FACING PERCEPTUAL OBSTACLES

So what sort of perception of severe mental illness should we be fighting for? How do we change our current view to “destigmatize” this social issue? The key to getting on the right path towards a solution, I believe can be found in a study I mentioned in the previous section. This study did little in the way of inspiring hope that the problem of stigma could be solved when people understood mental illness in terms of a biological disease as we seemed to have assumed. This study compared the ways participants viewed someone depending on whether or not they had a mental disorder and what they were told was the cause of their disorder. The results did not find a difference in the way participants viewed mentally ill people whether the cause of their illness was left out or attributed to a neurobiological problem. Even though this detail does alleviate the blame placed on the sufferer, negative social attitudes persisted and may even have gotten worse. But another condition tested this effect against yet another group of mentally ill people who offered a different explanation

The neuroscience of dehumanization is a complicated topic, there is no simple explanation, such as activation of a particular brain region, that we can point to as being the cause of dehumanization. The emotions of fear, disgust, and anger all seem to play a unique role in contributing to whether or not we will view someone as “being human” and treat them in a socially favorable manner. Furthermore, categorizing or labeling someone as being outside our group greatly diminishes the probability of empathizing with them. 

Let’s stop for a moment and forget about everything we’ve ever learned about mental illness. Make a concerted effort to disregard your brains automatic response to associate and reconcile incoming information with the neural circuits that map out categories. Those concepts are good at integrating experiences within the context and layout of what is already there, they aren’t go good at accurately representing what is objectively there.

Categories are really good at reconciling incoming information 

Categorizing and defining and labeling people and ideas has been a fundamental part of 

In order for us to reconfigure the way we understand and perceive mental illness, we have to take into account the architecture that we have to work with. And that is what I have been attempting to do up until this point, 

The insane person is a one whose propensity is to disregard rather than exercise the superior facilities of the human mind. The behavior of the lunatic is governed entirely by their base animalistic impulses. They demonstrate a striking lack of concern in regards to their deficits and a often a complete lack of self awareness. So attribute madness to demonic possession and others to a failure of tier parents to instill discipline or a sense of accountability. My view for what causes the madman to become mad is that he simple just has that such NATURE, HE IS naturally defective, they just are the way they are. One needs to be wary of the insane person who is capable of unexpected bouts of rage, lust, delusion, or any and all other conceivable form of immoral action. They are threats to society because of how well they can blend it and suddenly wreak havoc. I keep my family away from the madman who might disrupt and contaminate the moral integrity with his lack of values. It is important not to keep such persons confined within the walls of the asylums out of view of those of us who value strength, sensibility, honesty, and all the other virtues of a good society. Whether or not the madman is capable of learning proper social conduct or understanding normal human emotions is beyond me. To treat the insane as one would treat a typical human I believe would be futile and might even run the risk of encouraging them to continue on behaving as they do. The insane person has no place in society and poses only harm and degeneracy which is why it's best for the rest of society to stay away.

The mentally ill person is someone for whom we have immense sympathy. Their behavior is odd and off putting and most certainly not a normal way for a person to act…. But it’s not their fault! They have a sick brain! They have an illness that causes them to see things irrationally and behave irrationally, so it makes sense that we would be at the very least a little unsettled around them. We MUST have compassion for their disease and their suffering because it is good to be kind towards everyone… no matter how bizarre, especially when it is not a choice they are making. The thought of letting them move around freely and interacting in society is a little bit unsettling, but only because they might harm someone or themselves, not because they have a disease. I think it is important to show them compassion and try to connect with them if possible, I’m not sure whether I would want them to attend my wedding simply because people might be unsettled if they didn’t know about their disease. The mentally ill person does not deserve to be discriminated against and it is up to the rest of society to be compassionate towards and look after those who are mentally ill.

Someone who faces perceptual obstacles has been dealt more than the usual amount of perceptual imperfections. Whether it occurred suddenly or gradually as this individual grew and experienced the world, it became apparent to them that there are certain contexts or certain aspects of their subjective awareness that they find abnormally painful or otherwise problematic to the social role they inhabit. As the continue to navigate through life, they find that the particular problems persist and continue to get in the way of their wellbeing. The problems they face are unique to their conscious awareness and how they have made sense of life so far. These obstacles recurrently get in the way of the individuals desired trajectory for their own life though their perceptual obstacles may interfere with their ability to self reflect and be aware of themself, moments of lucidity help to reveal a self governing identity with consistent values, its just that this identity might not be in control most or even much of the time. All of us face perceptual obstacles and we really do mostly focus on the dramatic examples, but all of us have obstacles that burden the core identity, but are essential to defining the ideal self.

