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Advocacy for Equal Rights and Respect for the Mentally Disabled

Jessica Ware

Gender and Society

Professor Merriwether-DeVries

Juniata College

Word Count = 4141

Jessica G. Ware: 207 Brooke Ave, Magnolia, NJ, 08049

WAREJG15@juniata.edu

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In the past few years, our American society, and various other societies have been forced

to look at and reexamine specific minorities. Black Lives Matter, Feminism, LGBT Rights

movement, etc. There is one minority that has not been heard from, but has suffered almost in

silence: the mentally disabled. The mentally disabled have been facing negative stigmas and

discrimination for centuries, and only in the past 40 years have been given some rights. The

purpose of this paper is to show how people with mental disabilities are not that different from

what we call “normal people1” and they should be treated with the same amount of respect and

dignity as a “normal person”. I am advocating for men and women with mental disabilities to be

treated equally and to end the negative discrimination that they face.

Here are some words for you: mental illness, mental disabilities, mental health problems,

mental health disorder. These words are all the same thing, just with different names. What

exactly is a mental disorder, or one of the various other names? Psychologytoday.com (2013)

defines it as:

A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an

individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the

psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning.

To give a better understand to what qualifies as a mental health disorder, here are some of

the disorder: mood disorders, eating disorders, autism, OCD, ADHD, addiction disorders,

anxiety disorders, PTSD, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and

personality disorder. These are just the better known disorders, and most of them branch off into

more specific disorders.

1 Quotes around normal people because is anyone truly society’s perfect image of normal.

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Here are some statistics proved by The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)

(2013). There is roughly 319 million people living in the United States of America. Out of that

number, 61.5 million Americans experience a mental disability and about 13.6 million

Americans live with a serious mental disability (such as schizophrenia, major depression, and

bipolar disorder). One in five of youth (13-18) have or will eventually have a serious mental

disability. If those statistics don’t shock you, then maybe this will. The National Alliance on

Mental Illness (2013) stated “Nearly 60% of adults with a mental illness didn’t receive mental

health services in the previous year,” and “nearly 50% of youth aged 8-15 didn’t receive mental

health services in the previous year.” These shocking statistics exist because of the negative

stigma and discrimination. Negative stigma and discrimination is what keeps people with mental

disorders from coming forward, admitting that they have a disorder, and asking for help.

One important question is where does this negative stigma and discrimination come

from? The main source from society’s negative views on mental illness is from the media. The

Mental Health Foundation (n.d.) stated, “Media reports often link mental illness with violence, or

portray people with mental health problems as dangerous, criminal, evil, or very disabled and

unable to live normal, fulfilled lives.” This is further shown when someone simply types into

Google search “news report on a shooter with a mental disorder” and 3, 240, 000 results show

up. One article written by Bill Chappell (2016) was labeled “LAPD Reports Shooting 38 People

In 2015; A Third Of Cases Involved Mental Illness.” In the article, the only thing that came up

about mental illness was a sentence that repeated the title’s information, but the imagery the title

gives is enough to start some stereotypes on mentally disabled people. Another article was on

Rusty Houser, the 2015 Lafayette theater shooter. Writers Schapiro, Wagner, and McShane

(2015) used words like “his terrified family”, “an erratic, hard-drinking, violent, bipolar presence

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who sometimes skipped his meds”, and “Houser’s long-festering rage exploded in a wave of

gunfire.” What picture does this paint for those with mental disabilities? It was obvious that

Houser was an extreme case, but out of the 61.5 million Americans who go through a mental

disability, less than 5 percent end up shooting people. This negative painting of people with

mental disorders lead to the negative stigma and discrimination.

Due to these negative images of people with stereotypes, several misconceptions are

created about mental health problems, specifically thanks to the media. In a research journal

called Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illness, authors Corrigan and

Watson (2002) stated that the media the misconceptions that “people with mental illness are

homicidal maniacs who need to be feared; they have childlike perceptions of the world that

should be marveled; or they are responsible for their illness because they have weak character.”

