Link – Mental Illness: What’s Missing From Anti-Stigma Campaigns
I think Emilie may be on to something with this.
With the over representation of some mental disorder and the under representation of other mental disorders, there seems to be ‘’socially acceptable’’ mental health issues (even though there is still a long way to go) and less ‘’socially acceptable’’ mental health issues. Sometimes the less ‘’socially acceptable’’ mental health issues are related to how you act in public. For example, if you are not social enough, act in weird ways, have strange muscle spasm and compulsions, talk to yourself, you may be the “wrong kind of mentally ill.”
I suspect that for many, it’s easier to view mental health issues like anxiety, depression, etc. as an issue that is sad, and can lead to someone hurting themselves. Meanwhile, we look at some other people dealing with other mental health issues that might lead to them hurting others, because we’ve been accustomed to seeing the illness portrayed that way. The paranoid, knife-welding, person in a crowd, the multiple personality serial killer and so on.
However, the fact is that even those people are much more likely to be a victim of violence than a perpetrator. But we’ve seen them be violent, so we’ve trained ourselves to see them as dangerous, as opposed to recognizing that very few of the people with those diagnosis are dangerous at all.
Everyone dealing with a mental health issue is a human being, and that’s all that matters. We should all be treated as such.
Photo by TraumaAndDissociation 
