Community Connections, Spring 2002
Stigmatizing
Images Affect Children, By Otto Wahl, Ph.D.
Excerpted
from the National Mental Health Association Web site: www.nmha.org
The
tragedies of Columbine and similar incidents have led to impassioned calls
for increased mental health services for children and adolescents. While
there is little doubt that increases are needed and long overdue, this
focus alone overlooks an important fact. Even when services are available,
children and their parents often fail to make use of them. Although research
has revealed that nearly one in five adolescents experience a psychiatric
problem, most, including those who acknowledge and express concern about
those problems, do not seek professional help.
One factor that contributes to this troubling statistic is stigma. The
negative attitudes about mental illnesses that pervade public thinking
are hardly exclusive to the adult population. Children learn from a very
early age that psychiatric problems are seen as failures of character
and will and that those who admit to such problems or receive psychiatric
treatment are likely to be avoided and looked down upon by their peers.
Even second and third graders appear to have already assimilated the idea
that people with mental illnesses are to be viewed less favorably than
others.
From where do these negative views come? Certainly, they are influenced
by the attitudes and behaviors of adults. Children are witness to disparaging
references of those who are disliked or who have divergent opinions as
"crazy," "nuts" or "insane." Children hear
adults complain about people driving "like madmen" or behaving
"like lunatics" when they are upset. Children are aware of the
hushed and embarrassed tones used by adults when referring to relatives
who have undergone psychiatric treatment. In other words, children learn
easily that it is bad to be associated with labels that indicate a psychiatric
problem.
Children are also indoctrinated to negative beliefs about mental illness
through the entertainment media. Films for children often provide stigmatizing
images and ideas. Take, for example, Good Burger, a film based on the
popular Nickelodeon series, Keenan and Kel. Within this whimsical children's
movie is a sequence at the Demented Hills Asylum, where the heroes encounter
unkempt psychiatric patients in straightjackets who do things like disrupt
a card game by eating the cards and growl menacingly at visitors. For
somewhat older children, a 1998 chart-topping MTV video by the music group
N'Sync (entitled "I Drive Myself Crazy") provided similar images
of spaced-out psychiatric patients in straitjackets and padded cells,
with the repetition of lyrics featuring the word "crazy." These
stereotypes label people with mental illnesses as frightening, unattractive
and undesirable. They are being established or perpetuated within impressionable,
young minds.
It is small wonder, then, that children and adolescents do not seek psychiatric
help. They believe that to seek help would identify them as one of those
unlikable persons they have seen or heard about and leave them vulnerable
to ridicule and rejection. As Tipper Gore observed in a May 1999 Time
magazine article: "If we are serious about stopping the violence
and helping our children, adults need to erase the stigma that prevents
our kids from getting the help they need for their mental health."
Fighting the stigma of mental illness-a task that includes changing the
sometimes stigmatizing ways we ourselves refer to mental illness and challenging
the media images that communicate negative stereotypes to our children
and adolescents-is a fundamental task for helping to ensure that available
mental health services will be used successfully by children and their
families.
Otto
Wahl is a professor of psychology at Virginia's George Mason University
and a member of the NMHA Public Affairs Committee. He is the author of
Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness as well as the forthcoming
Telling is Risky Business: Mental Health Consumers Confront Stigma. Further
information about fighting stigma can be found on his web site at http://mason.gmu.edu/
~owahl/INDEX.HTM.
posted
4/9/02
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