Even trained professionals cannot reliably determine mental illness by appearances alone.

To Fight Stigmas, Start With Treatment

Could a panel of experts — a psychiatrist, psychologist and a psychiatric nurse — tell them apart?

They could not. After watching hours of videotape, the experts correctly identified only two of the five people with a history of mental illness. And they misidentified two of the healthy people as having a mental illness.

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“Having a mental illness doesn’t have to become your defining characteristic,” wrote the producer, Rob Liddell, in describing the program. “It shouldn’t set you apart in society.” The leading mental health advocacy group in England and Wales, MIND, praised the program for encouraging viewers “to re-examine their preconceptions.”

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Altering public attitudes toward the mentally ill depends largely on whether they receive treatment that works. This, in turn, sets in motion a self-reinforcing momentum: the more that treatment is observed to work, the more it is encouraged.

We see this in some of the more recent trends in treatment promotion: Psychiatric medications are routinely advertised on television. The military is taking meaningful steps to make treatment for combat stress standard. And last fall, President George W. Bush signed a law that prohibits health insurance discrimination against patients with mental illness.

Antistigma campaigns are well-meaning but they lack a crucial element. No matter how sympathetic the public may be, attitudes about people with mental illness will inevitably rest upon how much or how little their symptoms set them apart.

I'm pretty open about being bi-polar though people don't usually know unless I tell them.  But once people know there is a small group that I can tell treat me differently... 

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