A Perspective on Stigma

Ed Allard, FHR Communications Representative

I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Edward Allard, and since coming down with schizophrenia in the early eighties, I have had my share of struggles, relapses, and in spite of it all, a fairly good recovery. While recovery may not have been a reality without the expertise and good fortune of caring treatment providers, the support and, most of all the love, of my wife and son has been the constant that has helped me through.

Like a lot of people with a serious mental illness, I have a problem with the labels used to define me. Consumer, Client, Persons Served, Patient … all are well-meaning, however not easy to identify with in a positive light. I certainly understand that assigning specific labels to individuals is not unique to mental health service recipients. To my account, I am a client. To the local grocery store, I am their consumer. To my doctor, I am a patient.

Although consumer is not a pejorative term, for example, Consumer Reports is a trusted resource for product evaluation, yet I still cringe a little bit when I hear it. To me, it suggests that my role in life is to consume things; however, I do my best, daily, to do so much more. As an alternative, there is “mental health consumer” but this also presents some interesting ponderings. How does one consume mental health? If I consume my mental health, don’t I wind up running out of the stuff? Hmmm…maybe that’s how I got sick in the first place.

Other terms include the old stand-by, client and, most recently, person served. The more generic they are the more they fail to really capture the identity of the person living with a mental health disability. I often think of myself as a service recipient but even that would soon become hackneyed and riddled with stigma, were it to catch on. My personal issue with each of these terms is that they do not capture a person’s unique character; instead, they capture the stigma that surrounds that person’s mental illness.

I recently heard a report featured on WGBH, a public broadcasting station out of Boston, Massachusetts. It was stated that quite a few banks were turning down the federal government’s stimulus support due to attempts to avoid any perceived stigma. They thought the support might make them look weak. In essentially the same way, words like consumer and client make us, those on the receiving end of mental health services, look weak and dependent. The misconception that consumers and clients are unable to care for themselves, pose a problem for society, smell bad, attack people, say awkward things, or are hard to handle, is more common than one might care to admit. Consumers are no more likely to stand on street corners panhandling and getting in the way of traffic than they are to live happy lives, well-established in the fabric of their communities.

In fact, people with well-treated mental illness, enjoying a good recovery, often go unnoticed. Odds are you have crossed paths with one or two persons living with a mental illness today without even knowing you have. Yet, they are in fact consumers of care and exhibit more characteristics of modern-day recovery than the stigmatized ideas we carry.

Stigma is a major obstacle in one’s pursuit of recovery in any sense of the word. This applies both to the stigma we may feel from others and that which we carry for ourselves. The nature of stigma, and the reason I feel it is a problem, is basic prejudice. Like other words that can seem demeaning, the word consumer carries with it value judgments and false assumptions that are humiliating and characterize the person as “less than.” Thus, the real enemy may not be stigma as much as the prejudice that underlies it.

To characterize myself as mentally ill, I inevitably deny the degree of mental health I do, in fact, enjoy. Yet life experience has proven to me time and time again that I have a chronic, life-threatening and disabling disease. This disease happens to affect my mind. I recognize that as long as I have a mental illness, and need ongoing treatment, I will be viewed as a consumer. This does not make me less of a person, a non-contributor, or a problem for society. I am, as are all those living with a mental illness, someone who has something to offer. No amount of stigma or prejudice, or even mental illness, will ever take that ability from me.

Recovery is a relatively recent concept when it comes to mental illnesses. The advent of new and better treatments, and the work of advocacy, has resulted in more people establishing and keeping good mental health after serious bouts of illness. The more we can do to expose the general public to these facts, I feel, the better. Yes, I have been a derelict, but as I recover, I grow. As I recover, I work. As I recover, I learn to live with my past while still fitting the mold of client and consumer, family member and friend, neighbor and community member.

I have aspirations of helping Fellowship Health Resources become a source for reliable, honest, and meaningful behavioral and mental health news necessary to support people as they pursue their better selves. Note that I say people, rather than consumers, as I mean to bridge here the gap between the sick and the well, the sane and the insane, as there really is no difference between the two. We are a community of people and the more we see past the words we use to describe each other to the true worth of each individual, the more harmonious that community will become.