Let's talk about real issues.
Stigma exists, but it's not what keeps people from care. In many cases, a person with a severe mental illness has anosognosia (the inability to recognize illness). When a person has psychosis, he isn't really too worried about stigma.
If you eradicated stigma tomorrow, literally erased it from every mind and heart in the universe, you'd still have the following:
- A broken mental health care system run by police.
- HIPAA handcuffs.
- A billion dollars a year in funding going to Kittenology and situational mental health issues instead of the most severely affected and evidenced-based treatments.
- Rampant homelessness and unjust incarcerations.
- Ridiculously unprepared mental health care workers, with useless psychology degrees, treating your child for a drastic medical illness.
- Quackery and charlatans.
- Legal discrimination in medical parity.
- Enormous costs for treatment, lack of insurance coverage, and pencil pushers determining length of stay and medicinal options.
- Peer recovery usurping medicine.
- A shortage of 100,000 psychiatric beds in this country alone.
- A desperate shortage of qualified psychiatrists, especially in rural areas.
- Patients who won't stick to medical regimens and act out.
- Right to Be Sick Laws and no assisted outpatient treatment programs.
- An almost complete lack, except in certain big institutions, of comprehensive, wrap around programming to rehab the patient.
- Big Pharma promoting bad drugs.
- No standardized treatment plans for recovery.
- No affordable housing and no employment opportunities
- Anti-psychiatry whippets and naysayers
- All the heartbreak and decimation a severe brain illness causes to the patient and family.
You just wouldn't have stigma.
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Parents For Care