relatively well-adjusted.
High school counseling departments are generally composed of well-qualified and well-intentioned professionals, but their efforts are hampered by being too few in number and having a stigma associated with seeking their services.
