Which of These Women Has a Mental Illness?
Despite common misconceptions, they’re not violent. Or “crazy.” And, no, they can’t just “get over it.” They’re your mothers, daughters, sisters, best friends, work wives, celebs, and Instagram stars.
They’re also me, the editor-in-chief of Women’s Health (there I am, below) and someone with diagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder. And they’re you: Per an exclusive survey conducted by Women’s Health and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), 78 percent of women suspect they have a mental illness; 65 percent have been diagnosed with one.
Whether we have OCD or anxiety or bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, all of us share one common challenge: stigma. It shrouds mental illness, leaving patients to suffer alone and in silence, fearful of repercussions. Grave repercussions that include an increased risk for chronic medical conditions (such as osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s), lost earnings (a collective $193.2 billion a year), second-rate health care, and a high incidence of suicide.
These disheartening realities have led Ken Duckworth, M.D., medical director at NAMI, to now refer to mental health stigma as outright “discrimination.” The fallout, he says, is startlingly similar to that from other forms of discrimination like racism. (For example, nine out of 10 people with a mental illness say they have been discriminated against because of it—not only in their social relationships, but also at work and school, as well as by doctors and the police.)
Other experts, including psychologist Patrick Corrigan, Psy.D., of the Illinois Institute of Technology, liken the stigma surrounding mental illness to another form of discrimination: pre-2000s homophobia. He says a big part of the solution is the same: to come out of the closet.
But when WH set out to do just that—photograph women revealing their stories about how stigma has affected their lives—it almost didn’t happen.
The first veteran reporter we hired to write the story e-mailed a few weeks in saying that she had “pulled my hair out 24 hours a day” trying to line up women we could photograph, but it wasn’t possible to find people who’d risk the stigma of speaking in a national magazine. She had never bailed on a story before, she told us, but just didn’t think this one could be done.
Another part of our original plan fell through: soliciting more volunteers from the WH staff who would want to share their own experiences living with mental illness. Doing their due diligence, our HR team alerted us to potential complicated legal issues—because of any real or perceived workplace stigma staffers might face—so we dropped that idea.
Our public relations folks also initially expressed concern that if I, as the head of this magazine, were to come out publicly about having OCD, I might be seen “differently” in the industry—or be judged by my peers—and that I would have to accept that risk if I moved forward.
All these factors support the very reason this story needed to happen. Now, Women’s Health joins pioneers like Demi Lovato and Lena Dunham and Lady Gaga, who have come forward to talk honestly about mental health, as well as health-care organizations and grassroots campaigns whose aim it is to break taboos by putting real faces to medical diagnoses. We hope you, too, are with us.
This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of Women’s Health, on newsstands now. Go to our Mental Health Awareness center for more content like this and to find out how you can help break the stigma surrounding mental illness.
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