Is antistigma mental healthcare for the social model

Mental healthcare has traditionally focused on change of the individual.

It is only in recent times that antistigma has become part of mainstream mental healthcare. It is over the last decade that we have seen the increase in programmes that aim to change the construct, i.e. society and its view of 'normal' and stigmatised 'ill health'.

This seems a shift in the paradigm that will have impact on mental health and illness. Reducing the stigma of extreme or unusual experiences of consciousness can reduce the suffering caused by the stigma and discrimination. It can reduce the isolation and maintain support networks in times of crisis. It can reduce the social exclusion that often results from mental crisis or ill health. It can reduce the time to detection and increase insight by education of the public.

In reducing stigma and the barriers it creates this modern movement can actually reduce illness by helping make society more accepting of it and able to see the positive in the people who were once view as pariahs.

There are always dangers in these changes, the same as the changes achieved through mental healthcare focused on the individual. Simply put, there is always negative outcomes through change and often it is not accepted or noted. CBT is akin to brainwashing in that they both attempt to reprogram an individual by changing thinking patterns and behaviours; clearly CBT is done with an ethical approach, however this does not mean it is not without some of the dangers of CBT.

Through that line of thought there may be dangers in the antistigma movement that are unforeseen and perhaps unforeseeable. An example of destigmatisation gone awry is the example of personal debt that become rapidly destigmatised over the late twentieth century. This has lead to pervasive debt as a need of the economy and only recently has the misery of this come to the fore. Its links with mental ill health and suffering are beginning to be explored. During the recession the impact of bad debt will be affecting more of the population and bad debt has also been partially causal in the recession itself.

The risks of the antistigma movement are hard for me to see. Is it simply that the world will become more mad or more accepting of madness and eccentricity and laziness (to use old terms) and there will be no repercussions? I doubt that. Those behaviours may have been stigmatised for a reason, however I believe those reasons have passed. Homosexuality may have been stigmatised for a reason that procreation was necessary for the continuation of the species and a basic need for centuries. Things changed and people who were different from the norm could be accepted because the need for the stigma no longer existed.

What need is there for the stigma of mental ill health? Perhaps nothing today. But before....

--

....I tire of this line of thought. Its quite hard to think like this and communicate it. I also wonder are these musing really worth the effort they take?