Why Is There Such A Stigma Toward Mental Illness In General And Toward Anxiety In Particular?

People suffering from anxiety often fear they will be stigmatized, as do many with a wide range of mental experiences. Patients commonly feel they are weak for not being better able to manage their anxiety, as if they had conscious control over their anxiety at those over-whelming times. They might also fear that they are alone, and that if anyone knew how unbearable, empty, needy, panicky, frightened, or defective they felt, they would feel even more isolated.

Some patients fear an even more threatening situation—exile from their families for admitting they suffer from anxiety, confessing to what is seen in their family system as shameful or to a loss of self-control with the onset of their symptoms. Perhaps they fear they are going crazy and will suffer beyond anxiety—perhaps from a more profound disorder that, for example, a family member already has. Humans feel ashamed of the nature of our distress and fear rejection by loved ones. These feelings, taken together, lead us to keep our symptoms secret and, commonly, to avoid treatment at any cost.

The tragedy of this approach lies in distancing ourselves, not only from the healing aspects of relating to others, but from standard effective treatment modalities available today. If we only knew on the front end how universal feelings of anxiety can be and how anyone honest with himself or herself knows these internal states to some degree, we could feel great relief. Embracing treatment for anxiety can allow people to feel more integrity within themselves.

It can also foster the mending of deep family rifts or facilitate the transition out of a dysfunctional family system in a safe way. Symptomatic anxiety symbolizes the mind’s difficulty managing a particular, individual mental struggle—a difficulty understood via competent treatment. Anyone who would stigmatize you for your difficulties might be uncomfortable with his own handling of some aspect of your struggle.

Rick’s comments:

I would honestly have to say that I have not been stigmatized by others nearly as much as I’ve stigmatized myself.

This does not mean that those of us diagnosed with a mental illness are free from the type of prejudices and misunderstandings in society that other groups have had to overcome. We’re not. It’s just that self-stigmatization can be the hardest to overcome because it involves so many types of emotions. I’m sure that I’m not alone in having feelings of shame, worthlessness, inadequacy, and regret, all related at least in part to OCD. Not surprisingly, based on what this part of the book says, keeping my symptoms secret and isolating from others have been a large part of my life because of the illness, yet nobody has ever told me I should isolate or keep secrets.

This is the stigmatization that I have imposed upon myself. Then again, you just have to look at the headlines in the tabloids to know that self-stigmatization doesn’t suffer from lack of company. Words like “psycho” and “schizo” still blare out at us, long past the time that other words of bigotry and such insensitivity have been banished from the newspapers’ vocabularies. Self-stigma, though, is still the worst.