Time to end silence on mental illness

For too long, stigma and shame have kept the reality of mental illness hidden from view. Most people are shocked to learn that one in five adults experiences a mental health condition. Because of COVID-19, PTSD and anxiety are increasing. Since May is Mental Health Awareness Month, I’d like to lift the veil and shed some light on this difficult condition that millions of Americans live with every day.

Many famous people have struggled with mental illness. President Abraham Lincoln and the writers Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath had depression. Rhode Island Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy, who led the fight for the landmark Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, struggles with bipolar disorder and addiction. Artist Vincent Van Gogh, jazz pianist Thelonious Monk and Nobel Prize winner in economics John Nash had schizophrenia.

Many people think schizophrenia means split personality as in the stories of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or “The Three Faces of Eve” or “Sibyl.” Schizophrenia actually means “split from reality.” It’s marked by hearing voices, hallucinations and delusions — thoughts like you can fly or the TV is talking to you. Sometimes schizophrenia makes you appear catatonic.

Some people think that those with clinical depression should “snap out of it” or “put on a happy smile and think positive.” However, clinical depression, like schizophrenia, is caused by the deficiency of certain chemicals in the brain needed for the functioning of a healthy mind, like the deficiency of insulin causes the physical illness diabetes.

Depression is the leading cause of suicide. Each year, 40,000 people die by suicide in the United States. That’s the same number of people who die from breast cancer. People at risk for suicide should have the same amount of public attention and support, treatment, funding and medical research as those at risk for breast cancer do.

Many politicians blame those who are mentally ill for the proliferation of gun violence in the United States. This is illogical. Mental illness is worldwide, yet other Western democracies do not have a high level of gun violence. Stricter gun safety laws in Europe account for the difference. When a terrorist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist commits an act of violence, many people say they must be sick or they are crazy. The shooters’ actions are due to their political ideologies, not mental illness. Mental illness does not account for the many women in the United States killed with guns by their present or former domestic partners, either.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many state mental hospitals closed. Regular hospitals have a shortage of beds available to psychiatric patients. When mentally ill people don’t get the treatment they need, they can’t function well and lose their jobs. Then they lose their apartments because they don’t have money for the rent. Once homeless and living on the streets, they get sucked into the criminal justice system. Drugs and alcohol used as a means of self-medication becomes abuse, which together with loitering, disturbing the peace and petty theft are reasons the homeless mentally ill are arrested. Lacking money for bail or attorneys, the mentally ill languish in jails and prisons. According to a 2014 survey, “Approximately 20 percent of inmates in jails and 15 percent of inmates in state prisons have a serious mental illness. Based on the total number of inmates, this means that there are 356,000 inmates with serious mental illness in jails and state prisons. This is ten times more than the 35,000 individuals with serious mental illness remaining in state hospitals.”

I advocate that society place nonviolent mentally ill criminal offenders into community-based mental health programs and also work to ensure that individuals with mental illness who are sentenced to prison receive appropriate and humane treatment including access to appropriate medication.

My dream is for our society to have an open, honest, fact-based discussion about mental illness and to begin to treat it like any other chronic illness. As the artist Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1889: “As for me, you must know, I shouldn’t have chosen madness if there had been any choice. What consoles me is that I am beginning to consider madness as an illness like any other and that I accept it as such.”

End the silence! Stop the stigma!