Despite the progress we have made in proliferating mental health awareness programs, there are still loopholes in the form of stigma that are plaguing our system entirely. Mental illness is common but it is still often misunderstood. The kind of perceptions we develop and through which we process the coming information from the environment has added more value to the stigma associated with mental illness. It is just so easy to say someone as mentally retarded or psycho in our trite remarks that we unintentionally neglect the plight of an individual who has actually been the recipient of chain of hardships coming out of this disability. The way we talk about mental illness and the things we express publicly through media, social media, in our homes and in our workplaces are making a greater difference in creating perceptions about physical or intellectual abnormality.
Certain ways of talking about mental illness can alienate members of the community, sensationalize the issue and contribute to stigma and discrimination. There are certain words that have become such hackneyed for us that we unintentionally utter them without even giving a thought of the stigma and discrimination attached to it. Words like, “tum tou pagal ho”, “Khusra”, “psycho”, “schizo”, “mad”, “anorexic”, “psychotic”, “dmagh khraab hai” are commonly used words in our day to day vocabulary without even considering the plague of these words and how it feels like to be literally in a circumstance in which you have been subjected to one of such atypical conditions. There is an ongoing worldwide greater debate on language and its contextual understanding has brought some real changes in the use of language. For instance, sociologists and anthropologists are working onto change the term for prostitutes as sex workers because this word has aggravated real stigma on forced and unlawful prostitution. American Psychological Association (APA) has re-introduced a new word for mental retardation as Intellectual Disability (ID) which is a descriptive term for sub-average intelligence and impaired adaptive functioning arising in the developmental period in order to combat against the stigma associated with people suffering from mental retardation.
There is a greater need to divulge these differences that are intentionally or unintentionally are elevating the stigma in the form of language. Why this stigma has a nuclear impact? Language has a greater influence in shaping our lives and the way we perceive and interpret the world. The words that we use even just to hyperbolize any situation or to tease someone as a sweet prompt has a subtle yet a perpetuating impact on its underlying interpretation of these words. If we will begin to slice it down each as one by one, we will realize the associations that our brain has incorporated with these stigmatizing words. Our brain encode any information with certain kind of schemas (images, word associations, facts, myths) and then process into a viable thought. If we are calling someone “paagal ho tum” as a hyperbolizing term with no intention to mean it literally but we do have certain associations attached to how lunatic people seem like. This is how our brain made related associations.
Therefore, it is really important to stay intact with what you say and what would it mean generally along with its literal and intentional understanding. As words greatly encapsulate the major chunk of our life and their utterance not only have a one to one relationship with people whom you are conversant with but also it has been generally used as a parameter to build certain language related schema among masses. I think we all should prevent using words which can have demeaning sense because it just proliferates the entire stigma and strengthen our neural wiring’s associated with that word.
The author Zainab Shabbir is a survivor herself and a passionate mental health advocate. She wishes to start support groups in Pakistan where sufferers can open up and seek peer support.