These negative misconceptions cause people to withhold helping those with mental disabilities,

avoid them all together, give coercive treatment, and create segregated institutions when the

mentally disabled do seek help. Corrigan and Watson (2002) stated:

The 1996 General Social Survey (GSS), in which the Mac Arthur Mental Health Module

was administered to a probability sample of 1444 adults in the United States, found that

more than a half of respondents are unwilling to: spend an evening socializing, work next

to, or have a family member marry a person with mental illness.

This avoidance, and overall neglect, for people with mental illnesses holds them back

from reaching their full potential. By having this stigma and discrimination, people with mental

health problems have extreme difficulty finding work, have poor housing, go through poverty,

and can face social isolation.

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There isn’t just public stigma. The discrimination and prejudice causes self-stigma as

well. Self-stigma is when the people with the mental disabilities agree with the stereotypes.

Most of the time it is because they fear the discrimination and rejection from others. Because of

this, self-confidence suffers. One surprising thing that Corrigan and Watson (2002) found that

sometimes people with mental health problems react in the opposite manner. Instead of

developing a low self-esteem, they become righteously angry because of the discrimination and

prejudice they have experienced. Corrigan and Watson (2002) stated, “This kind of reaction

empowers people to change their roles in the mental health system, becoming more active

participants in their treatment plan and often pushing for improvements in the quality of

services.” Corrigan and Watson (2002) also found that there is a third party that is neither

energized nor harmed by the negative social stigma. Instead, the third party feels indifferent to

the stigma altogether. This may be because this third party may see that the culture’s stigma will

only change if it willingly chooses it, that it cannot be forced to change its views on mental

disabilities.

Public and self-stigma is also affected by the location. Where a person with a mental

disability lives in the world affects how the society around them treats them. A research was

done by Benomir, Nicolson, and Beail (2015) that was called Attitudes towards people with

intellectual disability in the UK and Libya: A cross-cultural comparison. This study looked to

“undertake a cross-cultural study, investigating attitudes to people with ID [intellectual

disability] in Libya in the year 2011, and to compare the Libyan data with those for the UK”

(Benomir, Nicolson, and Beail 2015). They used a questionnaire study (the questionnaire used

was the Community Living Attitude Scales for Mental Retardation (CLAS-MR)). With the

questionnaire study, they looked at three group in both the UK and in Libya: psychology

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students, science students, and the professionals in intellectual disability support. The results

came in term of four CLAS-MR subscales: empowerment, similarity, exclusion, and sheltering.

Benomir, Nicolson, and Beail (2015) stated the results were that:

Libyan sample showed significantly less favourable scores on Empowerment, Similarity

and Exclusion than the UK sample, but no significant difference on the Sheltering sub-

scale. Within-country analysis indicated no main effects of gender on all four sub-scales

in Libya and the UK.

This was the first study that undertook quantitative analysis of attitudes to people with

intellectual disabilities in Libya. Corrigan and Watson (2002) also saw similar result in Asian

and African countries in general. These two studies found that while negative stigma is less

evident in non-western countries, when it is found, the stigma is more severe than if it were to be

found in a Western culture. This could be because in non-western cultures, those who have a

mental health problem hide it because of the traditions in their society’s culture. People in these

non-western cultures grow up to be less numb and accustomed to the mental illnesses, especially

the older generations. Because of this, when some with a mental disorder openly states to their

society that they have this disorder, it comes as a shock to the public, and the public must likely

do not know how to respond properly to it. It most likely ends up that the person with the mental

disorder because an outcast and does not receive proper treat and may never recover.

Sometimes the stigma and discrimination starts at a young age. There has been a

growing concern for children with mental disabilities that they are being bullied in a school

setting. A study was conducted by Rose et al. (2015) called Bullying and Students With

Disabilities: Examination of Disability Status and Educational Placement. Rose, Stormont,

Wang, Simpson, Preast, and Green (2015) studied:

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Bullying involvement (direct victimization, relational victimization, cybervictimization,

bullying, fighting, relational perpetration) among 1,055 students with specific disabilities

in inclusive and restrictive settings and their demographically matched (race, gender,

grade) peers without disabilities.

