A personal perspective: How one statement set our country back a century.
“He opened the borders to prisoners, to inmates in psychiatric hospitals and insane asylums, and to terrorists.” In one breath, the former president placed my class (people with mental illnesses) in the same fear-based category as terrorists. He used my health condition, and that of 57.8 million other Americans (National Institutes of Health, 2024), as a political pawn.
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Dark history
Like many phenomena that are difficult to understand, mental illness has historically been met with fear and fear-based abuse. The first treatment for what we now know as mental illness was likely exorcism (Scull, 2015). Over time, exorcism evolved into other means of control, such as chains, insulin-induced comas, and mass institutionalization. These practices are a horrifying aspect of our nation's past that is not typically taught in history classes.
In 1908, a man named Clifford Beers wrote a book titled “A Mind That Found Itself,” in which he spoke of his harrowing experiences with mental illness and the inhumane treatment he received in the psychiatric hospitals of the time. He founded Mental Health of America, an organization that fights for the well-being of people suffering from mental illness. In 1953, the organization called for hospitals to donate the iron chains that once restrained mentally ill patients. These chains were cast into bells as a symbol of mental recovery.
Soon after, mental illness began to be understood as a health condition, people with mental illnesses were seen as having the same humanity as everyone else, and the deinstitutionalization movement began.
My mental state doesn't make me a werewolf.
The truth is that mental illness is not widely associated with violence: most violent crimes are committed by individuals without mental illness ( Varshney et al., 2016 ).
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However, as we have shown above, misunderstanding and fear can be extremely dangerous. America has a shameful history of oppression of people with mental illness, and even today, a diagnosis of mental illness is the single factor most closely associated with the risk of being shot by a police officer (Saleh et al., 2018). People with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.
My mental illness doesn't turn me into a crazed werewolf waiting for my next bite, nor does anyone else's. But these horror stories perpetuate a culture that makes us unwelcoming. They discourage people from seeking help for what are often treatable health conditions.
Like most other health conditions, hospitalization can be part of mental health treatment, but it’s important to leave the fear-mongering stigma and terms like “psychiatric hospital or psychiatric hospital” behind.
References
Beers, C. (1908). The Mind That Finds Itself.
National Institutes of Health (2024). Mental health statistics: 2024. Retrieved from Mental Health Statistics [2024] | United States
Saleh, AZ, Appelbaum, PS, Liu, X., Stroup, TS, & Wall, M. (2018). Deaths of people with mental illness during interactions with law enforcement. International Journal of Legal Psychiatry, 58, 110-116.
Scull, A. (2015). Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity. Princeton.
Varshney, M., Mahapatra, A., Krishnan, V., Gupta, R., & Deb, KS (2016). Violence and mental illness: What is the truth? J Epidemiol Community Health, 70(3), 223-225.
