G. Frink's

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Army Maj. Gen. David Blackledge has defied the American military culture of silence about psychiatric injuries, and defied our society's crippling prejudice against the mentally ill, by seeking treatment for and speaking openly about his post-traumatic stress disorder.

The broad problem he has chosen to confront is acute and pervades not just U.S. society, but apparently all of English-speaking culture.

Fear of career damage was a principal reason.

For civilians, recent British study found that nine out of ten who suffer from mental illness face discrimination from almost every quarter.

The study found that:

Nine out of 10 people with mental health problems do not go out or apply for jobs due to the stigma associated with their condition, a report said today.

They feel most discriminated against by their family (36%), followed by their employers (35%), neighbours (31%) and friends (25%), according to the survey by the mental health charity Rethink.

That discrimination results from a reflexive irrationality which was identified and made a national health priority by the First U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Mental Illness in 1999:

Stigmatization of people with mental disorders has persisted throughout history. It is manifested by bias, distrust, stereotyping, fear, embarrassment, anger, and/or avoidance. Stigma leads others to avoid living, socializing or working with, renting to, or employing people with mental disorders, especially severe disorders such as schizophrenia (Penn & Martin, 1998; Corrigan & Penn, 1999). It reduces patients? access to resources and opportunities (e.g., housing, jobs) and leads to low self-esteem, isolation, and hopelessness.

Neither this prejudiced insanity-of-the-so-called-sane nor its consequences have abated in the years since 1999. Instead, public mental health care in North Carolina and other states had deteriorated. Discrimination and shunning continue in both military and civilian life.

That has left the brave afflicted like Gen. David Blackledge with few worthwhile alternatives but to confront the prejudice, very much as other groups confront the discrimination they face.

With as many as one-fifth of the more than 1.7 million who have served in the Afghanistan and Iraq suffering from PTSD symptoms, the U.S. Army is organizing to do exactly that, with Gen. Blackledge taking point.

The Associated Press reports that:

Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, an Army psychiatrist heading the defense center for psychological health and traumatic brain injury, is developing a campaign in which people will tell their personal stories. Troops, their families and others also will share concerns and ideas through Web links and other programs. Blackledge volunteered to help, and next week he and his wife, Iwona, an Air Force nurse, will speak on the subject at a medical conference.

If this is not quite be mad pride for the military, 'twill serve.

The program embodies an inescapable declaration that all of us are now or without further notice may soon be crazy, psycho, sicko, whacko, a nut case and that we will not tolerate anything less than unprejudiced acceptance of those upon whom nature imposes such altered states.

It is a declaration which merely means, after all, that each of us has a living, neuroplastic, organic brain which changes with experience, which is prey to illnesses and which is given to the unexpected emergence of both gifts and afflictions. It means we understand the obvious about our neuroplastic, organic brains -- that reflexive assignment of stigma to mental illness is both illogical and inhumane.

We can then all acknowledge that those who do experience the altered states we characterize as mental illness do deserve to be treated with respect and to be loved and to be cared for. We are all, in a sense, they.

Whether their illness originates on the battlefield or from more pedestrian experiences, it must not result in discrimination or shunning lest that further blight the lives of the innocent ill, or kill, and leave us all with their blood on our hands.