“Come down with pneumonia, and your mother will rush you to the nearest hospital for medical treatment. But dare to declare depression, and your local pastor will be driving out demons and blaming witches in your village.”- Sangdu Delle from his Ted Talk in February 2017.
Stemming from my own personal experience of dealing with individuals diagnosed with personality disorders’ from a young age of 11, I had always sought myself to dig deeper and familiarize myself with the causes of such disorders. It was hard for me to really try to understand how an individual who has a personality disorder is incapable of controlling the way they react to what’s going on inside their brains, their minds are wired differently. More specifically, It’s hard to separate a person from their disorder if you are observing someone who has a personality disorder- and I am still learning how to do that because some of the people dearest to me have had to deal with disorders such as “bi polar”, “depression”, “schizophrenia” and “narcissistic” personality disorders’- it’s a learning process that I am still educating myself on – and it has almost been a decade.
I haven’t lived in India my entire life, however that’s where I am originally from- India being a developing country (like West Africa- where Sangu’s Delle grew up) the word “mental” is more often than not associated with a very negative connotation, in Sangu’s Ted Talk he mentions “ Growing up in West Africa, when people used the term “mental,” what came to mind was a madman with dirty, dread-locked hair, bumbling around half-naked on the streets.” There is such a strong stigma associated with mental health and on top of that there aren’t enough people who are educated about mental health. “To give you a perspective, if I had to translate the proportion of psychiatrists in the population that one might see in Britain to India, one might expect roughly 150,000 psychiatrists in India. In reality, take a guess. The actual number is about 3,000, about two percent of that number.” Says Vikram Patel, a psychiatrist, in one of his Ted Talks. These numbers are absolutely shocking, since India has the second largest population in the entire world of 1.3 billion.
Due to my own life experiences, the stigma associated with mental health became a topic that was so personal and something I really felt needed to addressed. This is because I feel it’s something everyone needs to know more about- in order to understand the people around them, and how to address the situation of mental health with respect and empathy, just as one would when engaging with someone who has a physical injury on any part of the body. Why does mental health come across as an illusion? – When one injures a part of their body that people can physically see- sympathy comes flooding the through the door, but what about an injury of the brain and mind? How can we turn a blind eye towards it? Just because it isn’t visible doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
The discrimination in the world of mental health is very important to address, because the myth of its rarity is still ongoing. Stigma is an enormous challenge in the eyes of public health.
Something I found very interesting was the prior definition of the word “stigma”.
“The pejorative use of the term stigma, reflecting a mark of shame or degradation, is thought to have appeared in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Prior to that, stigma was more broadly used to indicate a tattoo or mark that might have been used for decorative or religious purposes, or for utilitarian reasons, such as a brand placed on criminals or slaves so that they could be identified if they ran away and to indicate their inferior social position.” Of all stigma’s mental illness has been the most damaging from my research. A lot of individuals who aren’t adequately educated about mental health and these particular personality disorders that I will be focusing on with my project, usually believe that people with the mental illness are to be blamed; it makes it harder for them to understand that it is a “disorder” and not a “decision.
Despite their being various mental health campaigns such as “Not Myself Today”, “The Power of Okay” and “Stop The Stigma”– I still look around and find myself surrounded by individuals so unclear with the definitions of certain mental illness’, and more importantly they have a completely distorted and misinformed image and definition of them. The misconceptions that come with trying to understand or familiarize ourselves with a disorder are definitely something that add to the increasing stigmatization against these disorders. Additionally, the campaigns, and the videos they are creating don’t stay in the minds of most people- we live in a generation of such a short attention span – we usually skip videos that seem long and lengthy and bundled with excessive information. The videos and campaigns aren’t as memorable and visual as they should be, in my opinion. My aim as a designer is to research further into the depiction of these disorders in modern society- and really put it out there in society for people to understand what the faults are in misinformation about disorders and its immense stigmatization- being a first-hand learner about disorders myself.
I carried out the first step of my primary research by standing at the Union Square subway station, to ask individuals a quick question- “What is the first thing that comes to your mind when I say the word ‘bi polar’. I got a range of answers, however, the most common were words such as “moody”, “aggressive”, “crazy”, “two faced”- I was taken aback by how misinformed so many individuals are when it comes to defining a certain personality disorder. How such heavy words can be trivialized to words such as “crazy” – when it is a real illness and a chemical imbalance in the brain. Apart from the medical research that I also looked into- I decided to watch a range of Ted Talks by individuals who have been diagnosed with personality disorders and also psychiatrists who address the issue of mental health. I was most intrigued by interviews of Elyn Saks(a diagnosed schizophrenic), Joshua Walters (a diagnosed bi polar) & Ruby Wax(diagnosed with depression) – watching these 10-15-minute-long talks, I started writing down the commonalities between these individuals and what they were saying. It all kept boiling down to how the stigmatization of their mental health issues, only alleviated their problems, and additionally the viewpoint of how important it is for us to educate ourselves and move towards becoming a more conscious, aware, and respectful society towards individuals diagnosed with mental health. End the stigmatization.
As a designer in today’s day, I feel that it is my duty to be able to use my creative tool to work towards an important cause. After researching more into the misconceptions of certain mental illnesses, and hearing the individuals speak of their illnesses; my aim is to address the stigma associated with mental health I am striving to develop my own imagery of what it looks like, to paint a clearer picture and erase the misconceptions to the best of my ability. Joshua Walters, the individual who is diagnosed with Bi Polar disorder, mentioned in his Ted Talk “On being just Crazy enough” – “Now if you don’t know what hypomania is, it’s like an engine that’s out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks.” That image in my head, already helped me create an image of what the mania of a bipolar individual would look like, it helped me understand it so much more than anything I’ve read– and that image is going to be on my mind whenever I need to picture the disorder and understand it better.
My role as a designer is going to be to study disorders such as “schizophrenia”, “bi polar disorder”, and narcissistic personality disorder” and to raise more awareness of the accurate portrayal of these disorders, rather than the misleading definitions individuals have created for themselves when they think of these disorders.It will always be important to help our society learn and understand, what I myself am still on the journey of learning “It is a disorder not a decision”.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/sangu_delle_there_s_no_shame_in_taking_care_of_your_mental_health/transcript
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/sangu_delle_there_s_no_shame_in_taking_care_of_your_mental_health/transcript
[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/vikram_patel_mental_health_for_all_by_involving_all
[5] https://www.ted.com/talks/elyn_saks_seeing_mental_illness
[6] https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_walters_on_being_just_crazy_enough
7 https://www.ted.com/talks/ruby_wax_what_s_so_funny_about_mental_illness
[8] https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_walters_on_being_just_crazy_enough
