Program helps ease stigma around mental illness
‘I think we are way ahead than even five years ago,’ psychotherapist says
In August of 2016, Liz Wiener had hip surgery — and when she got home from the hospital, she was “drowning in flowers and meals and offers to do carpool.”
The following spring, she was an in-patient again — this time on a psychiatry unit. When she arrived home after a weeklong stay, there were no flowers or meals for her family or carpool offers.
“People were afraid to talk to me, to wish me well,” said the West Island wife, mother, mental health advocate and co-founder of the Wise Women Canada blog. “I don’t say it with judgment or criticism: It is what it is.”
“It” is the stigma that surrounds mental health issues.
Wiener, 46, has suffered from depression and a generalized anxiety disorder for much of her life. Her psychiatry admission in 2017, the first since her diagnosis at age 24, was because she was having suicidal thoughts.
Just as they do when they have heart surgery or hip surgery, people need support when they are being treated for a mental health problem, she said — and she longs for a day when living with mental illness will be “just another story, like living with heart disease or diabetes.”
That day is not tomorrow.
“I am not going to pretend that the stigma isn’t there and strong,” said Jennifer Sidel, a psychotherapist in private practice and a volunteer with Mindstrong, an initiative of the Jewish General Hospital’s foundation and auxiliary to raise both awareness of mental health issues and funds to support hospital psychiatry programs and infrastructure. “There are definitely a lot of people who aren’t getting help because they are concerned about what people will think.”
Still, there are encouraging signs that mental illness is emerging from the shadows. Public figures including Catherine Zeta-Jones, J.K. Rowling and Ashley Judd have acknowledged their struggles with mental health issues, for one. In an interview with The Guardian, Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson said he had battled depression as a young man and encouraged “men suffering from the disease to open up and seek help.”
“I think we are way ahead than even five years ago,” Sidel said. “It is just becoming more part of our language — and the more we hear about things, the less scary they are. The more we hear that others are struggling, the less daunting the prospect is of coming forward yourself.”
Psychiatry was for a long time on the sidelines of fundraising efforts, with donors more willing to contribute to other disciplines: That’s changing, too. The Jewish General’s Mindstrong has raised $3 million in three years and the money has helped, among other things, to fund services for youth mental health and provided support for families of individuals with mental illness. A training centre for mental health professionals opened last summer, a day hospital is set to open this year and the outdated in-patient psychiatry unit is being rebuilt and expanded.
And through an initiative known as Mindstrong Young Minds, students are going into high schools and, with mental health professionals, doing interactive presentations with Grade 10 and 11 students. They’re also establishing a Young Minds committee of students. The program, in its third year, is gaining momentum, with visits to more than a dozen schools by the end of this school year.
Today Wiener is an ambassador to the Mindstrong campaign. Speaking to about 200 during a mental health awareness symposium in February at the Jewish General organized by Mindstrong and WellMTL, she shared her own experiences. “I own my bad days,” she said. “I ask friends and family for the help I need.”
But until a few years ago, Wiener kept her diagnosis a secret from nearly everyone — in part out of concern that people would see it “as a sign of weakness of character” or that it was “something I caused.”
Not long after the 2014 suicide of comedian and actor Robin Williams, who battled depression for years, she came out about it on her blog, co-founded with Lisa Brookman, and has since written some powerful posts on mental health and illness.
“I want my kids to take away the bigger message,” said the mother of three teens. “I want them to see me as a strong woman who has a chronic medical condition who reached out for help when she needed it.”
One person in five is affected by a mental health issue and 75 per cent of mental health problems begin in adolescence, 18-yearold Marianopolis student Emmy Zemel told Grade 11 students at Royal West Academy at a Mindstrong Young Minds presentation in March.
Yet only one person in six gets a proper diagnosis, psychotherapist Sidel told students.
“Those who need help are often too scared to come forward. They suffer in silence,” 17-year-old Aidan Shulkin, a Grade 11 student at West Island College and Wiener’s son, told students. “Some days I would come home and see my mother in bed, a shadow of herself. I felt helpless and mostly silent.
“After my mother spoke out, I began to appreciate that mental illness is no different from physical illness ... and that, if we keep silent, no progress will be made. The problems will stay buried in the souls of those who suffer.”
Orit Eisenberg, whose husband suffered from bipolar disorder and took his own life, was instrumental in establishing Mindstrong Young Minds. Among its goals are to get kids to speak up, she said, to break the stigma around mental illness and for them to learn that there is a place to go.
Her daughter Emmy Zemel, who was 15 when her father died, initially got involved with Mindstrong to honour his memory. “I was blessed to have had such an amazing relationship with my father, despite his illness,” she said.
“I wanted to do something to make sure people viewed mental illness as something legitimate and that someone with a mental illness should not be defined by his illness.”
Being involved with Mindstrong is also a way to do what she can to try to ensure people who need help get it, she said. “If there is one person who changes his mind about coming forward or tells someone that he is suffering, it can totally change the course of their life.”
Jason Finucan, the keynote speaker at the February symposium at the Jewish General, received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder in his 20s. He was fortunate. Lithium, a mood and thought disorder stabilizer, was effective in his case. As a speaker and consultant who founded stigmaZERO, Finucan, 42, is now one of a growing number of people working to change the culture around mental illness.
Difficult as it is to imagine today, with all the campaigns and all the awareness, until only a few decades ago, enormous stigma existed around breast cancer, he said. “How did we go from then to where we are today? The answer is awareness and education and — and this is key — society needing to recognize, and did recognize, that the illness was happening to someone and it was not their fault. It was not a character flaw.”