The results showed that:

Students with disabilities experience higher rates of victimization and engage in more

fighting than students without disabilities. However, students with learning disabilities

and autism spectrum disorders tended to report higher rates of victimization in inclusive

environments, whereas students with intellectual disabilities and emotional and

behavioral disorders reported higher rates of victimization in restrictive settings.

Increased fighting was primarily associated with students identified with autism spectrum

disorders, emotional and behavioral disorders, and other health impairments within

restrictive environments.

What this research shows is that those who are mentally disabled, no matter what age, are

being discriminated against. Here are some statistics from the National Alliance on Mental

Illness (2013), “Approximately 50% of students age 14 and older with a mental illness drop out

of high school.” Students with mental illnesses are deciding, the parents are involved too, to

drop out of school because they feel so unsafe at a school, which is supposed to be a place where

the youth should feel safe. When someone goes to school, the scariest thing they should face

should be an exam or telling the professor that you didn’t do last night’s homework. Children

with mental health problems should not have to wake up in the morning and fear for their lives

because they have to face bullies at school.

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Results of this bullying can be more dangerous than simply dropping out of school.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (2013), “suicide is the 2nd leading cause of

death in youth ages 15-24), and “90% of those who died by suicide has an underlying mental

illness.” This is a hard statistic to swallow. The fear that these students with mental health

problems face is unimaginable. Fear that probably crippled their mindset and threw them into a

turmoil. Rose et al. (2015) stated that:

Students with SLD [specific learning disorder] and ASD [autism spectrum disorders]

experience higher rates of victimization in inclusive settings, whereas students with ID

[intellectual disability] and EBD [emotional or behavioral disorders] experience higher

rates of victimization in more restrictive settings. In addition, students with disabilities

tend to engage in more reactive behaviors (i.e., fighting) but similar rates of proactive

behaviors (i.e., bullying) when compared with their demographically matched peers.

All of these disabilities affect the child’s understanding of behavioral and social cues. If,

on repeat, a student with a severe case of this disabilities is told that they are worthless, they

should never have been born, or worse, they should go kill themselves, the student will have a

hard time understanding that the bully isn’t actually telling them to kill themselves. The student

with a mental health problem will take this speech literally. If a student that is higher functioned

with one of these disabilities, being told that they should die is very similar to telling a “normal

person” that they should be dead. If you are told something so many times, you start to believe

it.

This kind of treatment to a person with mental disabilities is illegal. In 1990, the

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was created. This act is still active to this day and “is a

civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all area of

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public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open

to the general public” (adata.org n.d.) This act is to make sure that men and women with mental

disabilities are given the same rights and opportunities as any other person would be given. If it

is illegal for anyone to discriminate against someone at whatever age that has a mental, or any,

disability, why is this still happening in our schools? It is time that we change how our society

and other societies view people with mental health problems. It is time that we truly give them

the rights, respect, and opportunities they deserve.

Change needs to happen, but for it to be everlasting, it needs to be done the right way. It

is important that there is a minimum amount of hiccups and backlash as the process of reforming

the public’s, and even the people with the mental disorders, opinions on mental disorders presses

on. Corrigan and Watson (2002) believed that they came up with a system that could complete

this goal, “change strategies for public stigma have been grouped into three approaches: protest,

education, and contact.”

