Posted by: Uticopa in stigma on
Apr 24, 2009
A few years ago, during an otherwise normal working week, businessman Jonathan Naess was very publicly sectioned under the Mental Health Act. It was a humiliating experience. Naess was a successful corporate financier with a long career in the City.
He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (manic depression) and placed in a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital.
While hospitalised, he had an interesting discussion with a psychiatrist about how prevalent it was for businessmen to suffer from a mental illness. It was this discussion which prompted him to ‘come out' as mentally ill to his employer - a risky decision in the competitive world of finance - and to carve out an unlikely role for himself as a mental health campaigner.
Posted by: Uticopa in therapy, stigma on
Jan 02, 2009
As Irving Berlin put it, there are times when we just have to face the music of our personal problems and learn to dance anyway. Certainly, after extraordinary turmoil in the economy last year, just about everyone has something to worry about. But sometimes change is not always for the worse. The trick is to, first, adjust by facing our problems.
Let's face the music......
If your life is becoming too much to bear for you, your GP is a good first port of call.
Posted by: Uticopa in stigma, mental health on
Dec 18, 2008
So much of the media stigmatizes mental health issues. Yet, media coverage in general has a direct impact on all our lives and even controls, subliminally, how we think. But in the field of mental health, it is clear that poor quality, essentially unbalanced, press coverage of mental health issues fuels stigma and actively reduces a sufferer's quality of life.
So, what can we do about it?
First we need to gauge its effects on mental health sufferers themselves. The mental health charity Mind recently surveyed over five hundred people suffering from a range of mental illnesses, asking them how they felt about press coverage. Over seventy percent felt that coverage of mental health issues was usually unbalanced, decidedly unfair and very negative in its biased reporting. In turn, this had made sufferers feel more anxious and depressed as a direct result. Some had even felt suicidal, whilst others reported withdrawal symptoms coupled with feelings of isolation.
