Someone once said to me, “Taking medication for your mental illness is one thing, but if you have to go to a mental hospital for it, you have problems.”
And my answer is, why? The treatment for people suffering from diabetes is to bring blood sugar levels to a normal level. The treatment for people suffering with mental illness is to balance the chemicals in the brain. When something goes wrong, both persons may end up in the hospital. Diabetes and mental illness are both medical conditions. One has a stigma, the other does not.
Judging by the representation of mental hospitals in the media—padded walls, straitjackets, ominous writing on the walls—it’s no wonder psychiatric care and its patients are stigmatized and often feared. Even a Google search of "Hospital" and "Mental Hospital" produce extremely different results (see images below). And while it’s true that some of these elements are taken from real-life mental health treatment practices, they are outdated by at least sixty years. Since then, humans have started to become more understanding of mental health for what it is—a chemical imbalance in the brain—and treatment has shifted to accommodate this understanding. The media's portrayal of mental wards with elements that are long outdated is misrepresenting mental illness in the most harmful way possible. It is instilling the wrong ideas in people's understanding of mental illness, which ultimately feed the stigma that could possibly instill fear in people who suffer from mental illness from receiving the help they need.
While everyone’s experience is different, my own experience in the mental ward was generally positive, despite the ever-present feeling of not wanting to exist anymore. I can assure you that there were no padded walls, no straitjackets, or anything like what you see in the media. The hospital where I stayed had kind, empathetic nurses and a lot of natural light, which is really helpful, especially in the darkest days of November. The other patients were quite nice and understanding of me and each other, and some of us even exchanged phone numbers to contact each other when we were discharged from the unit. They were people who could have been my classmates, my coworkers, my quirky relatives. They were no one to be afraid of. They were not dangerous.
The mentality of the person I mentioned above is what keeps those struggling with untreated mental illness from receiving the help they need. A person may be afraid to even go to therapy or take medication because it’s for “crazy people.” But the thing is, people in mental wards are often in a better state of mind than a person with an untreated mental illness. Because those in mental wards are receiving help for their illnesses and often acknowledge the fact that they need it, which is ultimately the first step to recovery.
Google search result: "Mental Hospital"
Google search result: "Hospital"