Corrigan and Watson (2002) mentioned that groups should protest “inaccurate and hostile

representation of mental illness as a war to challenge the stigmas they represent.” This is a quite

different approach. Most protest groups look to spread positive messages about the group they

are representing. By protesting inaccurate information, this sends two messages to two groups:

to the media and to the public. To the media, it tells them to stop reporting inaccurate facts and

representations about people with mental illnesses, inaccurate representations just like the article

previously mentioned about Rusty Houser. Even though the writers stated the facts that House

did shoot at people in a movie theater, they painted the image that all people with mental

disabilities are as violent and intense as him, and that people with mental disabilities should

never be trusted. To the public, it tells them to stop believing everything they hear, especially

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the negative views. The media likes to manipulate the true story for something that sells. The

facts are twisted for entertainment and rating purposes. The next time a member of the public

hears about a shooting, don’t always assume that the shooter had a mental disorder. If the

shooter did, then don’t assume that every person that has a mental disorder is going to shoot you.

By protesting, we spark interest. We grab people’s attention. By protesting, we bring

people to the protests, and overall, the movement. With all the attention, the people will demand

change. The government will have to make changes to feed the need of the movement. Those

changes and reforms will bring the education that the society needs to teach present and future

generations properly about mental health problems.

Protesting is only one step and one strategy to getting the stigma about people with

mental disorders to change. Education is another step and strategy to fulfilling this goal.

Corrigan and Watson (2002) stated, “Education provides information so that the public can make

informed decisions about mental illness.” People who have a better knowledge and

understanding of mental disorders are less likely to endorse harsh and negative stigma and

discrimination.

Several studies have shown that participation in education programs on mental illness led

to improved attitudes about persons with these problems. Education programs are

effective for a wide variety of participants, including college undergraduates, graduate

students, adolescents, community residents, and persons with mental illness (Corrigan

and Watson 2002).

If it is easy to teach one generation the wrong way, it is easy to teach a new generation

the right way.

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The third step and strategy is contact. By increasing contact between a “normal person”

and someone with a mental disability, the stigma is further diminished. Corrigan and Watson

(2002) stated:

Research has shown an inverse relationship between having contact with a person with

mental illness and endorsing psychiatric stigma. Hence, opportunities for the public to

meet persons with severe mental illness may discount stigma. Interpersonal contact is

further enhanced when the general public is able to regularly interact with people with

mental illness as peers.

By having this contact, it helps someone with a mental disability venture out into the

public’s eye more. People will grow used to seeing a mentally disabled person and grown numb

to what was once seen as odd behavior. When a mentally disabled person goes to a supermarket

or a mall, they wouldn’t have to worry about people stopping and staring at them. Mentally

disabled people would be able to get and hold down a job better, which will start the end of the

vicious cycle they were once in. By getting and holding down a job, they could afford to have a

house, which would keep them from being homeless and no longer being in that 26 percent of

homeless people with a serious mental illness.

One step and strategy that Corrigan and Watson did not talk about in their study was

reform. In general, reform would be going on as the other three steps are happening. As people

are protesting, as generations are being educated correctly, as the stigma is be diminished

because people are understanding and coming in contact more with people that are mentally

disabled, reforms are being made to prevent the society from going back to the old, negative

stigma. Merriam-Webster (n.d.) defines reform as “to put an end to (an evil) by enforcing or

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introducing a better method or course of action.” Reforms act like a protective barrier or shield

for the mentally disabled. The reforms would prevent the past from ever repeating itself.

One thing we need to be cautious of when this society starts teaching about mental illness

the right way: we must understand the differences and similarities between men and women with

mental disabilities. Men and women share the same mental disabilities. Sometimes they are

more common in a specific gender such as autism (it is four times more likely to develop it than

girls), but we should not make one disorder exclusive to a specific gender just because it is more

common in one. We must give the same amount for research and effort for both genders, they

deserve it.

