Stigma.

The other night I was in NUIM for a careers talk to help me to decided what I want to do after school. I decided that I would go to the talk on Paramedics and fire fighters and that I would also go to a talk on medicine. The first talk was amazing but that’s not why I am writing this post. The second talk was about medicine and there were three part to the talk. When we got to the third part to the talk that's when I learned something that I will never forget. We all know that there is a huge stigma attached to mental health but I always thought that health care professions such as doctors were to try and help reduce the stigma. And well now I know that I am wrong.

It was near the end of the talk and we were being told about the different parts of medicine and the different specialities that you can go into after you become a doctor. One of the specialities was Physhcarity( I cant spell that but you know what I mean)  she had toils us all a bit about the other sections and when she got to this one the one thing that she had to say about it was that it was “mad” Now i know this could have been a joke to try and get us to laugh but it had a huge affect on me and I still can’t get it out of my mind and that is why I am writing this blog post. I mean there is nothing mad about this!!

People who suffer from mental health issues are always being stigmatised and they become ashamed of their illness and that is not what should be happening. It makes some people fell that they are being judged and that if they ask for help that people are only going to look down on them.  I am one of the lucky ones, when I went into hospitals my friends, family and teachers all stuck by me and never thought of me as any different from anybody else. I was having a bad time and i was sick, we all get sick and have bad times so why should we get stigamitised just because we have a mental illness.

There is no such thing as normal yet people go around thinking that just because you have a mental illness you’re not normal. When my mam was sick with cancer people looked up to her and seen her as strong and brave because she was battling cancer .But why is it that people who are suffering from mental illnesses are not strong or brave and they are seen as crazy? I mean it’s an illness too. A physical illness does not get stigmatised but mental illness does.... there both illness why should one be stigmatised and other not?  The same thing goes for people who have special needs; we are no different from everybody else so why do we get treated different. I know things were a lot worse in the past and things have changed but people still have a set view on mental health and special needs and it needs to change.

I know that I’m not crazy even though some people in society might think that I am crazy but I know that I’m not but not everybody thinks things the same was as I do. So the next time you think that because someone has a mental illness that their crazy think about what you are doing to them. When you are sick things are hard enough, if there is stigma attached to it things get much worse.

The comment that the doctor made really made me angry and upset because I’m not mad and nobody with a mental illness is mad. We are the same as everybody else!! We are equal but we are all different.  So the next time that you think that a person suffering from a mental illness is mad or crazy think for a moment and ask yourself is they really? We are people like everybody else and it is not fair that people in society look down on us because we have an illness.