Barbara J. Hamby

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Stigma

Why, in this generation, have we swept so many of the mentally ill onto the sidewalks? In the early part of the twentieth century most were locked away, either in private homes or in institutions. Wherever we try to hide them, put them out of sight and out of mind, we are unsuccessful.

My generation was raised to avoid certain subjects. Some of us can actually say the word “sex” out loud, but I would venture to guess most of us can’t utter either the clinical or slang names of sexual organs unless we’re telling jokes. Almost every one of us has family, friend(s), or acquaintances who suffer from mental illness, but we don’t talk about that. Ishmael Reed, an African-American writer, recently referred to reports that one out of five Americans suffers from mental conditions, but nearly two thirds of those diagnosed never seek treatment.

In more than ten years of writing classes, seminars and workshops, I have met hundreds of writers but only encountered one who mentioned mental illness. She had suffered all her life and spent time in institutions herself. She wrote about others she met there as well as her own experiences. She was attempting to organize the jumbled journal of a young schizophrenic man she had befriended. She wanted desperately

to communicate with all of us what mental illness means to the patients and how it affects their relationships. I have lost contact with her and fear she may have given up on those of us who have no vocabulary to understand what she tried to tell us.

At some level we all know the terrible price we pay for our attitudes about mental illness. Our feeble attempts to control alcohol and drug abuse and the criminal actions that accompany them eat dollars at an alarming rate. Incarceration is expensive and ineffective. Treatment, no matter how expensive, may or may not work. We all pay for our inattention to this problem, either taxes for new jails or increased health insurance premiums for psychological or psychiatric treatment. Yet our homes and streets are still not safe while a part of our population wanders in confusion and terror.

I sincerely hope the generations following us, who have grown up in a more open society than we knew, will turn their eyes and their minds to the problems of mental illness and apply their expertise to workable solutions.