Start at the Beginning of Stigma

I have a confession to make.

Despite everything I now believe about mental health, advocacy and compassion, I once carried stigma myself.

I was 16 when I was assigned work experience at our local mental hospital, or “asylum,” as institutions like it were often called. I wasn't pleased. In fact, I was anxious and angry about having to go.

My reaction wasn't based on experience. It was based on what I thought I knew.

Before that, my work experience had been at the local pub, an environment that seemed far more familiar and considerably less frightening to a 16-year-old. Mental hospitals belonged to another world, populated in my imagination by stereotypes, frightening stories and people I didn't understand.

Ironically, mental health care wasn't entirely foreign to my family. Aunts of mine had worked at the hospital. Yet the stigma surrounding mental illness was powerful enough to shape my expectations before I had even walked through the doors.

Then something unexpected happened.

I went inside.

I met people.

And my thinking began to change.

Within about six months, I was working there myself.

Looking back, stigma had distorted my belief system because I lacked knowledge and understanding. Once I had direct contact with people experiencing mental illness, those assumptions began to crumble.

Knowledge replaced some of the fear.

Understanding created empathy.

And people became people again.

I eventually spent around three decades working with people experiencing psychological distress. I supported people through extraordinarily difficult periods of their lives, advocated for them and witnessed recovery in its many forms.

Over the years I also learned that the frightening image society had created of psychiatric hospitals and the people within them rarely reflected the whole reality. Difficult and sometimes dangerous situations certainly occurred, but they were only one part of a much larger human story involving illness, treatment, care, relationships, humour, frustration, recovery and hope.

I thought I understood stigma.

Then mental illness came knocking on my own door.

Years later, I experienced a psychotic break myself.

Suddenly I was no longer simply the mental health worker observing illness from the professional side of the fence. I became the person receiving care.

That transition confronted me with another form of stigma I hadn't fully recognised: my own.

Part of me struggled with the idea that someone who had spent so much of her working life in mental health could become seriously mentally unwell herself.

How could I be the patient?

Buried somewhere inside that question was the assumption that mental illness happened to “other people.”

That was stigma too.

Mental health knowledge did not make me immune to mental illness any more than knowledge of cardiology would make a heart specialist immune to heart disease.

That realization changed me.

Stigma isn't always shouted across a room. Sometimes it sits quietly inside our assumptions. It can be inherited from family, absorbed from society, reinforced by frightening stories or simply grow in the empty spaces where knowledge should have been.

And mental health isn't the only place we find it.

Human beings create judgments around race, religion, age, socioeconomic circumstances, body size, disability and countless other differences. I have had to examine some of my own inherited assumptions and ask where they came from.

That process is uncomfortable.

It is also necessary.

Wiit & Wisdom grew partly from that journey: from observer to mental health worker, from advocate to patient, and eventually to someone able to look back from both sides of the experience.

I don't claim to have all the answers.

But I do know this:

Understanding can dismantle fear.
Knowledge can challenge stigma.
And compassion can change what happens next.

Perhaps the best place to start dismantling stigma is exactly where I had to start.

With ourselves.

I hope you'll walk with me through this.

Wendie Nicht