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News
Archive 2001 |
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Putting a Face on Mental Illness By TOD CITRON What do you see when you think of the face of mental illness? Is it the Texas mother who drowned her five children after fighting another round of postpartum depression? Is it the Atlanta man who climbed a crane and held police and construction workers at bay for a day and night before taking his own life? Or is it the teenage girl from your subdivision who fought her way back from the brink of destruction on drugs and is now getting her life back together? Or do you see the young man who has learned to live on his own, making a living despite the challenge of mental illness who, with effective treatment, has managed to control his problem. You read the headlines about the first two cases, but the second two – the success stories – didn’t make the news. Commentators keep asking why the people involved in these most extreme cases “fell through the cracks.” But, for thousands of individuals and families each year, the Cobb-Douglas Community Service Boards provide the safety net that keep people with mental health and substance abuse problems from falling through the cracks. What we think we know about mental illness comes from the stories we are told, from family members, from friends and co-workers, and – predominantly today – from the media. The mass media is “the wholesale distributor of the stigma of mental illness,” according to George Gerber, founder of the Cultural Environment Movement and for 30 years a researcher of the cultural impact of TV on society. The media, including television, newscasts and movies, often distorts the reality of mental illness. In the decade between 1985 and 1995 Hollywood released more than 150 films with character who have mental illness, the majority of them killers and villains. While the print media digs deeper and reports more accurately, studies of journalistic coverage of mental illness done in 1989 and repeated in 1999, violence and crime were the most common types of stories involving mental illnesses, and negative stories outnumbered positive ones two to one. The good news and the success stories that are reported are overwhelmed by the sensationalized bad news that keeps being repeated again and again. This lack of information, or abundance of misinformation, is as ridiculous as the report a few years ago that most of the information about current events for young adults came from the comedy monologues of Jay Leno and David Letterman. The question has been raised that if the five Texas children had been killed by an intruder, rather than their mother, that the public outrage would be justified in hating the murderer. Instead, there is an outpouring of compassion and questions of “why” in this mother’s act. Despite such a horrendous act, there is an element of being able to learn something from this situation. That a person with mental illness can be anyone and that effective treatment can prevent these ultimate actions. Other diseases – polio, cancer and AIDS – in their course spawned a public reaction that changed from apathy, to distrust to compassion. The people in our community who suffer from mental illness need the same compassion. Unfortunately, for centuries there has been apathy and distrust regarding those among us who suffer from mental illness. We won’t make progress in eliminating the associated stigma and solving the problems of mental illness until the same compassion and public interest that conquered polio and other illnesses, and is now directed at diseases such as cancer and heart disease (to name but a few), are focused on mental health related illnesses. # # # Tod Citron is executive Director of The Cobb & Douglas Community Services Boards which provide mental health, mental retardation and substance abuse services to more than 11,000 residents of Cobb and Douglas Counties annually. Cobb County Community Services Board |
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