To Speak or Not to Speak?

It occurs to me that a lot of the famous people who have shared about their personal struggles with mental illness (think Demi Lovato, Adele, Chrissy Teigen, Lena Dunham, even Dwayne Johnson - I could keep going) can perhaps afford to do so. Why would a person fear stigma when they bear a cushion of wealth or fame?

For the common person, things are less simple. I don't know how it works in mainstream America but in my community, people have good reason to fear stigmatization. We have children. Those children will need to get married one day. It's hard enough to find a good match without a parent's mental illness in the picture, to say nothing about the plight of a single who's ill. The way thoughts work in our community is, 'If I can marry a person with no mental illness in the family, why would I consider someone with?'.

A little cold. Callous, perhaps. But this is the reality when we filter through candidates on paper before agreeing to meet them.

Of course the logic is flawed. As a psychiatrist once told me, there is also a strong likelihood that a healthy person, with no family history, will develop a mental illness at one point in their life. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI),

"Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. (46.6 million) experiences mental illness in a given year".

Current research, including a report from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), indicates that we can't yet quantify the predisposition to mental illness based solely on genetics. This is especially true since environment plays a strong role in the development of said conditions. It might be fair to conclude, then, that we ought to pay more attention to the environment people experienced while growing up, and hey, who can claim to have had a perfect childhood? No one I've met, that's for sure.

While I'm pleased that celebrities have been normalizing discussion of mental illness, I'm skeptical of the impact. It's not enough for Lady Gaga to talk about her condition. We regular people have to do the talking. There need to be more op-eds about our experiences, and our struggles. This is not simply a matter of social comfort, or a ploy to get our kids married. Talking about mental illness breaks down the barriers that isolate our friends and family. Feelings of isolation are a leading cause of suicide.

When you frame it like that, sharing our stories could save lives.