“Like Norman Bates?”
“That’s weird”
“You’re scary”
“Will you kill me?”
“Is it contagious?”
These are some of the answers I’ve gotten when I have revealed I suffer from schizophrenia. I know most people think this kind of things, based on ignorance –most, anyway, keep themselves silent. But I don’t. Not any more.
Schizophrenia is a disorder that affects one’s perception of the world, causing hallucinations and/or delusions. But it doesn’t only do this; it can also cause other symptoms like disordered thinking, absence of emotional expression, loss of speech, catatonic behavior… It usually begins to affect people in their teens or early adulthood.
This illness is surrounded with stereotypes and stigma. When thinking about schizophrenic people, what comes to one’s mind is murderers. Scary, dangerous, violent people. Schizophrenic murderers in films and shows are to blame, and so is the fact that when a mass shooting or a sounding murder committed by a white guy happens, the media is quick on blaming this on mental illness of any kind -often, schizophrenia, or something likely sounding and deliberately ambiguous. This hides the fact that, actually, schizophrenic and mentally ill people in general are more likely to be the sufferers of violence than the perpetrators. Mentally ill people, especially those classified as dangerous, are more in danger of suffering violence from the police, from the prison complex, and even from psychiatric institutions. These representations are often inaccurate in their portrayal of the symptoms: they show schizophrenic people as people with “multiple personalities” when this does not actually happen to us, it’s a disorder on its own; they show schizophrenic people “hearing voices in our heads”, when this happens less often than the voices coming from objects around us; and portray all of our delusions and hallucinations as bad, scary, or forcing us to harm people, when really, even though this can happen, some are really innocuous, or even helpful (when I forget my keys or wallet somewhere, I get voices reminding me of it, I don’t know what I’d do without them). Other common tropes are sexualized mentally ill girls, mentally ill people that can’t be helped by psychiatric institutions, glamorized portrayals of mentally ill people showing them as cute or geniuses because of the illness itself…
You see, there’s no positive reference for mentally ill people, and specially, not for the ”dangerous” ones, like schizophrenia.
This is why I’m not silent any more. We need to talk about schizophrenia and mental illness in another context that is not fictional characters or mass shooters. If not, people will not be able to relate to us. We will be scared to tell anyone about our illness, being forced to act neurotypical when we obviously aren’t able sometimes. We will be confused about what the actual symptoms of our illness are, and won’t look for the treatment we need. The portrayal of who can be ill will still be limited, leading to misdiagnosing of socially disadvantaged groups. If we’re still being told that we are beyond help, we won’t be encouraged to get it. Violence against us will still be justified.
Mental illness stigma, I’m sure, has taken more lives than mental illness itself. And this needs to stop.
