The Stigma of Mental Illness… Culture Change Needed

“Mental illness affects one in six Americans, and yet it is still an illness people are reluctant to talk about, let alone admit they have.” So says Anne Thompson in a recent NBC’s Nightly News segment on Glenn Close’s efforts to change the perception of and stigma associated with mental illness. This makes me think of  the sentiments a mom recently shared with me about her trials in raising a son with bipolar disorder. She said “I had to call the police on my son twice, which was the most devastating thing in the world.” A year after his downward, crisis-generating decline… and a diagnosis that changed everything… this 14 year old young man is infinitely better. “We still have flare-ups, but he has done almost a complete turn-around.”

Mental illness in teenagers is a silent epidemic. According to the New England Journal of Medicine “half of all serious adult psychiatric illnesses – including major depression, anxiety disorders and substance abuse – start by 14 years of age, and three fourths of them are present by 25 years of age. Yet the majority of mental illness in young people goes unrecognized and untreated, leaving them vulnerable to emotional, social and academic impairments during a critical phase of their lives.”

Consider the teenagers who are involved with drugs and alcohol, who skip school, get in trouble with the law, live on the fringe and seem to reject adult efforts to get them to live by the rules. Would your reactions and responses to these kids be different if you knew there was mental illness involved? Of course it would. And, it is not only possible, it may be likely that this is the case.

The stigma toward mental illness, coupled with ignorance about its prevalence, creates dangerous gaps in the way adults intervene and support teenagers who need it. The culture change needed is a wide-spread change, and the new public service announcement by Director Ron Howard and Glenn Close’s collaboration will help to bring awareness to  this need. BringChange2Mind.org says “Change a mind; change a life.”

But this needs to get personal. For every parent of a teenager lives either in close contact, or in community with teenagers who need us to to do better by them. We can’t wait for the culture at large to change…we need to act now to help the teenagers in need of mental health services. They live under our roof, and in our midst. Our ignorance is not an excuse. We need to be less judgmental; we need to recognize that teenagers dealing with anxiety, or depression, or bi-polar illness may appear to be the stereo-typical difficult or defiant teen, when what they really are is ill. And in need of help.

This culture change needs to get personal. What can you do to help someone you know?