I’d like to stop here to interject a way of viewing people diagnosed with mental disorders. Up to this point we’ve focused on people with diagnoses as being characterized as “a different sort of person”, specifically one who is intrinsically different (an insane person). A modified version of that view focuses on them as being a person “with a brain disease” that causes them to be different (a mentally ill person). Both of these views categorize diagnosed people based on what makes them different and abnormal and worse off; and both leave out a component which is fundamental for inspiring empathy, that component being the fact that the disordered person lives a day to day life just like all people on Earth. We’ve seen how education and awareness improved things in terms of accepting disordered people as being humans who deserve human rights, but even with their humanity being restored, categorizing them as being different on the basis of a brain disorder still marks them for social disgrace as being “different”. 

Recall the model that humanization is a process in which education and familiarization mutually reinforce each other to propel towards acceptance. Both components must work together and require a sufficient amount of the other one to occur simultaneously to break the habitual processes of dehumanizing and othering. “Stop the Stigma” style activism efforts really have gotten it right all along. We’ve been told again and again “Educate yourself on mental health topics” and “listen to and empathize with people with mental disorders” by so many different brochures, and educational ads, and media figures, that they have almost become cliche theoretical ideas whose importance and significance became lost and unconsidered. They became lost to what I’ll call the effect of “illusory subtext attributed contradiction” meaning that the point being made is overlooked and discounted due to the context it’s presented in leading them to make the assumption that what is being said is an attempt to virtue signal or allude to a sentiment and is illegitimate. 

Organizations such as that National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), American Psychiatric Organization (APA), Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other bureaucratically structured organizations are effective in that they provide reliable, fundamental, comprehensive, up-to-date information that is essentially universally accessible in terms of being easy to access as well as comprehended. The trade off for this reliability and ease of access becomes especially apparent when it comes to something like destigmatizing mental illness.

The data is accurate, it's clearly presented and easy to understand, the points being made cover what I’d consider to be the important ones… but if the purpose is to change the stigmatized attitudes of the people reading this information, how effective might these graphics be in doing that? Probably not… because a problem like stigma is rooted in an enduring tendency of human emotion, facts and information alone doesn’t change the opinions and behaviors for the overwhelming majority of people in most cases. This is the problem I have with most mental health awareness campaigns, because although advocates might think they’re making an impact and feel good about what they do, the people they reach and possibly even the advocates themselves unconsciously might still be contributing to negative attitudes towards the people they’re trying to help.

My original premise for this project was to compare the three disorders I looked at across three domains; representation in media, clinical and scientific data, and interview with an individual with that diagnosis. 

It's time to talk about the individual. Individuals are important, at the end of the day, society is nothing more than millions and billions of them interacting with one another in direct and indirect ways. We refer to the act of these interactions as being “social” and “social stigma” refers to social interactions that tend to negatively impact individuals based on the way they are perceived in regards to social situations. Although structural stigmatization exists, I chose to primarily focus on interpersonal social dynamics because all it takes to make a difference is for one person who reads this to make the conscious effort. Before getting into examples of what that would look like, we need to change the way we view people with disorders as social beings, which begins and ends with looking at them as an individual with individual experiences and individual human characteristics. 

The three interviews you’re about to read were conducted right at the beginning of production and were originally intended to be supplementary materials that were secondary to the media and science portions. However, doing these interviews changed the way I looked at the topic and which I restructured everything else around. Because once you connect with someone on a human to human level and talk about something as personal and profoundly life altering as a severe mental disorder, you really do come to understand what it means to “see the person” and not the disorder.

Some disclaimers. If you are not intimately familiar with the life story of someone with any of these disorders, be cognizant not to let these examples generalize your concept of any of the disorders. One of the most important things to keep in mind when considering the individual is that every person with a disorder has a unique experience. Just as your life experience differs from other people you could be categorized alongside, substantial variation exists in the population of people with the same diagnosis. Overlap between groups exists just as it goes within groups, these diagnoses are nothing more than an arbitrary set of symptoms used to classify people for the purpose of treating them effectively. Furthermore, even if somebody  has a diagnosis of a disorder, nobody should be viewed as having the final word as to a “truth” about what it means to have a diagnosis. People with the same diagnosis have differing opinions and different life experiences. To recap: don’t generalize an experience or opinion to others with that diagnosis; there is no one person whose opinion or experience is the ultimate authority for what it means to have that diagnosis.

Names and some information has been changed in order to protect anonymity. Interview format followed the same basic outline of 12 questions for each interview with some added depending on the natural flow of each conversation. The format is a direct transcript of audio recordings of each interview. These are real people.