This is a question that I often ask myself, because I know from my own experiences that if more was known about mental illness and it was discussed in society I, for one, would have been saved a lot of pain and anguish. Right up to the day I was taken to a psychiatric hospital and sectioned under the Mental Health Act, I knew practically nothing about mental illness. I knew that I must be ill because I was very depressed, couldn't concentrate and was having weird experiences: my thoughts would be projected as subtitles onto the TV screen and I would stand at the bottom of my garden and hear dance music and traffic screaming past, even though my garden backs on to countryside! I would try and explain to people that I was ill when teachers asked me why a particular piece of work was very poor, or my parents asked me why I had failed to produce any homework despite having sat at my desk for several hours. They just thought that I was being lazy and would angrily tell me to "stop it and pull yourself together" when I continually talked nonsense, not having any idea that I might be mentally ill.
Part of the reason that I was not given help sooner was that I was actually seeing a child psychiatrist at the time, because I had taken an overdose shortly before my fifteenth birthday. She last saw me a few days before I was put on a four week section, and I still can't understand why she thought that all my talk about the conversations that were going on in my head was an invention, surely it must have been obvious to her that I was ill? So if even a psychiatrist can't recognise the symptoms of mental illness, then how can people in the community help people who are mentally ill.
I feel that if the subject was brought out into the open and people were given the facts about mental illness then they would be more understanding and able to suggest that a friend of theirs displaying symptoms of a schizophrenia type illness get psychiatric help. The situation has improved dramatically in recent years with regard to people's perception of depression, it is no longer seen as a self-indulgent illness confined to people with weak personalities and is recognised as a serious and debilitating illness. So why can't the same understanding be granted to schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders? The basic problem is that people feel threatened by anything which goes beyond normal patterns of speech and behaviour, and so are frightened by people they see as "weird" or "crazy". The media doesn't help either, the only time it bothers to mention mental illness is when there is an outcry over an escaped psychiatric patient who has committed a murder, which only adds to the hatred and fear society has of the mentally ill. They don't bother to mention that the majority of mentally ill people are perfectly harmless, peaceful people who wouldn't dream of committing a crime. The facts about AIDS have been widely publicised, so why not the facts about mental illness? I came across a leaflet published by the NSF explaining the symptoms of some mental illnesses and I feel that if leaflets like these were distributed in schools and offices, people's perception of the mentally ill would change, and it would become more acceptable. People suffering from mental illness would get help sooner; if a relative, teacher, friend or acquaintance had recognised that I was ill, I might have been spared the pain and fear of being sectioned. The reason they did not was that they had not come into contact with mental illness before and knew nothing about it. The only people with the true picture are the mentally ill themselves and their friends and families. Mental illness strikes ordinary people at random and is nothing to be ashamed of, and the sooner society realises this, the better.
Catherine Baulk