Fighting Stigma Begins at Home

In her recent From the President column titled “Stigma: ‘I Need to Tell You Something I’ve Never Spoken to You About’ ” (Psychiatric News, July 3), Dr. Renée Binder commented on the importance of combating stigma. I appreciate Dr. Binder’s attention to stigma and her suggestions for fighting it, but I was struck by another possibility. What if we as psychiatrists were to acknowledge when we have suffered from mental illness ourselves?

I’ll start: in my 30s and 40s, I had a prolonged major depression. It was not trivial. I recovered.

In 2013-2014 I took part in creating an exhibit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco titled “The Changing Face of What is Normal: Mental Health.” I was most involved in telling the stories of patients and staff at Willard State Hospital, a New York psychiatric asylum for the “chronically insane” in the 20th century. I also agreed to be one of six clinicians/patients to be interviewed for videos to run throughout the exhibit. Each of us talked about our experiences with mental illness, diagnosis, and stigma.

Whenever I spoke about the exhibit—at a reading, a history conference, and with members of a peer support group for those with psychiatric illness—I was thanked again and again for being willing to be honest about my own depression. That was what people found most meaningful.

Those who are old enough may recall when brave women, including nationally prominent politicians and members of religious orders, put themselves on the line by stating publicly that they had had abortions. Can we do something like that?

While it is obviously complicated to tell the world, including potentially our own patients, that we too have struggled, what stronger statement could we make that we mean it when we say that mental illness is not a reason for shame?

Are Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison and a few others going to stand in for all of us? Or are we going to have the courage to stand with the people we are trying to help?

Karen L. Miller, M.D.