Why What Politicians Say About the Mentally Ill Matters As Much As What They Do
After nearly eight years of being mentally ill, I’ve almost gotten used to the way we use mental illness as a way to denigrate one another. I’ve silently listened to my classmates say that someone needed to be medicated, as I went home and took my prescribed dose of Celexa. I’ve heard my peers call people “disturbed” and “psychotic” while feeling like I was slowly losing control over my own emotions. I’ve dealt with people suggesting someone should attend therapy as an insult, while I was attending therapy and having my life saved.
While I’m at the point in my health journey now where hearing these terms on the street doesn’t particularly faze me, it’s always hard to take hearing a friend use these words, words that could potentially have described me at various points during my adolescence, and insinuate that they are wrong, bad, and embarrassing, and describe the processes and tools that have saved my life as shameful.
Politicians are certainly no exception to using these sorts of remarks — Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy said that he wasn’t qualified to lead the House GOP back in October of 2015 because “he doesn’t have a background in mental health.” During the Republican primaries, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush stated that his opponent Donald Trump needed therapy, while Trump roared back that Bush was “a sad person who has gone absolutely crazy.” Again, easy to let slide, right? These are the kinds of drastic statements that have unfortunately become characteristic of the modern GOP: offensive in broad strokes, personal, and upsetting.
But disrespect for the mentally ill is far from a partisan issue. President Obama infamously called opponents of his Iran deal “the crazies.” Economist Paul Krugman once labeled Pres. Obama “obsessive and compulsive” in compromising on the debt limit. And — the remark that got me thinking about this article to start with — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders joked during a Democratic debate that, “if you watch these Republican debates, you know why we need to invest in [mental health].”
That remark drew blood from me, more than anything disparaging said during GOP debates. Maybe it’s like the example of the friends presented earlier; after all, here is a candidate who was literally arguing for expanding mental health treatment, a candidate that I like and generally support (albeit, with some reservation), and he still threw in a comment about the mentally ill to disparage his opponents. And it became a hilarious sound bite, shared on my Facebook news feed over and over, along with articles that, more or less, said, “Get over it — he wants to help you.”
Which is true. He supports a single-payer healthcare system that would cover all mental health issues, which would be a boon for the mentally ill in this country. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a mentally ill individual in the United States, on average, can expect to spend 10% of their family income on mental health treatment.
But to act like cost is the only obstacle to receiving treatment is disingenuous. It doesn’t matter how many times people shout it, the stigma against mental illness is real and dissuades people who have the economic means from receiving treatment. In August 2014, the Association of Psychological Science published an examination of the multitudes of ways stigma impedes treatment. In short, the stigma that associates mentally ill individuals with inherent “badness” drives a number of other discriminatory practices, which then manifests itself in people showing symptoms in one of two ways: either they figure they are inherently broken, so why even bother to recover or seek treatment, or they don’t want anyone to know that they feel this way, so, in order to hide their problems, they never seek treatment. And in a world where only 41% of mentally ill adults seek treatment, that’s truly disheartening.
The graphs pictured above, from Mental Wellness Today, show just how widespread it is. I know from experience just how hard it is to live with mental illness, so please do not underestimate the statement that stigma and discrimination is harder to live with than the illness itself. That is a statement that has weight and power and needs to be taken seriously.
Expanding access to care is certainly necessary, whether it’s by expanding insurance coverage or increasing the number of trained professionals in an area. (Expect to see another article about the scarcity of highly trained professionals in the future.) I commend Sen. Sanders for his commitment to making it easier for the mentally ill to access care, as well as Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who’s expanded mental healthcare by leaps and bounds in his home state. (Women’s health? Well, that took a small hit.)
But we cannot simply throw money at a complex problem like mental health and expect that that will solve everything. A multifaceted issue deserves a multifaceted approach, and it’s time for all political figures — Rep. Gowdy, Gov. Bush, Trump, Sen. Sanders, Pres. Obama, everyone — to step away from using these terms, lest they detract from a shared mission to improve mentally ill lives.