One thing that we have to make certain to both the people with the mental disabilities and

the society around them is that having a mental disability does not make you weak. In a census

in the National Alliance on Mental Illness (2013), it was discovered that for most races, women

come forward about having a mental illness than men. For Caucasians, 21.5 percent of women

made use of mental health services, but only 11.3 percent of males used it. Numbers were even

lower for African Americans with 10.3 percent of women using mental health services, and 6.6

percent for males. Similar results were found for Hispanics and Asians. Surprisingly, for

American Indians and Alaska Natives, 16.3 percent of males used mental health services, and

only 15.1 percent of women used them. These numbers are still far too low. We need to break

this stigma that asking for help means that you are weak. We also have to provide better services

to the people who are brave enough to ask for help. A reason that the Caucasian percentages are

so high and the other races are so low is because the other races are given poorer quality of care

and treatment and the discrimination to those races is too intense in some services.

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Women and men, especially those with severe mental disabilities, often state that they

lose part of their personal identity when they are labeled as mentally ill. Both men and women

believe that they are decreased down to just their diagnosed disabilities and their personal cares

and needs are forgotten. A study was done by Scheyett and McCarthy (2006) called Women and

Men With Mental Illnesses: Voicing Different Service Needs. The purpose of this study was to

discover what men and women were looking for when they accepted that they had a mental

disability and went to get mental health services:

In our study, we examined some ways in which women and men with severe mental

illnesses view their service needs within the mental health system. Using a focus-group

approach, we asked the participants to identify the services that they thought they needed

to succeed and meet their goals in life and then listened for the differences and

similarities between the women’s and men’s voices in these discussions (Scheyett and

McCarthy 2006).

One of the characteristics that both groups (men and women) agreed upon that was

important when seeing someone at a mental health service is mutual respect. “For the men,

respect was characterized by being listened to, being given information, and being supported in

moves toward greater independence” (Scheyett and McCarthy 2006). The women had a

different perspective on what respect was. “The women saw the context of respect as one that is

built on caring, understanding, and mutual relationship between a mental health provider and a

recipient of service” (Scheyett and McCarthy 2006). Another difference was that the men

wanted to be seen by their doctors and caretakers as individuals. They wanted to be seen as

equals to them as well, and to be “allowed to assert their autonomy” (Scheyett and McCarthy

2006). Women contrasted with the men, “the women wanted to be integrated into the context of

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a healing relationship with their mental health providers within the larger locational context of an

integrated and understandable service system” (Scheyett and McCarthy 2006). Men wanted to

have their independence and to be seen as equals. Women wanted an emphasis on the

connection with their doctor or caretaker and for a caring nature. By knowing what each gender

wants when they finally are able to have the courage to come forward and ask for help, mental

health services are able to give them want they need and help them on their road through

recovery.

` There are approximately 7.125 billion people in the world. There are approximately 319

million people living in the United States of America. 61.5 million of those Americans

experience a mental disability. Approximately 13.6 million American have to live with a serious

mental disability. One in five of our youth (13-18) in America have or will eventually have a

serious mental disability. With such large numbers, why is this minority not being heard? Why

must the mentally disabled suffer in silence and be denied an end to their suffrage? In other

cultures such as in Asian and African, people who tell their communities that they have a mental

disability are denied the help they need and are forced to become outcasts. In modern day

media, those with mental health issues are painted as either violent psychopaths that should

never be trusted, have childlike personalities that cannot handle the real world, or that they are

responsible for their disorder because they are so weak and it is their fault. The amount of

negative stigma, discrimination, and even prejudice that mentally disabled people have to go

through, sometimes on a day-to-day basis, is inhumane. It needs to stop. Changes need to be

made. We need to teach current and future generations that what is shown on the television or

what is written in the newspapers is not always true. We need to show people that the mentally

disabled are not the different from “normal people”. We need to protest, educate, create contact,

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and reform. The mentally disabled should be treated like a “normal person” would be treated.

People with mental health problems should be given the same amount of respect and dignity as a

“normal person” would be given. People with mental health problems should be given the same

amount of rights and opportunities as a “normal person” would be given. People advocate for

equal rights for African Americans, women, Native American, Asian Americans, Gays,

Lesbians, etc. I am advocating for men and women with mental disabilities to be treated equally

and to end the negative discrimination that they face. They deserve to be liberated.

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Bibliography

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