the antistigma movement is wrong

At least in one respect.

It isn't the stigma of the label which is what mental illness is: it's
the stigma of the symptoms.

The majority of the success of antistigima movements, at least large
ones, is all about language and labels. Many mainstream campaign
movements seem to have a bias towards the values of political
correctness and away from core concepts.

The stigma of mental illness is what causes the poorer outcomes in
life. The stigma is the stigma for symptoms alone. Psychiatry has just
added labels associated to clusters of symptoms to define the
behavioural modification required.

The stigma of the label is important but the root cause of mental
illness is, in my opinion, the illness in those who exclude, prejudge
and outcast the mentally ill. Not the mentally ill themselves.

Before psychiatry the outcomes fore the mentally ill were worse. They
were outcast from society and communities at the turn of the
Industrial Age. No psychiatric system existed. There was no label but
mad.

Mad pride and the Get Moving project are the real begins of true
antistigma. Their work is truly what makes real change. Being able to
be mad and not excluded is the aim of mental healthcare though perhaps
not psychiatry itself. The true heroes of this great battle, the
Martin Luther Kings and Gandhis, are those who understand the symptoms
are the root of the stigma and not the labels. They allow themselves
to be mentally ill to change the dysfunction in soicety.

The Great Confinement continues to perpetuate the myth that
psychiatric treatment is the way forward. All it has done is allowed
the pathologisation of ever greater swathes of the normal human race
while society's norms are allowed to constrict to make the smallest
forms of deviance judged with that terrible term, mad.

--
"Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being
wanted, for having someone to call their own."
Mother Teresa

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience
to remain silent."
Thomas Jefferson

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have,
beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser
than oneself.
Marlene Dietrich