A Primer on Depression and Bipolar Disorder

II. MOOD DISORDERS AS PHYSICAL ILLNESSES

G. Stigma Of Having A Mental Illness

At the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) National Meeting in Boulder in the summer of 1988, a woman psychiatrist (whose name I don't remember) from UCLA reported about her survey of several thousand people in southern California on the level of stigma they attached to a list of serious illnesses. She asked, in effect, "Of the following illnesses, which do you consider to be the worst to have?''.

The long list included such things as mental retardation, cancer, epilepsy, venereal disease, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, etc., etc. And mental illness. The result was interesting: mental illness was chosen worst by a large margin. [At the time I couldn't help joking "It's nice to be number one at something, but this is ridiculous!" even though the joke was partly on me.]

It is, perhaps, easy to understand why people should feel this way. For one thing, most people know that mental illness is very serious -- perhaps totally incapacitating -- but don't have any idea of what causes it, or what it is like. They fear it: they fear the "loss of their mind," and they fear "being locked up in a mental hospital" presumably with lots of other "crazy" people. In addition, most people conceive someone who is mentally ill to be disruptive, irrational, violent, and dangerous. In reality, only a very tiny percentage of victims of mental illness (for example people with extreme mania) ever act that way; I suspect that this common, but badly erroneous, picture of the mentally ill comes directly from television and movies where it is the norm.

From all I have written above, it should be obvious that such deep prejudice and stigmatization is totally unwarranted, particularly for the mood disorders. In fact, there are many famous people in history and present-day life, who suffered (or suffer) depression or bipolar disorder. People like Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Vincent van Gogh, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Patty Duke, Ludwig Beethoven, Wolfgang Mozart, Gioacchino Rossini, George Frederick Handel, .... the list goes on and on. People with incredible talent, intelligence, creativity, sensitivity, and leadership abilities.

Indeed, studies strongly suggest that many of the 19th and 20th century poets and writers in English were/are depressive or manic-depressive. I am not saying these people had special abilities because they were ill, but that they managed to release their creativity despite their illness. I list them both to provide hope for victims, and also to provide clear evidence that mentally ill people do not always fit the fearsome picture described in the preceding paragraph.

Having put in a bad word for television above, let me now praise it for a documentary program which I saw on PBS in the winter of 1986/87 (I was still pretty shaky then, so I must be forgiven for not remembering exactly when, or the title, or other trivial facts). The program described the life of a small group of people who lived in a mental half-way house in Minneapolis; they were provided meals, helped with daily tasks, and supervised by workers at the house. They had freedom to go out to work, classes, and other activities.

Most of the program was devoted to explaining and illustrating their lives. But two vignettes tell the essential story. At one point, the narrator was interviewing a man suffering from bipolar disorder. He had experienced an episode of major depression several months ago; as a result, he lost his job, then his home, and then his wife left him, taking their son with her. After becoming unable to care for himself, he was hospitalized and started on medication, which resulted in significant improvement.

Now in the half-way house, he was visited by his small son every weekend. In the interview, this man was asked "If you could have any wish you want, what would it be?" Holding his son in his lap he responded, almost in tears, "I would just like to be like all the rest of you. I would like to be normal!"

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