Why There Is an Indelible Stigma around Mental Illness

 

Peek-a-boo!

There is a reason for the stigma around “mental illness.” There is a reason why the stigma cannot be gotten rid of, despite official efforts. Insist that depression and the other forms of PTSD are an illness, no more a matter of moral weakness than, say, breaking a leg, and “you’re sick” simply becomes an insult.

There is a reason we commonly insist that the mentally ill are violent and dangerous, when the statistics show they plainly are not.

The way we treat the “mentally ill” is actually strikingly like the way we once treated lepers, as Michel Foucault has documented.

It is because we fear the mentally ill. It is because mental illness is contagious; and we fear becoming mentally ill.

The problem is that those suffering “mental illness,” or CPTSD, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, as it is now often called, have some intimate experience of evil, and are utterly sincere. That is their trauma. The rest of us are delusional about evil, generally pretending it does not exist. We whistle past the graveyard. Because otherwise, we ourselves would experience the trauma. We shield ourselves in denial. 

As Winston Churchill, himself depressive, perhaps “bipolar,” observed: “Men occasionally stumble over truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” Churchill credited his depression for his ability to see the genuine danger of Adolph Hitler, when all the wise heads of his time were for appeasement: Germany had been treated shabbily at Versailles, Hitler was not as extreme as his rhetoric, his demands were not so unreasonable. Churchill was for years condemned as a warmonger.

George Orwell similarly credited his chronic depression for his critical ability, as he saw it, to confront unpleasant truths that other people could not.

General Sherman went mad for a spell at the beginning of the American Civil War. He could see the horrors ahead, when the general public were streaming to the hillsides at Bull Run to enjoy the battle. He, and General Grant, were both depressive—as are most great generals. A military leader cannot afford delusions.

So the mentally ill alone confront the truth, and the mentally ill, being utterly sincere, cannot be relied on to shut up about it. So calling them insane—literally, “dirty”—and discounting anything they say is the necessary attitude among the general run of us in order to preserve our common delusions.

In earlier times, this tendency of the “mentally ill” to speak truth was put to use in the institution of the court jester—some artistic type declared to be insane, who then had special warrant to speak the truth to the king without punishment. After all, the poor fool could not control himself.

And this is the one way the king could ever know the truth about the state of his reign. Courtiers would always have motive to flatter instead.

This is also the point of the cultural institution of “the artist” generally. Artists are broadly loopy in the eyes of the world, and so, if obliquely, if they re true artists, can get away with speaking the truth. Emily Dickinson summarized the artistic task: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant/Success in circuit lies.” As with Jesus’s parables, those who have ears to hear can take away what they are ready to accept. The rest can just imagine it is some idle entertainment, or that Leonard Cohen is singing about sex.

But for the general run of the “mentally ill,” those with no or little talent to entertain, shunning, contempt, and torture are the usual lot.

This is to be expected in this world. It is exactly what Jesus warned about—and showed in his own person.