Effect of mental illness stigma on society

The economic principle I’m exploring is “Institutions are ‘the rules of the game’ that influence choices".

Courtesy of drdeborahserani.blogspot.com/

My research question to help me study the economic principle is “What are the societal challenges that people with mental illness face?”

The article published in Psychology Today titled The Stigma of Mental Illness Is Making Us Sicker demonstrates this economic principle by showing how stigmas around mental illness came about in the first place, the difficulties that people with mental illness encounter in their daily lives, and how those difficulties further damage their health.

 Stigmas surrounding mental illness come about at a young age. Children are taught words like “weird”, “crazy”, “psycho” and “retarded” in regards to people with mental illness, and these words are commonly misused to create a strong negative connotation surrounding mental illness. Soon, negative perceptions are formed towards the mentally ill, and thus stigmas are formed. I have experienced that often times, mental illness is so closely linked to these negative words that they become nearly synonymous in some people´s opinion, when people use ¨bipolar¨, ¨OCD¨, or ¨anorexic¨, to name a few, colloquially.

 This causes people to distance themselves from people with mental health, sometimes because they feel unsafe. Because of social distances, the mentally ill are subject to isolation and stereotyping. It is easy to be unconsciously discriminated against in the workforce because of misinformation of what their mental illness is. Research shows that being treated poorly can worsen mental illness. The isolation created from social distances can make patients less likely to seek treatment for their illness. I experienced that I almost did not receive treatment because I was worried what people would say when I wasn´t at school. Along with that, the stigma can spread to affect how the mentally ill feel about themselves. Embarrassment is a common thing when it comes to mental illness, which is crazy in my opinion because it´so both very common and should not be very different from physical illness. It would be crazy to be embarrassed about cancer, diabetes, etc.

 In my next blog post, I will research the question: What does the country do to aid those with mental illness?