Starting with People First
Mental Health America created Mental Health Month in 1949. To this day, it remains our most robust initiative with an emphasis on overall health. Nineteen million people were exposed to our materials last year. Undoubtedly many millions more received messaging from one or more of the literally thousands of organizations that now promote Mental Health Month.
Focusing on health has always been central to MHA’s mission. We were formed in 1909 as the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. We were renamed in the middle of the century as the National Association for Mental Health, and then later became the National Mental Health Association. We’ve been Mental Health America for the last ten years.
So the distinction between mental health and mental illness has always mattered to us.
The language of “mental health” is important to us, but our advocacy movement was splintered in the latter part of the twentieth century by organizations that wanted to focus more on mental illness and mental illnesses.
This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “Mental illness” — especially deep-end, late-stage mental illness — attracts the attention of policymakers and the media. “Mental health,” not so much. So it makes mental health policy more accessible. But it also changes the discussion, and makes the policy debate different from what it could be.
For one thing, for many years we defined people by their mental illnesses — calling someone “a schizophrenic,” for example. That hasn’t necessarily changed in the media. When my book, Losing Tim, was published two years ago, I objected to the proposed subtitle “How Our Health and Education Systems Failed My Schizophrenic Son.” Language was important to me. It didn’t flow as well, but I asked that we make it “My Son with Schizophrenia,” because people need to come first.
“People first” language has been part of the mainstream of thinking pretty much since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. But it is coming late to our world.
Still, I think that’s where we start. We’re all people first, and we need to appreciate that. We’re individuals, with individualized lived experiences and individual goals and ambitions. Those lived experiences have value, and can inform the thinking of society as a whole. And we’re also all part of that society, and that means we have some common experiences and universal expectations as well — to be treated with respect, for one, and to be given every opportunity to direct our own lives to the extent of our abilities.
If you threw me out on the streets of a major city, with no food, no shelter, and no money, and asked me to survive on my own, I wouldn’t know how. But we expect many of our children with schizophrenia — like my son Tim — to do that every day. So maybe they aren’t as helpless as we think they are.
When he was a teenager, Tim was once asked by a mental health professional, “Do you know who you are?” He took a deep breath, thought for a minute, and said, “No, I don’t really think I know who I am yet.”
We all have existential crises, but we don’t all have schizophrenia. And that alone should humble us, just a little, when we decide how we want to talk about both mental health and mental illnesses.
