Sick or sick?

Jane broke her arm. She texted Thomas via Messenger. He replied: "Oh, so sorry to hear that! I can imagine it must hurt a lot... Can I come visit you?" A typical reaction, right? Maybe you're thinking, what does that have to do with anything. Well lets look at a slightly different situation.

Jane was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was having halucinations for quite some time now and every now and then, she got the feeling, like she was being stalked by someone. She texted Thomas via Messenger: "Hey Thomas, you know how I wasn't feeling quite well for a while now? I finally found out why. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia... Could you please come over? I need somebody to talk to... Jane" ... And Thomas replies: "Really sorry Jane. Hope you'll feel better soon. But I don't think coming over would be a good idea... I mean, no offence, but it's schizophrenia! Do you even realize that people like you go nuts now and then and end up killing somebody?! Why are you not in mental assylum or somethin'. They shouldn't let person like you just roam about! Just... Don't contact me ever again. Bye." A typical reaction, right? ...

But I don't want to go into dephts of which stereotypes are known for which illness... We'll get into that some other time. Today I want to talk in a more general way...

There isn't illness, like illness. That's a fact. You're going to treat differently a person, who scraped his arm and a person who is on a deathbed with the latest stage of cancer. That's normal. But once you compare a person with cancer, with a person who suffers from ADHD... Poor man with cancer (normal reaction), but what he has to do with some madman? He's just an attention seeker anyways. Tch. He should look in his mirror and realize that there are worse diseases around the world than some hyperactivity! (Normal reaction? I don't think so.)

In my opinion, many people takes the words mentaly ill as the synonym of the words bad, weird and potentionally dangerous. Let's have a look on reasons, how these stereotypes came to be. What is the main cause of their existence? And why is it so hard to invalidate them? We'll take a look at all this in the next article.

If you have any questions, observations, etc. Leave us a comment bellow this article. We're here for you.