People with mental health issues are still stigmatized. The media portrays most people with mental illness as violent or flat out crazy. Yet, that is not an accurate portrait of a person with mental health concerns. First, if we were to remove all the mentally ill people from the population: violence would only decrease by 3% according to Dr. Phillip Resnick, M.D. psychiatrist (served as an expert on the Unabomber and other criminal cases).

Secondly our picture of mental illness is at the peak of symptoms. When most people think of mental illness they think of: 1) The person with anxiety who can’t leave the house or attend social situations; 2) The person who is depressed who can’t get out of bed, can’t go to work or school and who is suicidal; 3) The person with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia who is floridly psychotic, hallucinates, hears voices and has delusions; 4) The veteran with PTSD who can’t function in public, has an extreme response to a car backfiring and who can’t sleep for days; or 5) The person with any kind of mental illness who self-medicates with alcohol, street drugs and perhaps is homeless. Read the rest of this entry »