Borderline Personality Disorder

Talking about mental health destigmatises it

It’s often said that one of the best ways to tackle prejudice against those with mental health problems is for people to speak openly about their mental health.

Talking about mental health destigmatises it

Clare Allan
Tuesday 4 June 2013

In my experience, speaking out helps people with mental health problems to reveal themselves as individuals rather than categories

It’s often said that one of the best ways to tackle prejudice against those with mental health problems is for people to speak openly about their mental health. I think this is true and it works because while prejudice sees people as types, or even not quite as people, when an individual talks about their own experience, you can hardly fail to recognise a fellow human being.

But there are very good reasons for people choosing not to speak out. And chief among these is the discrimination they know they will encounter when they do so. It’s a catch-22.

For me the process of coming out has been to some extent an inevitable consequence of what I do for a living. It would have been odd not to have written a novel set in the mental health system, as that’s where I’d been for 10 years when I wrote it, and for much of that time the parameters of my world had extended very little beyond the psychiatric.

It’s not a question of autobiography, but more that the themes I wanted to explore – What constitutes normality? How does language cope with extremes of experience? – were ones for which this context offered a fertile environment.

Read the article

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.