The Stigma Of Mental Illness

“Crazy! Freak! Psycho! Faker! Weirdo! ”, these are common societal given names for the mentally ill. In other words, this is the beginning of what has been stigmatized against the mentally ill. Stigma, by definition, is a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person. Stigma is a label while, more often than not, leads to discrimination, segregation, and disadvantage. If someone is labelled to be psycho, they will most likely be avoided, for safety, due to the stigmatized assumption that they’re dangerous. This is relating this to mental illness from how the mentally ill are treated due to the assumption originating from it’s stigma. Society is the source of mental illness’ stigma. As violent crimes are committed,
Many reasons can be said for why this is, but a few major factors play into the major reason why mental illness is portrayed to be violent. Mental illness is a delicate subject as many are affected by their family or friends who are suffering from a mental illness or one’s own self that are struggling with it. While this is exhausting enough, with the added pressures and mistreatments of society, mental illness is a hard kick while they're already down. This does not help the alleviate the stress a mentally ill person holds which can ultimately affect their judgement and decision-making further. When people think of mental illness, they think of crazy people. If a professional was asked about a crazy person, they would refer to people with schizophrenia. Mental illness is not just schizophrenia, but instead involves a wide range, like personality disorders, mood disorders, and cognitive disorders like autism and dementia. But with movies consisting of mentally ill characters, like Norman Bates in “Psycho”, Michael Myers in “Halloween”, or Dr. Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs”, that portray mental illness as a false idea.
So when the mentally ill are associated with vicious cold blooded killers, they are appointed the stigma of violence. It can be very difficult, for some, to visualize a normal person, with the word illness attached to their back. Many mental illnesses can affect a person in ways that may force them to have unpredictable behavior, make irrational decisions, and delusional thoughts. These are some symptoms of many mental illnesses. But can one say it is fair to stigmatize all the mentally ill over what a rare few have unintentionally committed, if they have at all. This scenario may be no different than the stigma of Muslims being terrorists. A rare few, the minority, do not have the majority in whether mental illness is dangerous or not. Though not all mentally ill people make the most rational and logical decisions, that does not mean they get to be discriminated for it. Other well known stigmas are based on race. Stigmas of how, supposedly, people of color are violent criminals and gang members or how Latino/as are rapists. This is evidence of how the stigmas lead to discrimination and segregation, due to the past history of people of