Autumn Segner
[email protected]
Mentor:
Dr. Jennifer Thigpen
[email protected]
The Invisible Struggle
Understanding the Stigma of Mental Illness and its Roots
By Autumn Segner
The Findings
The Stigma is Real
Psychology has advanced a great deal during recent
history, particularly in the past century. Yet despite new
knowledge on the causes of mental illness, the stigma
surrounding it still exists. Numerous studies have
proven its resilience in modern times. Indeed:
•
In most countries, only around 10% of the health
budget is used for mental health programs despite
high rates of mental illness.1
•
A study found that 60% of mentally ill people
reported that they had experienced some kind of
rejection; 77% had seen harmful portrayals of the
mentally ill in the media.2
Why It Persists
My research sought to discover the roots of this
stigma, so as to understand why it is still prevalent. I
focused on attitudes toward mental illness prior to the
mid-twentieth century, when psychology began to
bloom into the science it is today. I found three main
historical contributors:
•
The early, universal beliefs that the mentally ill were
possessed by supernatural forces
•
The institutionalization and subsequent lack of
visibility of the ill
•
The common attribution of the mentally ill as
“other” than human
Where does this stigma come from? For millennia
humans have believed that mental illness was the result of
possession by supernatural forces:
•
Ancient skulls dating to 6500 BCE have holes suggesting
the use of trephining to release evil spirits.4
•
Since the time before the Qur’an, Arabians thought
that jinn (or demons) caused mental disorders.5
•
Until the Han dynasty, many Chinese thought illness in
general was due to demons, ghosts, sins from past
lives, fate, or imbalance in energy.6 However, these
beliefs likely lasted for many years among the common
population, as they often relied on folk medicine.
•
The Greeks and Romans thought that it was the result
of possession by a god or demons. Their beliefs are
well-displayed in play The Bacchae by Euripides, where
the mother of a king, Pentheus, kills her son due to the
god Dionysus throwing her into a “frenzy.”7
•
Early Christianity cited demons as the cause, and said
that being unable to fight these demons made one
morally weak; one biblical story describes Jesus
expelling demons from a chained man, who afterwards
was “in his right mind.”8
•
Even science fell prey to these ideas; an early British
psychiatrist named Henry Maudsley said that mental
illness was punishment for breaking a “moral law.”9
With such deep roots in history, it is difficult to
eradicate the ideas that people have held for centuries.
It is unfortunately unsurprising that the stigma still
exists. Yet if we can understand where the stigma came
from and discredit these beliefs, it is my hope that we
can dismantle it and work toward a more
compassionate view of mental illness and the mentally
ill.
“…there is no such thing as a
harmless lunatic. All lunatics are
dangerous, and should be kept in
confinement. The man who believes
that there is such a thing as a
harmless lunatic is laboring under a
delusion himself.”3
– Dr. Forbes Winslow in the New York
Times, 1895
Since the fourth and fifth centuries, human beings have
employed a consistent strategy of dealing with the mentally
ill: sequestering them in mental health institutions. This
practice began in Byzantium and Jerusalem. European
treatments often consisted of chaining up the ill and leaving
them in their own waste, as well as beating and starving
them. Bloodletting was also a common practice. Hospitals
were placed near the center of states in the U.S. for
convenience but were often so far from cities that
hospitalization effectively operated as exile. 10 With the
mentally ill hidden from view, public imagination ran wild,
allowing fear to prosper.
Overall, mental illness has been a source of shame
for millennia, whether because it was assumed that it
made them morally weak, dangerous, or inhuman. The
stigma still exists, and to truly address and eradicate it,
we must better understand its roots. Perhaps then we
can begin to treat mental illness as it really is: an illness
that is not the fault of the person and one that must be
treated with patience and compassion.
References
1.
The Madman by Sir Charles Bell (1824), from “Sir Charles Bell, Essays on
Expression.” Wellcome Images, https://wellcomeimages.org/. Copyrighted
work available under Creative Commons Attribution only license CC BY
4.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
For years, people justified their treatment of the ill by
saying that they were no better than beasts. Reason was
cited as making one human, and seeing as the mentally ill
were considered to have lost this, they were seen as
subhuman. An anonymous person contributed to a
newspaper called The World that madness brought “the
mighty reasoners of the earth, below even the insects that
crawl upon it.”11
Cutting the Stone by Hieronymous Bosch (1494), from Allison M. Foerschner,
2010. “The History of Mental Illness: From Skull Drills to Happy Pills.” Inquiries
Journal/Student Pulse 2 (09), http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=283.
Conclusion
In 1867, Henry Maudsley described the
mentally ill as: “’tainted persons’, ‘lepers’,
‘moral refuse’, ‘ten times more vicious and
noxious, and infinitely less capable of
improvement, than the savages of primitive
barbarism’, and endowed with ‘special repulsive
characters’.”12
Laura Davidson, “Mental Health Laws Would Diminish
Stigma and Improve the Lives of Millions,” The
Guardian, April 26, 2016, accessed September 2,
2016, http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2052/lnacui2a
pi/api/version1/getDocCui?lni=5JMH-GNJ1-F0216512&csi=270944,270077,11059,8411&hl=t&hv=t&h
nsd=f&hns=t&hgn=t&oc=00240&perma=true.
2. O.F. Wahl, “Mental Health Consumers' Experience of
Stigma,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 25, no. 3 (1999): 467478, accessed February 1, 2017,
doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.schbul.a033394.
3. “Knows ‘Jack the Ripper’,” New York Times, September
1, 1895, accessed October 11,
2016, http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2098/docview
/95244163?accountid=14902.
4. Jenni Irving, “Trephination,” Ancient History
Encyclopedia, May 01, 2013, accessed March 9,
2017, http://www.ancient.eu /Trephination/;
Stephen P. Hinshaw, The Mark of Shame: Stigma of
Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 56
5. Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural
History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the
Madhouse to Modern Medicine (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2015), 52-53.
6. Ibid., 40.
7. Quoted in Greg Eghigian, From Madness to Mental
Health: Psychiatric Disorder and Its Treatment in
Western Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2010), 18-30.
8. Ibid., 37.
9. Scull, Madness in Civilization, 243.
10. Hinshaw, Mark of Shame, 59, 64, and 68.
11. Ibid., 64 and 189.
12. Scull, Madness in Civilization, 265.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Jennifer Thigpen for mentoring
me during my research and helping me improve as a
student. Her kind support is the reason for this project.
Printed by BCU. Bcu.vetmed.wsu.edu