Followers

Thursday 17 September 2015

Day 14:

Stigma


Thank you so much everybody for your comments yesterday. It has given me a much needed boost to keep going. I may well have another wobbly day ( or two) but I won't give up!

The stigma of any type of mental illness, not just BPD, makes many patient’s problems worse. It has a negative affect on their lives because of prejudice and discrimination. It is so important that people with mental illness be treated with respect and dignity and not judged or labelled.
The attitudes of others can be as big a burden as the illness itself. The stigma can even keep people from being diagnosed in the first place. There is so much misunderstanding about mental illness, for example, that it is self-inflicted or that it reflects a weak personality. There are often negative and inaccurate portrayals of people with mental illness in the media which shape our ideas of what it actually is.
The mentally ill continue to receive negative attention due to ignorance and fear. People view them as "crazy", dangerous or unstable but that is simply not the case. Maybe that is one of the reasons I am writing these posts, so that people understand it more with the facts and accounts of someone going through it.

People need to be educated about it and others with mental illness may gain some courage to enable them to talk more openly about it.

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