Why Do We Self-Stigmatise Our Mental Health?
By: Laura Fox
Tags: Mental Health, This Happened To Me, Stigma, Mental Illness, Victim Blaming

We would never say these things to someone else, so why do we say it to ourselves?

Photo by Alex Boyd on Unsplash

I have often asked myself why I self-stigmatise my own mental health. I am a mental health worker. I am studying for a degree in Health and Social Care with a specialism in mental health. I run a mental health support page on Facebook. I have given talks and written courses on mental health. So why am I so cruel to myself when I notice symptoms of my mental illness?

I am committed to fighting the stigma on behalf of others. But I seldom show that commitment when it comes to my own mental health. I know rationally that there’s no shame in having mental health problems. But there’s a nagging voice that flits between telling me I should be ashamed of my mental illness and I should be ashamed that I’m not ill enough.

I’m not prejudiced towards people with mental health problems. I’m not ignorant due to a lack of knowledge about mental health problems. So where does this voice come from? Because those are not the sort of things I think or say when it comes to other people.

The main contributor to this voice is society. We live in a society that victim blames anyone with an illness, whether it be physical or mental. People can say some pretty damaging things:

“Have you tried yoga?” “Have you tried eating more healthily?” “You have so much to be happy about.” “You need to grow a thicker skin.” “We didn’t have all of these labels back in my day. It’s just an excuse to be lazy.” -Comments I have received about my mental illness

Madeline Dyer explains why this makes someone feel like they are being blamed in her article Please Believe Me When I Say There’s No Cure for My Chronic Illness.

“Statements like these tell me that this person believes it is my fault that I’m still unwell, because apparently I’m not eating the right diet/doing the right thing that would ‘cure’ me.” -Madeline Dyer

She also makes the valid point that people have this attitude as they want to believe that if they were to become unwell they would be able to do something about it. It’s difficult for them to wrap their head around the fact that anyone can become unwell and you don’t get to decide how unwell you will be or how long your illness will last.

The problem with our society victim blaming people with mental illness runs a lot deeper than the occasional throwaway comment. People are being asked to prove how unwell they are by the benefits system and the mental health system. If they can’t prove this, they don’t get benefits or mental health support. This leaves people feeling like they are frauds or like they are being blamed for their circumstances.

In the UK, people are assessed to see whether they are eligible for Personal Independence Payments (PIP). As a mental health worker, the vast majority of service users on my caseload have been through this assessment. It’s a brutal process and many questions are not applicable to mental health.

Many service users have told me that they felt like they weren’t believed. One disclosed that he had to show the self-harm scars on his thighs to the assessor. I offered to support him to make a complaint, but he was afraid that it might jeopardise his claim.

The Department for Work and Pensions figures (DWP) reveal that 7,990 disabled people who lodged a claim for person independence payment (PIP) in the five years after the new benefit was launched in April 2013 had died within six months of registering their claim, while also having that claim rejected. -Disabilitynewservice.com

Mental health services can also make people feel that they have to prove they are unwell. Services are underfunded and understaffed, so many people are assessed as not being unwell enough to qualify for support.

Whereas the benefits system is intentionally rejecting people to meet targets, the mental health system is unintentionally rejecting people due to lack of resources. However, it still makes people feel like their mental illness is their fault.

Terms such as “environmental stressors” and “high functioning” are thrown around when someone is deemed unsuitable for the service as if these things mean you're not that ill. And when people do qualify for help, the pressure to discharge them as soon as possible due to high waiting lists makes them feel like services are still saying you’re not that ill.

On the flip side, people are also made to feel like they are too ill. There’s a lot more support for mental health awareness but very little support when someone displays symptoms of mental illness. I discuss this in more depth here:

In my job, I am very open about the fact I have mental health problems with both service users and colleagues. Luckily I work in a supportive and progressive environment, but this has not always been the case.

In previous workplaces, if I showed any obvious symptoms of mental illness I was made to feel like I needed to “tone it down” and “stop making a fuss.” I was struggling with anxiety and it was clear that I was nervous all of the time. I found it hard to make eye contact and I would trip over my words. It was a shock to the system when people were treating me like I was too ill as in the past I had felt like people didn’t believe I was ill enough.

At college, I was struggling with depression. I often looked tired and on the verge of tears. I was made fun of for this whenever I was in social situations. I felt excluded and it became a vicious cycle. The more they excluded me the more I felt the needs to isolate myself. The more I isolated myself the more depressed I became. The more depressed I became the more I blamed myself. The more I blamed myself the more obvious my symptoms would be. The more obvious my symptoms were the more I was excluded.

I later learned about this in my degree when I was reading about social stigma. Social stigma around mental illness is less about the mental illness itself and more about the behaviour of the person. When someone is displaying obvious symptoms of mental illness they are seen as “deviant”. Stigma justifies people’s animosity towards this behaviour.

This lack of compassion influences the language we use when talking about mentally ill people. When the stigma feels justified it becomes normalised to see the stigmatised group of people as “less than.” This leads to some very problematic language that is seldom questioned.

The term “triggered” is thrown around if anyone expresses their dissatisfaction, particularly if they are emotional about it. You could argue that these are just words, but I have worked with service users who were too afraid to use the word triggered in case I perceived them as over-dramatic or entitled. Words are incredibly powerful.

As a mentally ill person, I pick up on problematic language pertaining to mental health problems. For example, I notice people using words like “unhinged” and “mental” to describe people who have committed crimes such as murder or sexual assault. I have heard people trying to diagnose Donald Trump with some sort of personality disorder. When someone is talking about someone they have fallen out with, such as an ex-partner, they often use the word “psycho.”

It is natural for people to want to make sense of things. When we hear about the things serial killers and abusers have done it’s hard to understand why they did these things. So it’s no surprise that we look to mental illness as the answer. But people playing psychiatrist and diagnosing people they don’t like adds to the victim-blaming culture. And by continuing to add to the victim-blaming culture we are encouraging people to self-stigmatise their mental health.

And what are we saying if we are using mental illnesses as adjectives to describe bad people?

The pressure to be the “perfect survivor” can create more symptoms than it does heal them. When you are drip-fed the message that symptoms make you defective you feel like you have to be a perfect example of recovery. You need an inspirational story of how you beat mental illness and now you’re just like everyone else.

Why do we have to be inspirations? Why do we have to be success stories? Isn’t it already pretty inspirational that we are still here? Aren’t we success stories for getting through another day?

We deserve better than a society that encourages us to blame ourselves for something we didn’t choose.