G. Frink's

Like you, I either am now or may soon be crazy, psycho, sicko, whacko, a nut case and if you're a member of Active Minds you're with me.

Those terms mean only that each of us has a living, organic brain which is prey to illnesses to which misguided stigma are attached.

Niels Larsen Stevns (1864-1941): Healing the leper

Photo by Gunnar Bach Pedersen

(c)Public Domain

Active Minds was first organized because that stigma kills by discouraging the mentally ill from seeking timely, effective treatment, and by burdening with unearned shame some who do seek treatment.

That organization of college students seeks among other things to teach the simple truth -- there is no more legitimate shame in mental illness than there is in the common cold.

Yet the stigma persists. It persists and if we give it nurture, we risk having on our hands the blood of friends and loved ones whom acceptance would have saved.

No, those are not your hands at which I glance. My maternal grandfather killed himself not long before Christmas four decades ago when I was a freshman at North Carolina State University, and I have come to believe that with a little more understanding of chronic depression and rejection of prevailing prejudice about mental illness, I could have pulled him through.

Somewhat similarly, Active Minds was founded by Alison Malmon after her older brother, Brian killed himself when in March of 2000, when he was a 22-year-old college student and she was a college freshman. That was one year after the First U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Mental Illness addressed the stigma as a pervasive evil.

She explains that Brian developed symptoms of a schizoaffective disorder, was hearing voices and was having suicidal thoughts while a student at Columbia University in New York. Because of the stigma, he hid them until even treatment could not make the illness bearable. Thus she says, and I agree, the stigma killed him.

In his book "The Mark of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change" (Oxford University Press, 2007), Stephen Hinshaw explains that such concealment continues in part because those who suffer from mental illnesses continue to face housing and job discrimination, as well as hurdles when voting, obtaining a driver's license and maintaining child custody, in addition to facing profoundly negative, misguided, personal responses from others.

No college student, I am not eligible to join Active Minds -- just to say the prejudices involved are deep-seated, irrational and entirely possible to overcome. And live what I assert.

Those prejudices drive into the grave people who could recover, become well, productive and happy again. if we would substitute compassion for this ugly, ancient fear.