What Stigma?

For anyone who doesn't know, the #whatstigma? hashtag on Twitter was started today by @RebeccaFront to raise awareness of mental health issues and reduce the stigma surrounding them. It quickly became the top trending topic in the UK and is trending highly worldwide at the minute. And it's only been going a couple of hours at most. If you haven't already, take a few minutes to read it over. It's inspiring and moving stuff to see so many people admit to their problems, and know that they aren't alone.

I have great admiration for the people opening up about the most personal, private and oftentimes painful of issues. I wish that I had their strength and courage. I'm writing this blog post with no real intention of actually publishing it. I have a link to this blog on my Twitter account, and if I don't have the bravery to admit to any of this over there, I'm not going to do it here, right? Mostly it's because I follow and am followed by a range of different people - randoms I don't know, vague acquaintences, people I know through 'work'-like activities, as well as friends from real life and new friends that I've made through Twitter and the interwebs. A few of them know about my problems, the vast majority do not. And I'm terrified of how it would be received if I did admit to it.

I don't think that it would make people think that I'm a bad person, or completely stop talking to me. But I do think they would react differently. Treat me with kid gloves, perhaps. Pull back a little, afraid of how I might react to any given situation. Think that I'm just too high maintenance to deal with. That's almost the worst part of the stigma around mental health. I can't imagine that anyone I told would laugh in my face, or say anything overtly horrible or mean to me. It's the not knowing what to do with me that I'm most afraid of. As it is, I feel that a lot of the people in my life don't understand me or know how to take me. I fear that they think I'm weird and annoying and a bit strange.

So if I told them that - in addition to being a bit of a sci-fi geek, extraordinarily sarcastic, obsessed with music, movies and tv -I have some depression and anxiety issues, that I've been on medication for a year and a half and in and out of various types of therapy and counselling for a lot longer than that, how are they going to react? Are they going to pull their punches with me, only engage in the most superficial and polite of conversations, for fear of upsetting me? Are they going to ignore anything remotely negative that I say because they don't know how to respond? Are they going to assume that I'm suicidal anytime I'm in a bad mood? Will they not think I'm funny anymore (if they ever did to start with)? Will they back off because they think I'm just more hassle than I'm worth, in such a casual situation as Twitter and the internet can be? Will they see that it's just one part of who I am, together with my extreme short-sightedness, propensity for watching reality tv solely to slag it off, dislike of mushrooms and a million other things?

It's the fear of being treated not as a person, but as the illness that gets me. That and the very personal nature of it. Whether or not people are perfectly ok with mental illness (and most people that I know, anyway, would insist absolutely that they are ok with it), it's still a very personal and intimate thing to know about someone else. It's difficult to share that, therefore, with people that you aren't overly close to. It feels like you're trying to force a relationship to be something that it's not, and that you're creating a burden of expectation and obligation - or at the very least, you're afraid that that is how the other person will perceive it. But not sharing it makes the problems worse. It just adds to the sense of alienation, loneliness, feeling 'other' and outside of everything. The sense that you have to wear a mask with everyone to be accepted, that you have to be what they want you to be. And hiding something like this every moment of your life is exhausting. Trust me.

And then of course, there's the work/professional side of things. How do you go about explaining something like that to people in your worklife? How much do you need to explain, how much will they read into it? Any sign of weakness - physical, mental or otherwise - is something we're generally conscious of trying to hide in our workplace. Where do you even begin trying to navigate that one?

I don't know what the solution is to this. I don't know how much of it is part of the stigma, and how much is part of the illness. Maybe if we were all more upfront about our mental issues, we'd all be more used to figuring out how to deal with people who have problems like this?

At this point I realise that this is starting to sound negative and almost as if I think that reducing the stigma is a futile exercise - that is not what I mean at all. I think that the #whatstigma idea is brilliant and inspiring and restores my faith in humanity more than a little. I guess what I'm really trying to express is my admiration for those able to be upfront about it. There's so much that makes it so terrifying to be able to admit it (to greater or lesser extents, depending on your particular mental health problem) that the success of the hashtag so far is perhaps an even bigger achievement than it might seem to those lucky enough not to have been affected by such issues.

Either way, kudos to Rebecca Front. If I ever meet her in the street I'm giving her a massive hug. Although I hope that that doesn't induce a panic attack in her...

I hope that this campaign continues and grows stronger, and gets picked up by mainstream press to get the attention that it both needs and deserves. And as if to emphasise just how much we do need this, this week in Belfast two children, one aged 11 and one aged 13, were buried after taking their own lives. Children.

We need to make mental health easier to talk about. We need to improve services for anyone who might be suffering, and we need to do it as soon as possible.

There's a long way to go, but this is a beautiful start.