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Leonard white

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How much of a negative stigma is still attached to mental illness such as schizophrenia ?

There are a lot of generalisations made about mental illness. The biggest in my opinion is that you are either mad or sane, Is life ever that black and white ?
I suffered from acute mental disorders as a teenager (these fell into the spectrum of schizophrenia)
I do not have schizophrenia, I experience from time to time symptoms that are listed in a group know as "The schizophrenias"
I found it very difficult to come to terms with the stigma of this and kept it a secret for years. Part of my recovery and learning to cope with this was also confronting my public/personal image as a "mad person"
I would like to hear peoples opinions and views about this. Please don't put kid gloves on, If you have any negative views about this, bring them to light for discussion. We all form little opinions of each other naturally, even when reading a question or an answer here. Did your opinion of me shift when I told you about my experience ?
Does anyone still think schizophrenia is a split personality ?

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Closing Statement from Leonard white

I would have loved to hear more comments on my question of stigma . Thank you for your comments.

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    Beste Arslan

    • +1
    Feb 3 2012: " The biggest in my opinion is that you are either mad or sane, Is life ever that black and white ?"-Loved that question and personally I think the answer is no,life isnt just black or white.I dont believe that there is a seperation of 'insane' and 'sane'.I wrote something on my blog a while back ,which relates to your question.There I wanted to express my thoughts about insanity being an overdose of poignant emotions and not knowing how to deal with these. The definition of 'insanity' to me is,Strong emotions+having no one to share it with/feeling lonely+feeling alienated=becoming more and more introverted and as all of these emotions built up inside us finally one day they will find a form of 'escape',but as they' escape',we become trapped in ourselves.Therefore since we are all human and we are bound to experience such emotions,arent we all' insane'?The only line that divides us into being 'normal' or being 'insane' is the ability to be aware of,embrace and enshroud those powerfull feelings.Because being concious of what we are actually feeling behind those emotions leads to an understandment of ourselves,then this will lead to realising that 'fighting' them, 'ignoring',' denying' or simply 'giving into' them wont seperate the four walls around our minds.What can help us is loving ourselves,accepting our emotions,accepting ourselves for who we are...accepting both good and bad.And finally not forgetting that we are not alone with these emotions that we cannot control,everybody goes through them at some point of their life...After all,we can only know what the light feels like when we have felt the dark.

  • russell lester

    • 0
    Feb 3 2012: Huge ammounts in subtle ways its everywhere
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