Australian trade minister, Andrew Robb, spoke about inadequate government funding for mental health at a summit of mental health experts on Monday. Canberra related his own personal experience of struggling to seek treatment for depression and counseled that “stigma has been such a massive deterrent” both for individuals in need of help and for government funding of mental health programs.
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This dude should open his eyes and realize why Beyond Blue and Defeat Depression (large-scale campaigns to reduce “mental illness” stigma) failed miserably… conceptualizing emotional distress as illness does not work, and the disease model of mental illness does not improve outcomes nor does it promote sympathy toward people in distress, no matter how much destigmatization is attempted.
Someone should show this minister the following video so he can stop trying to fix Humpty Dumpty aka the broken mental illness model:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5caitdQA6HY -
This dude should look at what his own government is doing to people of Australia and migrants /asylum seekers and take care of the human rights abuses and disastrous neoliberal and sometimes straight out fascist policies they’re introducing. Mental health, my a**.
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The stigma is real and does great harm because it keeps people at an inherent disadvantage via aggressive marginalization. It’s also extremely painful to the psyche and can cause all sorts of health issues to occur.
But it comes from within the system and field; stigma is at the basis of how diagnoses are made and how clients are perceived as ‘other.’ Stigma in its purest form is an inherent part of this racket. And this is what they want funded.
Claiming that stigma undermines their funding is such classic en masse manipulation–standard procedure in the ‘mental health’ field.
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So true, and if they really wanted to stop the stigma, they’d be advertising the fact that 2/3s of ‘schizophrenics’ today were victims of child abuse or adverse childhood experiences. Rather than continuing to claim the “major mental illness” stigmatized are “dangerous.” Most of those so stigmatized are victims of psychiatric misdiagnosis – and, of course, the “gold standard” treatment for ‘schizophrenia’ is known to create both the positive and negative symptoms of ‘schizophrenia’ via neuroleptic induced deficit syndrome and neuroleptic induced anticholinergic toxidrome.
http://psychcentral.com/news/2006/06/13/child-abuse-can-cause-schizophrenia/18.html
They’d also be confessing that the antidepressants and ADHD drugs are known to cause the “bipolar” symptoms. And, again, this has resulted in massive psychiatric misdiagnosis, misdiagnoses affecting over a million American children so far, and God knows how many adults.
If the “mental health” treatments were effective, I could understand the call for more funding. But since the psychiatric drugs can actually cause the very symptoms of the “serious mental illnesses,” which is resulting in higher disability numbers, it makes no sense to continue to fain belief in the already discredited DSM stigmatizations.
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This is how I’m seeing it now–
If mental illness is a myth, then no one is mentally ill so there is no distinction among any of us in this arena. We all have equal mental capability, albeit diverse in our foci and processes, perhaps, which would elicit totally neutral (non-stigmatizing) categories of discernment–some faster and more direct, some slower and more creative, different goals, priorities, beliefs, cultural influences, etc. No need for labels, here, which only amount to ‘name-calling’ in practice–aka stigma.
If mental illness is something tangible and real (as it is for some), then I don’t know anyone how is not vulnerable to going off-kilter and into a ‘mental fog,’ as it were, as this is a natural part of life and a reasonable reaction to extreme overwhelm due to all sorts of factors in life, and indeed, with ALL the abuse that’s doled out daily. We’ve all been recipients of this, at one time or another, at least. Society has become abusive, by and large.
Transitions and change also challenge everyone’s state of being and balance. That is universal. And this is a time of great change. We are all facing this, on a global scale.
These days, on this crazy planet, how can anyone discern who is “mad” and who is “sane?” We discern by ‘who is in power,’ and that is not at all the same thing as being sane. In fact, it is often the mad who seem to ascend to power.
Either way, no such thing as ‘them’ and ‘us’ when it comes to ‘mental health.’ It is how we relate to ourselves, rather than worrying about what other think (or call each other), that will create the pathway out of a stigmatizing culture.
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The “Stigma” thing has been created to keep people prisoners of the mental illness criminal conspiracy; to keep them “zombie-drugged” and involve in menial, demeaning, demoralizing, and dehumanizing activites that totally strip a person of what it means to be a human being. Only the death camps of the Holocaust supercede this in its horror. However, there is one thing about this. This is happening “under our noses” in our cities, our towns, our churches, in the country, in the suburbs and we have been brainwashed to think it is a good thing and for our good for the “sufferer” and for society; etc. We have made this as usual as eating at McDonalds. We think it as good for us taking a shower or eating a carrot. Something is so very wrong here. How can you have stigma for something that only exists in our collective warped mind? I think fairy tales have more basis in reality than the mental illness criminal conspiracy. Thank you.
