Bryony GORDON
Afew years ago, when I had first plucked up the courage to write about the obsessive compulsive disorder that had plagued me since childhood, I was invited for a coffee by a high-profile figure who wanted to talk to me about the possibility of working with them on a mental health campaign they were putting together. The onus was on the word “health” – when I arrived, and mentioned the term “mental illness”, they quickly rebuked me and said they wanted to focus on wellness, not illness. “It scares people off,” they explained. “If we want to engage people in the conversation, we need to move away from the Victorian notion of mentally ill people belonging in asylums. Mental health affects everyone.”
They were right, of course. Mental health does affect everyone, and mental illness scares lots of people – not least those suffering from it themselves. But while I know that this person was well-intentioned, and that their take on the mental health conversation is hardly unique, I think it’s important that we now have another conversation about the mental health conversation. For, in our rush to destigmatise mental health, we may have inadvertently increased the stigma faced by those who don’t actually have any mental health, and instead only have serious mental illness.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently, in part because of the reaction to the very public manic episode bipolar sufferer Kanye West is currently experiencing, and in part because I am in the process of revealing more of the ugliness of my own mental illness, in the book I have written about alcoholism and drug addiction.
But let’s start with West, the rap super star who married Kim Kardashian and more recently announced his intention to run for president. When West took to the stage this week at a rally in South Carolina, many mocked the chaotic, rambling speech he made, and the strange tweets he later put up about his in-laws being white supremacists. West, who suffers from bipolar disorder, was clearly in the midst of an episode of mania, but that didn’t stop people from turning his public breakdown into hilarious memes for everyone to laugh about. It was only when his wife made a public statement about her powerlessness in regards to his mental illness that the tide of public opinion turned from condemnation to something approaching compassion.
We can all be mental health advocates when it comes to anxiety and depression and perhaps a little bit of the right kind of OCD. We are far more understanding and compassionate about them than we were 10 years ago. With more complex mental health conditions, however, there is still a long way to go. Bipolar, schizophrenia, psychosis… these do not have anything like the right amount of public awareness attached to them. All too often, the person suffering from the condition is blamed, rather than the condition itself. West, with help, will hopefully be OK. But what about those with bipolar watching the reaction to him?
Another much misunderstood part of the mental health conversation is addiction, a double whammy of a mental illness in that it often develops as a way to cope with a pre-existing one. There is no doubt that I became addicted to alcohol and drugs in part as a way to cope with the terrible intrusive thoughts that I had experienced since the age of 11, but it was easier for me to talk about those thoughts than it was the faulty coping mechanism I had created in an attempt to deal with them. In the grips of alcoholism, addiction and OCD, I behaved badly – but I can see now that I behaved badly not because I was a bad person, but because I was a terribly ill one.
As a middle-class white woman, I was privileged enough to get to go to rehab, but for many other sufferers of addiction, that option is not open to them. Let me be very clear: mental illness is not an excuse for bad behaviour. But we need to acknowledge that it is often the cause of it, and only when we do that are we able to change it.
The author Matt Haig put this brilliantly this week, when he wrote in a social media post that “If you condemn the person with bipolar on a strange rant, if you condemn the addict who has broken the law, if you condemn the depressed person who has done something desperate to ward off depression, you are not helping prevent their behaviour. You are just stigmatising these people further, and alienation fuels those behaviours… Shame is not medicine.”
He is right. We need to remember that mental health is not some sort of fad that exists as a campaign to help brands sell things. Mental health can be ugly and unpleasant, but our refusal to see this is far uglier. We need to turn and look at the mentally ill, for only then will we be anything close to mentally well.