We need an empathetic revolution. What is an empathetic revolution you ask? It is the innovation of radically transforming the world to create social change. In this case, the motivation is to progressively reform mental health stigma using empathy as the catalyst. True empathy occurs when a person not only feels and understands another's plight but is also spontaneously moved to help them. Imagine if you will, a world where everyone is compassionate and empathetic as to lend a helping hand to their neighbor in need. Sound implausible? It's not. It's possible. It is right within our grasp. And it is long overdue. We just need to realize how simple the solution really is.
Meet Anne. She was a modest girl from an ordinary town. Growing up, she endured physical and psychological abuse from her overbearing mother. She couldn't wait to get out on her own and make her own rules, and she moved out as soon as her eighteenth birthday rolled around. But Anne ran into a big problem; she didn't know how to live a regular life; make friends, pay bills, even make dinner. She felt inadequate. And this depressed her. She went to a therapist. She was put on medication. She got diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and a personality disorder. She still tried to handle her life. She got a boyfriend, thinking maybe he could help her, but he abused her. She just couldn't do it anymore. She overdosed on her pills and ended up in the psychiatric hospital. She lost her job. Then she lost her apartment. Depending on the system now, she tried to get her life back together. But nobody would hire her. She was forced to move back in with her mother, who started abusing her again. One day Anne decided she had enough. She killed her mother. Stigma heavily contributed to this situation. There are countless stories like this, which begs the question, why? And how do we ensure incidents like this do not happen again?
The scourge of mental health stigma has had its ebbs and flows, and although the stigma of certain mental illnesses has declined throughout the years, for others it has increased, and for a majority of others, people's views have not changed, even since the 1950s. The concept of fighting mental health stigma didn't really start gaining traction until the early 2000s and since then there have been countless anti-stigma campaigns, programs created, studies done, and scholarly articles written on the subject. So why, after all of that, is mental health stigma getting worse? It's because none of these anti-stigma tactics included the key ingredient, the determining factor to ending mental health stigma for good. That critical element is Empathy.
So, what is empathy and why is it necessary to ending stigma? Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It's putting yourself in their shoes, feeling what they feel, desiring to help them, and then helping them. Where stigma can end lives, like in the case of Anne and her mother, empathy has the power to save lives. It helps connect people in deep and meaningful ways, see things from different perspectives, and foster positive feelings. The benefits of empathy erase the harm that stigma causes. The four basic reasons stigma occurs are lack of awareness, lack of education, perception, and fear. There have been a myriad of campaigns enacted to fight these factors, but they have all fallen short. The reason? These campaigns have not taken into account people's sense of empathy. And without empathy, the messages of these movements fall on deaf ears. We must first cultivate a sense of empathy within them. Then, and only then, will anti-stigma efforts have any real impact.
You may be asking yourself how to convince people to lean on their empathetic side. Almost everyone is capable of empathy, but how do we compel them to act on those good vibes? First and foremost, we must change the definition of the term mental illness. Currently, mental illness is defined as: any of a broad range of medical conditions that are marked primarily by sufficient disorganization of personality, mind, or emotions to impair normal psychological functioning and cause marked distress or disability and that are typically associated with a disruption in normal thinking, feeling, mood, behavior, interpersonal interactions, or daily functioning. This definition needs to be thrown away. Considering that the definition of illness is: an unhealthy condition of body or mind, and the definition of mental is: of or relating to the mind, why isn't the definition of mental illness "an unhealthy condition of the mind"? Stigma. Stigma that has become so mainstream, so accepted by society, that it has even permeated academia. And that is unacceptable. Another necessity is to attach the concept of empathy into the definition, so that when people learn the definition of mental illness, they simultaneaously learn to be empathetic towards those with this condition. A more universally acceptable definition of mental illness would be an unhealthy condition of the mind, though it does not diminish someone's worth. As new generations learn the new and improved definition of mental illness, they will learn that someone's sense of worth does not change based on mental illness; they will learn to be empathetic.
Another crucial undertaking is to raise people's metacognitive awareness, or, awareness of one's own thought processes. One way to do this is to have people with mental illnesses candidly explain what they would like from the general public, and continuously broadcast this information to the public, via ad campaigns viewed collectively. Through constant exposure, society will become more flexible, more understanding, and more aware, and as their awareness evolves, so will their empathy. The secret to enhancing empathy is to do it in such a way that the public is not even aware you're doing it, and to do it in ways that are unavoidable and required.
Many modern-day anti-stigma campaign efforts heavily feature education, or, the lack thereof, and propose that by learning about specific mental illnesses and statistics, stigma will be reduced. That is a miscalculation. Education is key to ending stigma, but of a different subject. What needs to be taught is active listening, reading body language, mirroring, relating to others, emotion regulation, empathy, different perspectives, and the power of random acts of kindness. These classes need to be mandatory. By presenting this specific information in this specific manner, the consequences will be beneficial, and effective.
The final piece of the puzzle is fear. Fear is defined as an anxious feeling, caused by our anticipation of some imagined event or experience. Why do people fear mental illness? One thing anti-stigma campaigns got right is that people fear what they don't understand. But throwing information at them and expecting them to understand it doesn't make sense, because if they don't understand the reason for their fears, they can't be expected to change those fears. Many individuals have their own unique and distinctive motivations they believe justifiy this fear, so the question at hand is how to convince people that it is in their own best interests to question these fears and relearn a more open-minded and compassionate viewpoint.
Taking into account society's empathy defecit and lack of awareness, it is only to be expected that mental health stigma will remain virtually unchanged, regardless of how many anti-stigma campaigns are launched. Only by intentionally and empathetically addressing the four basic reasons stigma occurs, can we expect to see any tangible, fundamental change.
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