Mental Illness and How We Try to Ignore it.

Browsing on BBC News earlier tonight, I stumbled across a quite frankly disturbing article. It described how Indonesia treated their mentally ill - by locking them up in institutions and chaining them to wooden platforms. Naturally, I was shocked by this. But then I thought, this isn't wildly different to how people with mental health problems are treated in this country. Disgusting does not cover it.

In the UK, it is deemed perfectly normal to visit your GP with a problem along the lines of mental illness. As long as nobody else finds out. The stigma still hanging over mental illness in this country is still staggeringly large, regardless of the recent publicity ads by Stephen Fry and other well known people. It just doesn't seem to make a difference. It still seems that the moment that you mention you have a mental illness, people back right off and (maybe unconsciously) view you as being some kind of emotionally unstable psychopath. Having only had limited experience of this type of illness, I am not fully qualified to start spouting off about what people should or shouldn't do. However, what I did notice was how keen doctors were on antidepressant medication even for mild cases. This almost gave me the impression that they still want to hush the disease down with minimal effort. Studies show that long term counselling is the way to go with depression, not just a bit of CBT and 'wonder drug'.

I find it fascinating how we can talk about people breaking bones or having non-psychiatric illnesses as freely as they can talk about the weather, and yet an awkward silence almost always sets in when things like schizophrenia or depression are mentioned. They are no different to any of the other diseases - the person suffering didn't make themselves get the disease and aren't 'contaminated' either. Just because it involves the mind, these people are subtly discriminated against. This should not be the case!