Overcoming the shame

SPEAKING UP HEALS OLD WOUNDS

Chapter 4

Jonathan Leavitt on stage during rehearsals. 

(Photo: Steven St John for USA TODAY)

Some people with mental illness are fighting against stigma in surprising ways.

Canadian David Granirer, a comedian who has long suffered from depression, teaches people with mental illness to speak out through comedy. He calls his class Stand Up for Mental Health.

In the past decade, Granirer has taught comedy to 400 adults with mental illness throughout North America, both as therapy for them, as well as a way to debunk stereotypes of the mentally ill.

"How often do you hear the words 'hilarious' and 'schizophrenic' in the same sentence?" asks Granirer. "Audiences see people with labels like bipolar and schizophrenic, and see them as funny and likable and courageous."

Jessica Dawson was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She recently participated in Stand Up for Mental Health, a program that teaches people with mental illness to perform stand up comedy routines.

(Photo: Jim C Jeong for USA TODAY)

Granirer says one of his most courageous students has been Jessica Dawson.

Dawson, 42, had never enjoyed laughter.

She was laughed at too much as a child. For much of her life, laughter sounded like mockery, and jokes felt like stones thrown by bullies. For Dawson -- who was suicidal by age 10, had a baby at 16 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 22 -- there often wasn't a lot to smile about. Dawson's parents and doctor hid her diagnosis from her for four years, afraid that the news would prove too upsetting.

Yet in 2006, Dawson found herself on stage, telling jokes, and getting laughs, while talking about the most painful episodes in her life – ones about which she had always been ashamed -- such as hearing voices and undergoing treatment with electroconvulsive therapy.

"Before I had electroshock, I thought I was Jesus Christ," she quipped in her act. "Afterward, I thought I was a toaster."

Learning to see her life in a new light proved to be powerfully healing, Dawson says.

"It changed my life," says Dawson, who lives in Canada's British Columbia. "Having the fantasy of being a star sort of lifts you momentarily out of thinking about how low you are on the societal scale of acceptance. . . I'm no longer buying into the shame, and I'm giving others permission not to buy into the shame."

While standup comedy isn't for everyone, the program provides an important service, Granirer says, by allowing people to see that people with mental illness aren't that different.

With so many people with mental illness "in the closet," the dominant image of people with mental illness has often been negative – the homeless person on the street, the deranged young man with a gun, says Patrick Corrigan, a professor of psychology at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Research shows that the most promising way to dispel stereotypes is to meet someone with mental illness face-to-face, Corrigan says. These sorts of encounters are two to three times as effective as educational programs.

"The way we've diminished the stigma of being gay is by having brave men and women come out," Corrigan says. "It wasn't watching anti-stigma programs in middle school."

Few public figures with mental illness today speak about it openly.

Football player Brandon Marshall, a wide receiver for the Chicago Bears, is an exception. Marshall, 30, was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which can cause mood swings and emotional outbursts, in 2010.

Chicago Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which can cause mood swings and emotional outbursts, in 2010.

(Photo: Jerry Lai, USA TODAY Sports)

Marshall says he decided to speak up to help dispel the stigma around mental illness.

"So many people are trying to hide something that needs to be talked about, and if it's talked about, so many lives will be saved," says Marshall, who created the Brandon Marshall Foundation to help others with mental illness. "Where we are at is where the cancer community and HIV community were 25 years ago."

While Marshall says he has taken some flack for speaking out -- including trash talk on the football field -- he says the positive responses have outnumbered the negative.

“'Where we are at is where the cancer community and HIV community were 25 years ago.'”

NFL PLAYER BRANDON MARSHALL

"The good part has been having a platform to help people," Marshall says. "One out of four of us are suffering from something."

Marshall says learning from other people with mental illness has given him hope. "You can get better," Marshall says. "There is light at the end of the tunnel."

Hakeem Rahim, who has bipolar disorder, once felt he had to hide his condition, which surfaced when he was a freshman at Harvard University. Instead of calling in sick when he was having a tough day emotionally, he would tell his employer that he had the flu. Eventually, he just didn't feel comfortable hiding his diagnosis.

Rahim now works full-time giving educational talks, mostly about mental illness. A woman called him after seeing him speak at a college, confiding that she was suicidal. Rahim, 33, was able to find her help.

"These stories are so important," says Rahim, who says that surveys conducted after his talks suggest that audience members were more willing to talk to others if they felt depressed or anxious. "Part of my goal is to share what I learned. Hopefully, if they learn it earlier, they can get help sooner."

Hakeem Rahim hid his bipolar disorder for years before finally sharing his diagnosis. He now works full-time giving educational talks, mostly about mental illness.

Research suggests the country has made fitful progress in fighting stigma.

Large national surveys conducted in 1996 and 2006 found that Americans increasingly understand mental illness to be a biological condition, rather than a moral failing. And the study found Americans have become more accepting of people with depression.

Over the same period, however, Americans grew less willing over time to befriend or work with someone with schizophrenia, and more inclined to see people with the disease as violent and dangerous. Researchers have not conducted more recent surveys.

It's likely that Americans' attitudes toward serious mental illness have only hardened since the shootings at Virginia Tech, Newtown, Conn. and Santa Barbara, Calif., says psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, which focuses on patients with severe mental illness.

A 2012 study found doctors less likely to prescribe medications for heart disease and other ailments to people with mental illness. Other studies have found that doctors are less likely to recommend surgery after a heart attack for people with mental illness, or hospitalize them after an emergency department visit for diabetes.

Dawson says she no longer feels the need to hide her diagnosis.

At one time, she was afraid to even ride the bus, because she worried that other passengers could tell she had schizophrenia. After taking the stand-up class, she learned to joke with people on the bus, defusing her fears.

Dawson says she wishes that story had a happier ending. She's largely home-bound today, unable to take public transportation or even leave the house, due to rheumatoid arthritis that makes it difficult to walk. Although she has a wheelchair, her apartment complex won't allow her to install a ramp. Dawson says can't afford to move to a more accessible apartment.

Yet Dawson says she remains forever changed by her experience onstage, which gave her the confidence to write to local politicians about important issues, take college classes for the first time and respond to online bullies who make fun of those with mental illness.

As for her childhood tormentors, Dawson says, "All those people who said I had no sense of humor? They were wrong."

Pasted from <http://www.usatoday.com/longform/news/nation/2014/06/25/stigma-of-mental-illness/9875351/>