From the Pen of Pat (Peer Counselor Patrick Quinn) I see my mental illness as a gift! Let me quote a song: If you could be inside of me You’d see what light I see I can see through mountains watch me disappear I can even touch the sky Flying high again! – Ozzy Osbourne (known to have mental health issues) But apparently not everyone else feels the same way. There is a lot of stigma in 2014 America. One of my mentors is Fred Frese. Fred is a renowned person with schizophrenia who recovered and got his Ph.D. He astonishingly became the head of the psych ward of the hospital that once confined him. I asked him point blank, “Do you think it is okay to tell people that I have a mental illness?” He shot back. “No!” But he added, “at least not yet.” As a person who has admitted his mental health issues to any and all, he added, “And if you do admit it, there will be insults, subtle or otherwise.” But things are improving. One sign of improvement is that many famous people have come forward about their mental illnesses. Oprah Winfrey, Harrison Ford, Jim Carrey, Terry Bradshaw, and Elton John have all come forward (there is a long list of names I cite in my speeches). And some have even championed the cause. Take actress Glenn Close: She said, “Our single goal is to get people talking openly and without shame about mental illness.” Glenn’s sister, Jessie, and Jessie’s son, Calen, are afflicted. Even major league sports are getting involved, baseball in particular. To quote Sports Illustrated, “Major league baseball . . . a long-time fortress against psychiatry, has . . . taken giant steps to . . . acknowledge players with emotional problems and give them the resources to deal with those issues.”(The article in Sports Illustrated on baseball and mental illness is a multi-page article online.) And I have been hearing for years that, since patients were released en masse from psych wards in the 1980’s, jail cells have become the new psych wards. Finally, something is being done about it. The start of the answer is something called HOPE Court in Zanesville. The idea of HOPE Court is to take people who are mentally ill who would normally be charged with a crime and, instead of sending them to prison or jail, send them through a special program to give them the help they need. The HOPE Court pamphlet says, “The primary goal is to keep the offender mentally stable, sober, and crime-free by teaching them how to make healthy choices to change their lives.” And the change hopefully doesn’t stop there. You can visit a website – bringchange2mind.org – which pictures Glenn Close and her family in an ad. The ad states, “Glenn and her family chose to be national voices for the first campaign dedicated to fighting the stigma that accompanies mental illness. Having the disease is difficult enough. Being blamed or ostracized for having it, well THAT’S JUST CRAZY.”
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 00:18:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015