family wellness | F E AT U R E
d n e s ’ t le ! a m g i t the s
written by Kimberly Blaker
Nearly one in five American adults experience mental illness in any given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health – and one in 25 experience a serious mental illness (SMI). Those with an SMI consist primarily of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, and severe major depression.
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nfortunately, people with mental illness experience a high degree of stigma. They often experience discrimination in the workplace and their personal lives from those who see someone with
a mental illness as odd or flawed. This often results from a misunderstanding of mental illness and not recognizing that it’s a medical condition. In recent decades, the stigma surrounding mental illness has improved slightly. Yet it persists. Part of the
problem lies in that it falls under the field of psychology, the study of human ‘behavior.’ Much of society doesn’t understand mental illness often has biological and genetic roots. So people often see mental illness as indicative of personality flaws or learned
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behavior and think someone with mental illness should be able to just ‘snap out of it.’ Many experts and advocates recognize this problem and have called for biologically-based brain diseases to be reclassified into more appropriate fields of
