Stigma Busters

by Victoria Molta

Victoria is a Contributing Writer to Mental Health World.

I have been working part-time as a coordinator for a program called “In Our Own Voice,” funded by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI). I was recommended for the job by a mental health consumer who is the Director of Consumer Initiatives at the Connecticut Mental Health Center in New Haven.

Though I’ve had jobs in the past twenty years since I was first diagnosed with severe mental illness, this one is particularly meaningful. I set up dates and times with directors of mental health clubhouses, NAMI affiliates, colleges, and hospitals, where trained speakers tell about their experiences with mental illness. A video is shown that portrays different aspects - dark days, treatment, coping, acceptance. We have had fifty presentations all over Connecticut, and our goal is to reach one hundred by the end of the year. The speakers call themselves “stigma busters” with the aim to educate consumers, providers and family members about mental illness.

I wish that I had been educated about mental illness when I first became ill in 1982. I felt very much alone with my illness and didn’t know what was happening to me. I had heard of “nervous breakdowns” and derogatory terms like “the nut house” and “psycho” but I didn’t know that they pertained to me. It was only several years before I became ill that thousands were warehoused and put away in institutions for life. When they died, they were buried in unmarked graves behind hospitals, shamed, neglected and forgotten in life and death. People did not talk about mental illness. They feared people with mental illness.

My hope is for more programs like “In Our Own Voice” to form throughout the country and to put a human face on mental illness. We need to show others that we aren’t monsters to be feared or clowns to be laughed at. We are people that are affected by chemical imbalances in the brain. It cuts across all socioeconomic levels. I know former lawyers, doctors, missionaries, and dancers whose lives were cut down by mental illness. Recovery is possible and people need to know that. We may not be able to reclaim the lives we had before mental illness struck, but we can learn to live with the hand dealt to us. We can create lives of meaning, happiness, love and fulfillment.